43 replies to this topic

[Texan Eagle]

Over the years I have learnt not to give much importance to negative reviews, complains and rants on Facebook or any social media review based sites such as TripAdvisor, simply because people go there to complain only when they have a bad experience with a service or an organization. As long as every thing goes hunky-dory hardly anyone thinks of going to the review page and stating "Hey I had a normal trip without any problems" after each trip or each stay at the hotel.

That being said, the ones who said social media is the worst thing to have happened to us, I'd say please take a moment and think again. Social media, like any other thing in the world, is as good or bad as you make it to be. I use social media and crowd-sourced apps for a variety of productive uses.


Facebook is to stay in touch with my friends from across the globe. (I'd like to hear someone counter this stating they stay in touch with all their friends by calling them on phone and writing letters. I don't.)

I use Twitter to get latest news and non-news interesting links to read, I don't tweet "Hey I just ate a sandwich". In fact no one who has been using Twitter regularly does this. Only the newbies do that, and soon realize nobody really cares if you ate a sandwich or stepped on dog poop. These days most important news stories "break" on Twitter before traditional media websites catch up.

On my smartphone I regularly use Yelp to find out about interesting places to eat that I may not know about but people living in the area know. I make a conscious effort to stay away from overly processed chain restaurants food as much as I can and find local mom-and-pop run substitutes and Yelp has helped me find several such hole in the walls about which I'd have otherwise never known.

Long story short, social media is big today, very big. Use it smartly to your advantage or stay out and complain how bad it is.

[Donctor]

Off topic (but following what has been started): I gave up facebook several months ago. Now I read this article from the New York Times and see a lot of my reasons, articulated better than I could have:

http://www.nytimes.c...ebook&st=Search

You did not know all this before you joined Facebook? Oh well....

OK so you knew it all before you joined, and then didn't. Good on ya. Good to know it all.

Many of us knew this (or assumed this) before joining. As a 14-year-old (my age when I joined Facebook), I was aware that this was likely to be the case. I don't know what Jis did or did not know, but I'm willing to bet that many, many people (particularly members of the "under 30" club), were well aware of this stuff before joining.

[johnny.menhennet]

I do not consider this forum to be social media but rather an information site as folks are coming on here to share information about a specific topic. To me social media are those sites where people share idle gossip, chit chat about what they are eating for lunch or whatever, troll for dates and generally waste time.

While the above does happen quite a bit, Facebook can be an incredibly useful tool for those looking to relay important information to a larger group of people than could realistically be called (or telegraphed, or whatever).

For sure! Being in high school, I would be ostracized for NOT being on Facebook. But I find it very useful. I'm not for any of that idle gossip either, but I mainly use it to check our Speech and Debate group page. With 50 members, 30 regularly active, it is a great way to convey information. If our teacher needs to tell us the date of a specific tournament or when to turn in fees etc., it is a great tool to reach everyone since she can't see all of us for half the year (our school has an interesting schedule) and she knows the information will get out because teenagers DO spend time on Facebook. I think it can definitely be very helpful for group. When I go on a cruise, I am likely to never see 99% of those people again, but I still love keeping in touch, and i have since seen two from my 3 past cruises later when they come to San Diego. I see it more useful as a way to 1) Keep in touch with groups and 2) Keep in touch with friends who I don't see every day.

[jis]

Off topic (but following what has been started): I gave up facebook several months ago. Now I read this article from the New York Times and see a lot of my reasons, articulated better than I could have:

http://www.nytimes.c...ebook&st=Search

You did not know all this before you joined Facebook? Oh well....

OK so you knew it all before you joined, and then didn't. Good on ya. Good to know it all.

Did not mean to offend you, but I truly thought that the internet savvy knew about such things. Now I stand corrected.

And of course knowing all that I still joined and am an active participant. Similarly knowing all the extant evil in everyday society at large I still participate in it quite actively, trying to avoid the evil parts completely, and using the good parts to my advantage.

