Author Topic: The dark side of social networking.  (Read 2059 times)

Offline LrsDude

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Re: The dark side of social networking.
« Reply #20 on: July 14, 2010, 05:21:10 PM »
There's always the opposite tack.

Sometimes I feel like the more people are aware of my existence, the more likely it is that someone would notice if I went missing.

Plus you could make the argument that by flooding the internet with enough worthless information, it actually can make it more difficult to police.

Both of those ideas are exemplified here:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/167606/may-07-2008/hasan-elahi

Online stargazer2

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Re: The dark side of social networking.
« Reply #21 on: July 14, 2010, 05:43:23 PM »
Plus you could make the argument that by flooding the internet with enough worthless information, it actually can make it more difficult to police.


I've sometimes thought about purposely doing exactly this to my Facebook page - joining literally every group that comes my way, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Fascist, Anarchist, Buddhist, and Ba'hai, Catholic and Jewish, and pro- and anti- almost everything, everywhere in the world, regardless of whether they are written in English, PURELY to mess with the signal to noise ratio.  It'd also be fun to create a bunch of invisible friends, and make up postings for them.  I'm thinking seriously about adding my school's semi-official invisible friend (a student who never attended a day at my high school, is nevertheless a living legend among it's alumni).  Like my school's friend, I could make up wonderfully dramatic lives - ranging from world-traveling hippies to drug and drama addicts, to megacorporation jet-setting execs, and so on.  It'd be fun to set up their interests, hobbies, and perspectives to play with people's expectations.  I think it could get to be an art form - a reflection on the variety of personality niches that are so close to empty, yet would be possible in the space of human experience.

As a data geek myself, I'm pretty sure you could skew the data badly enough to make sorting it at least challenging, possibly unrewarding, and given enough effort and organization, almost impossible.

Offline sinic

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Re: The dark side of social networking.
« Reply #22 on: July 16, 2010, 09:26:59 AM »
Way to all be "cogs" in the "machine" that we consider a "working society." 

I do all my communication using tin cans connected by strings... and then I talk in code so anyone looking at the strings coming from my mother's basement won't be able to decipher what I'm actually saying.

Seriously, though.  It's not like we even need the facebooks to know anything about anyone.  If you've used the same screen name in more than one location a simple google search can reveal anything/everything about you from what you favorite food is to, say, any sort of writing one might have done at one point in their lives.

I used to be a Holier Than Thou person as well when it came to Facebook, but now I see it for what it is.  With the right protections in place it's a way for me to keep in contact with my friends from different stages of my life and be able to share things, links or videos or music, with them.  Facebook has allowed me to get back in touch with a bunch of my friends from college who live back in MI and other places.  These contacts have led to face to face meetings and renewed contacts which insure that when Hol and I move back to MI there will be a bunch of people there ready and waiting for us to show up.  That's a wonderful feeling and something that really wouldn't have been possible without facebook.
"All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." – Edmund Burke

http://sinicfug.mybrute.com/