Speaking of Facebook, those of you who happen to be on Facebook may wish to check out the Amtrak Unlimited Facebook Page

Edited by jis, 13 June 2012 - 08:08 AM.

[Maine Rider]

Off topic (but following what has been started): I gave up facebook several months ago. Now I read this article from the New York Times and see a lot of my reasons, articulated better than I could have:

http://www.nytimes.c...ebook&st=Search

You did not know all this before you joined Facebook? Oh well....

OK so you knew it all before you joined, and then didn't. Good on ya. Good to know it all.

Did not mean to offend you, but I truly thought that the internet savvy knew about such things. Now I stand corrected.

And of course knowing all that I still joined and am an active participant. Similarly knowing all the extant evil in everyday society at large I still participate in it quite actively, trying to avoid the evil parts completely, and using the good parts to my advantage.

Speaking of Facebook, those of you who happen to be on Facebook may wish to check out the Amtrak Unlimited Facebook Page

No offense taken. I was just amazed that someone had actually done so much research before they joined Facebook. To me, if you say "I knew all that before...", which is what it sounds like you are saying (correct me if I am wrong), would have known about the Reuters poll referenced in the article. So, can you tell me what percentage of Facebook aged 55 and older say they use Facebook every day? (The answer is 29%, but I didn't already know that. I had to go back to the article and look it up.)

So my sarcasm was directed at your remark which was implying that you did know all that. I probably could identify some facts which I know about the internet and social media that you do not know, and that doesn't make me any better or smarter than you. But I do not claim to have known all the facts presented in a specific article which I linked to in response to the thread which had become a discussion of social media. And I doubt very much that you knew every point that article and its references made, on the day you joined the gang at facebook.

So your second remark about the "Internet savvy" is equally off-putting. Do you know about Turing machines? What kind of machines were they? How does binary encoding work? ASCII? What is quantum computing? What do the commands "traceroute", "ping", "telnet" and "ftp" mean? Have you ever done an "Archie" search? Or a "Veronica" search? What is the difference between them? What's the difference between telnet and ftp? What program in Windows and Mac would you use to establish a telnet connection with a remote host?

Have you ever sent and received email using nothing but UNIX command line commands? Browsed the web before Mosaic, Netscape, Explorer, Chrome, Safari ever existed?

How many users are on the internet? What percentage of them are over 55? What percentage of them of any age would you consider to be internet savvy?

I would say you are, if you got all those answers right the first time, without going on line.

[Donctor]

Off topic (but following what has been started): I gave up facebook several months ago. Now I read this article from the New York Times and see a lot of my reasons, articulated better than I could have:

http://www.nytimes.c...ebook&st=Search

You did not know all this before you joined Facebook? Oh well....

OK so you knew it all before you joined, and then didn't. Good on ya. Good to know it all.

Did not mean to offend you, but I truly thought that the internet savvy knew about such things. Now I stand corrected.

And of course knowing all that I still joined and am an active participant. Similarly knowing all the extant evil in everyday society at large I still participate in it quite actively, trying to avoid the evil parts completely, and using the good parts to my advantage.

Speaking of Facebook, those of you who happen to be on Facebook may wish to check out the Amtrak Unlimited Facebook Page

No offense taken. I was just amazed that someone had actually done so much research before they joined Facebook. To me, if you say "I knew all that before...", which is what it sounds like you are saying (correct me if I am wrong), would have known about the Reuters poll referenced in the article. So, can you tell me what percentage of Facebook aged 55 and older say they use Facebook every day? (The answer is 29%, but I didn't already know that. I had to go back to the article and look it up.)

So my sarcasm was directed at your remark which was implying that you did know all that. I probably could identify some facts which I know about the internet and social media that you do not know, and that doesn't make me any better or smarter than you. But I do not claim to have known all the facts presented in a specific article which I linked to in response to the thread which had become a discussion of social media. And I doubt very much that you knew every point that article and its references made, on the day you joined the gang at facebook.

So your second remark about the "Internet savvy" is equally off-putting. Do you know about Turing machines? What kind of machines were they? How does binary encoding work? ASCII? What is quantum computing? What do the commands "traceroute", "ping", "telnet" and "ftp" mean? Have you ever done an "Archie" search? Or a "Veronica" search? What is the difference between them? What's the difference between telnet and ftp? What program in Windows and Mac would you use to establish a telnet connection with a remote host?

Have you ever sent and received email using nothing but UNIX command line commands? Browsed the web before Mosaic, Netscape, Explorer, Chrome, Safari ever existed?

How many users are on the internet? What percentage of them are over 55? What percentage of them of any age would you consider to be internet savvy?

I would say you are, if you got all those answers right the first time, without going on line.

I don't think Jis is claiming to have known any of the particular figures. It seems that he's claiming to have understood, to a significant degree, how Facebook could/would be used. That seems like a reasonable claim. Assuming that I'm understanding what Jis is saying, I was in the same position when I joined, too.

It's surprising to me that almost any of the information presented is shocking to anyone who uses the internet regularly. Within the last two or three years, I don't know if I've met someone within ten years of my age who doesn't know this stuff.

[Maine Rider]

Off topic (but following what has been started): I gave up facebook several months ago. Now I read this article from the New York Times and see a lot of my reasons, articulated better than I could have:

http://www.nytimes.c...ebook&st=Search

You did not know all this before you joined Facebook? Oh well....

OK so you knew it all before you joined, and then didn't. Good on ya. Good to know it all.

Did not mean to offend you, but I truly thought that the internet savvy knew about such things. Now I stand corrected.

And of course knowing all that I still joined and am an active participant. Similarly knowing all the extant evil in everyday society at large I still participate in it quite actively, trying to avoid the evil parts completely, and using the good parts to my advantage.

Speaking of Facebook, those of you who happen to be on Facebook may wish to check out the Amtrak Unlimited Facebook Page

No offense taken. I was just amazed that someone had actually done so much research before they joined Facebook. To me, if you say "I knew all that before...", which is what it sounds like you are saying (correct me if I am wrong), would have known about the Reuters poll referenced in the article. So, can you tell me what percentage of Facebook aged 55 and older say they use Facebook every day? (The answer is 29%, but I didn't already know that. I had to go back to the article and look it up.)

So my sarcasm was directed at your remark which was implying that you did know all that. I probably could identify some facts which I know about the internet and social media that you do not know, and that doesn't make me any better or smarter than you. But I do not claim to have known all the facts presented in a specific article which I linked to in response to the thread which had become a discussion of social media. And I doubt very much that you knew every point that article and its references made, on the day you joined the gang at facebook.

So your second remark about the "Internet savvy" is equally off-putting. Do you know about Turing machines? What kind of machines were they? How does binary encoding work? ASCII? What is quantum computing? What do the commands "traceroute", "ping", "telnet" and "ftp" mean? Have you ever done an "Archie" search? Or a "Veronica" search? What is the difference between them? What's the difference between telnet and ftp? What program in Windows and Mac would you use to establish a telnet connection with a remote host?

Have you ever sent and received email using nothing but UNIX command line commands? Browsed the web before Mosaic, Netscape, Explorer, Chrome, Safari ever existed?

How many users are on the internet? What percentage of them are over 55? What percentage of them of any age would you consider to be internet savvy?

I would say you are, if you got all those answers right the first time, without going on line.

I don't think Jis is claiming to have known any of the particular figures. It seems that he's claiming to have understood, to a significant degree, how Facebook could/would be used. That seems like a reasonable claim. Assuming that I'm understanding what Jis is saying, I was in the same position when I joined, too.

It's surprising to me that almost any of the information presented is shocking to anyone who uses the internet regularly. Within the last two or three years, I don't know if I've met someone within ten years of my age who doesn't know this stuff.

Where is the part about the information being shocking? I missed that I guess...

Sure, Mr. Zuckerberg is young and has a new wife and had a movie made about him last year, (oh - and a lot of money, generated by Wall Street investors who now look foolish), and many in the younger generation prefer social media more to actual face-to-face human contact. And are worried that they might be ostracized at school if they don't use facebook.

The point of all my arcane questions is that this internet we all use, and like for our various reasons, was conceived and then made real by a lot of scientists, many long dead now and many others long in the tooth, work which was done before the founders of Twitter and Facebook were born. And before I was born, come to think of it. I guess today what passes for "internet savvy" is having a new iPhone, a Twitter account, and a few hundred Facebook "friends." But there might be more to it than that, and so a younger person than me expressing astonishment that I don't know "all that" is a bit disingenuous.

And if you took the time to read all this, you (and I) need to spend more time outdoors. Bye....

[Donctor]

Where is the part about the information being shocking? I missed that I guess...

Sure, Mr. Zuckerberg is young and has a new wife and had a movie made about him last year, (oh - and a lot of money, generated by Wall Street investors who now look foolish), and many in the younger generation prefer social media more to actual face-to-face human contact. And are worried that they might be ostracized at school if they don't use facebook.

The point of all my arcane questions is that this internet we all use, and like for our various reasons, was conceived and then made real by a lot of scientists, many long dead now and many others long in the tooth, work which was done before the founders of Twitter and Facebook were born. And before I was born, come to think of it. I guess today what passes for "internet savvy" is having a new iPhone, a Twitter account, and a few hundred Facebook "friends." But there might be more to it than that, and so a younger person than me expressing astonishment that I don't know "all that" is a bit disingenuous.

Your views are certainly valid. I don't understand why they're being presented so grumpily.

And if you took the time to read all this, you (and I) need to spend more time outdoors. Bye....

Speak for yourself. I am outdoors.

[white rabbitt]

I do not consider this forum to be social media but rather an information site as folks are coming on here to share information about a specific topic. To me social media are those sites where people share idle gossip, chit chat about what they are eating for lunch or whatever, troll for dates and generally waste time.

'
olympianhiawatha
so u mean i can chit chat here about my menu for lunch
and i can look for a date wow amtrak unlimited is great
if i can do all that

[jis]

[quote name='Maine Rider' timestamp='1339613797' post='373556']
No offense taken. I was just amazed that someone had actually done so much research before they joined Facebook. To me, if you say "I knew all that before...", which is what it sounds like you are saying (correct me if I am wrong), would have known about the Reuters poll referenced in the article. So, can you tell me what percentage of Facebook aged 55 and older say they use Facebook every day? (The answer is 29%, but I didn't already know that. I had to go back to the article and look it up.)[/quote]
I did not mean to say that I knew the statistics that did not exist back then of course. Sorry if I gave that impression. However, also I have no idea why that piece of information is important for deciding whether to be on Facebook or not.
[quote]
So my sarcasm was directed at your remark which was implying that you did know all that. I probably could identify some facts which I know about the internet and social media that you do not know, and that doesn't make me any better or smarter than you. But I do not claim to have known all the facts presented in a specific article which I linked to in response to the thread which had become a discussion of social media. And I doubt very much that you knew every point that article and its references made, on the day you joined the gang at facebook.[/quote]
I had no intention of giving that impression. Sorry again. As I said of course I did not, but the significant items that in my mind would have a bearing on deciding whether to partake in social media or not were pretty evident to many of us back then.
[quote]
So your second remark about the "Internet savvy" is equally off-putting.[/quote]
I don't quite know where this is going since the questions that are listed, and I attempt to respond to below, have very little to do with the sort of internet savvyness that would be involved in deciding whether to participate in Facebook or not.....but......
[quote] Do you know about Turing machines? [/quote]
Yes, two course in Theoretical Foundations of Computing and a Chapter in ones Ph. D. Thesis covering Turing Completeness of an algorithm would unfortunately force one to know about such esoterica. However, I have no idea what that has to do with being internet savvy or deciding whether to participate in Facebook or not.
[quote]
What kind of machines were they? How does binary encoding work? ASCII?[/quote]
Well I could spend a lot of time explaining that, but would rather not do so here.
[quote]
What is quantum computing? [/quote]
I would not call myself an expert of that but have worked on a few projects studying the implications on software architecture of using quantum computing as the foundation for the computational hardware. That is the limit of my knowledge in that area.[quote]
What do the commands "traceroute", "ping", "telnet" and "ftp" mean? Have you ever done an "Archie" search? Or a "Veronica" search? What is the difference between them? What's the difference between telnet and ftp? [/quote]
Having participated in writing some of those standards I would have a tendency to know about them. But that all was many moons ago. Of course I use ftp and telnet quite frequently even now. Traceroute and ping not that often since I have managed to shed my network admin duties many moons ago.[quote]
What program in Windows and Mac would you use to establish a telnet connection with a remote host?[/quote]
You mean there is one and only one program to do so? How about telnet?
[quote]
Have you ever sent and received email using nothing but UNIX command line commands? [/quote]
Yes, even using bang addresses, and for the heck of it just using uux. I used to be a Usenet and Email administrator in Bell Labs in the early 80s. I used to administer the hocs* subnet with gateway at hocsd which got its feed from allegra in Murray Hill and ihnp4 in Indian Hill over private AT&T Long Lines trunks.

Wrote and maintained an entire email system that was widely deployed in parts of Bell Labs and later ATTIS Labs. Lived through the transition from bang addresses to RFC822 ones. It was interesting because when combination of bang and RFC822 segments were used in the same address the parse was ambiguous. Also I have sent Email from DEC TOPS 20. The arguably first "internet" email I ever sent was sometime in 79 or so on Arpanet. My home account was on mit-mc. I used to access it through the Brookhaven National Lab IMP to which we had a private trunk link from the CS Department at Stony Brook. Of course connecting to mit-mc over this plethora of network segments was using ... guess what .... telenet. No, not the telnet we are familiar with now but its Arpanet precursor, which ran on the Arpanet Host-Host protocol a precursor to today's TCP/IP.

Of course managing those sendmail.cf files which were specification for driving a Post Canonical System Engine to create new email addresses and routing info from those provided, on BSD UNIX, was quite a trip too.
[quote]
Browsed the web before Mosaic, Netscape, Explorer, Chrome, Safari ever existed? [/quote]
Of course! Indeed, we wrote several toy browsers both on straight X-Windows and also atop the Andrew Toolkit from CMU, and then got involved in bug fixing the first version of Mosaic. That was kind of fun. And then I ran into Marc at an HP TechCon last year, and had a few laughs about the silly bugs that we got to fix back then. Hey, our team at Bell Labs wrote an entire multi-media based development environment using the Andrew Toolkit way before Microsoft came up with OLE, and they managed to get several critical points wrong. Oh well..... If you have access to AT&T Technical Journal you can look up the article on "SDA - Software Development Assistant". Incidentally the MIME standard is based on the multi-media work that was done by Nathaniel Borenstein in the Andrew Toolkit, which we used extensively, and provided him with lots of feedback on what should and should not go into MIME. A lot of the multimedia stuff that you get on the internet today is MIME encapsulated.
[quote]
How many users are on the internet? What percentage of them are over 55? What percentage of them of any age would you consider to be internet savvy?
[/quote]
Actually I have no clue and I don't see what it has to do with being internet savvy or deciding to use Facebook or not.
[quote]
I would say you are, if you got all those answers right the first time, without going on line.
[/quote]
Hmmm! The requirements that appear to be implied by the questions are pretty steep to meet to be considered internet savvy. I would not claim to be internet savvy in many ways that many others of the younger generation are, and OTOH I would say that I am internet savvy in some other ways that many others are not. I am sure that is true of most of us of the older generation, specially those with a technical background. Of course there are a lot from my generation who are outright terrified of this stuff too, so much so as to be totally paralyzed and unable to even conceive of trying to use any of it.

Coming back to the original topic, I believe there are several of us that were quite aware of the negatives of internet and in particular its application in social media, and have been involved in heated discussions about it way before anyone dreamed up Facebook or Twitter or such.

But coming to think of it, those early wild west days of the development of distributed computing and computer networking were a lot of fun. I consider myself very fortunate to have been deeply involved in those developments. Those were some of the times that I cherish in my 35 year career in Computer Science.

Edited by jis, 14 June 2012 - 07:50 AM.

[jis]

I do not consider this forum to be social media but rather an information site as folks are coming on here to share information about a specific topic. To me social media are those sites where people share idle gossip, chit chat about what they are eating for lunch or whatever, troll for dates and generally waste time.

'
olympianhiawatha
so u mean i can chit chat here about my menu for lunch
and i can look for a date wow amtrak unlimited is great
if i can do all that

Of course..... look at the lengthy discussions about Amtrak Diner menus and the details of how the food is cooked or not.

Look at those stories of steamy experiences in Sleepers. Nothing is missing here.

[jis]

The point of all my arcane questions is that this internet we all use, and like for our various reasons, was conceived and then made real by a lot of scientists, many long dead now and many others long in the tooth, work which was done before the founders of Twitter and Facebook were born. And before I was born, come to think of it. I guess today what passes for "internet savvy" is having a new iPhone, a Twitter account, and a few hundred Facebook "friends." But there might be more to it than that, and so a younger person than me expressing astonishment that I don't know "all that" is a bit disingenuous.

And the point of all my arcane answers to the arcane questions is..... never assume that you know enough about one who is posting something until you actually know. I have no idea what your age is and I don't think it is important. Some of us, some younger, some older participated very deeply in the development of the foundations for what we see today, and it is sheer delight to see where things are! And we continue to build the foundations for things that are yet to come tomorrow! That's the fun of it all! That is what makes it all worthwhile at the end of the day .... not all the salary and stock options that also flow from it.

I still do not believe that to decide whether to participate in Facebook or not requires one to even know Turing's or Goedel's names, let alone the Machine (and more importantly the associated conjecture) and Theorem respectively. Afterall how many times do people think of Carnot when they rev up their engine in the car, and indeed why should they? The younger internet savvy kids of today know enough that they need to, to make a - what amount to - venue of social interaction decision. And what they don't know they will learn through experience.

The conversations I have with my nephew who is doing a Ph. D. in the area of multimedia social interactions in a joint project involving MIT Media Lab and NYU, and comes from a background of English Literature, is a sheer delight... to see how the technology and arts are coming together for a beautiful blossoming of endless possibilities. So I would not diss the younger generation just because they are young, inexperienced and full of dreams, and unaware of the arcana that supports the platforms they take fore-granted for their work. I remember that we all were there once ourselves. No reason for us to turn bitter just because we are older and wiser now.

Edited by jis, 14 June 2012 - 07:57 AM.

[Porter20]

So on a separate note - since this about Socail Media - I'll share a story from this past weekend. My wife & I were traveling back to Orlando from Seattle via Delta. Delta made an equipment change & rerouted our connection from Atlanta to NY city & we would get in 3 hours later - which stunk. But what really stunk is they separated us; so we were no longer sitting together on a 5 hour red-eye flight or the other 3 hour flight. When we talked to the check-in agent, we received a firm apology and were told the only way we could sit together was if we each paid $79 and moved up to FF seats. Begrudgingly we did (with a pact to each other to avoid Delta as much as we could in the future).
Sitting in the terminal still steaming, I blasted a tweet to Delta commenting on how their customer service stinks (I use to fly them A LOT & never had issues like this in the past). Im not a huge twitter person - mainly use it to keep up with my favorite sports stars & other news items as well as occasional comments to friends. Much to my surprise, I received a response in less than 3 mins. They asked for some additional information, apologized & refunded the $158 to us. I was shocked and happy they did something easy that I felt they should have in the first place. I was impressed how differmet travel companies are using different forms of social media to address customer service issues.

[pennyk]

And the point of all my arcane answers to the arcane questions is..... never assume that you know enough about one who is posting something until you actually know. I have no idea what your age is and I don't think it is important. Some of us, some younger, some older participated very deeply in the development of the foundations for what we see today, and it is sheer delight to see where things are! And we continue to build the foundations for things that are yet to come tomorrow! That's the fun of it all! That is what makes it all worthwhile at the end of the day .... not all the salary and stock options that also flow from it.

I still do not believe that to decide whether to participate in Facebook or not requires one to even know Turing's or Goedel's names, let alone the Machine (and more importantly the associated conjecture) and Theorem respectively. Afterall how many times do people think of Carnot when they rev up their engine in the car, and indeed why should they? The younger internet savvy kids of today know enough that they need to, to make a - what amount to - venue of social interaction decision. And what they don't know they will learn through experience.

The conversations I have with my nephew who is doing a Ph. D. in the area of multimedia social interactions in a joint project involving MIT Media Lab and NYU, and comes from a background of English Literature, is a sheer delight... to see how the technology and arts are coming together for a beautiful blossoming of endless possibilities. So I would not diss the younger generation just because they are young, inexperienced and full of dreams, and unaware of the arcana that supports the platforms they take fore-granted for their work. I remember that we all were there once ourselves. No reason for us to turn bitter just because we are older and wiser now.

WOW, very well written Jis (for an old guy - just kidding about the "old" part - you are only a few months older than I am)

[JoanieB]

And the point of all my arcane answers to the arcane questions is..... never assume that you know enough about one who is posting something until you actually know. I have no idea what your age is and I don't think it is important. Some of us, some younger, some older participated very deeply in the development of the foundations for what we see today, and it is sheer delight to see where things are! And we continue to build the foundations for things that are yet to come tomorrow! That's the fun of it all! That is what makes it all worthwhile at the end of the day .... not all the salary and stock options that also flow from it.

I still do not believe that to decide whether to participate in Facebook or not requires one to even know Turing's or Goedel's names, let alone the Machine (and more importantly the associated conjecture) and Theorem respectively. Afterall how many times do people think of Carnot when they rev up their engine in the car, and indeed why should they? The younger internet savvy kids of today know enough that they need to, to make a - what amount to - venue of social interaction decision. And what they don't know they will learn through experience.

The conversations I have with my nephew who is doing a Ph. D. in the area of multimedia social interactions in a joint project involving MIT Media Lab and NYU, and comes from a background of English Literature, is a sheer delight... to see how the technology and arts are coming together for a beautiful blossoming of endless possibilities. So I would not diss the younger generation just because they are young, inexperienced and full of dreams, and unaware of the arcana that supports the platforms they take fore-granted for their work. I remember that we all were there once ourselves. No reason for us to turn bitter just because we are older and wiser now.

WOW, very well written Jis (for an old guy - just kidding about the "old" part - you are only a few months older than I am)

I agree! I'm probably in the same age bracket too.

There is absolutely no reason to be afraid of the internet or social media if you take the time to educate yourself a little.
Facebook is not scary or a waste of time, it's a tool and a valuable one at that, and just like any tool... it's not too hard to hurt yourself if you don't take the time to read the directions.
Cut that tree down with a saw or learn how to use a chainsaw or get the phonebook out and call a lumberjack, your choice.

I love Amtrak's FB page.
I've learned a lot there and it's interesting and, fun too, to read what passengers have to say.
Some of the complaints are outlandish and full of ignorance and entitlement, some are justifiable.
Based on my perception, the outlandish and ignorant seem to prevail - as always.... JMO.

[Anderson]

The question of whether AU is "social media" hinges on the question of what social media is/isn't. However, I would at least argue that AU is not social media in the same way that Facebook is.

To be fair, when I joined Facebook, I was 18 and it was still a college campus-only thing. I remember the minor explosion that happened when the news feed first went up all those years ago.

However, I've always treated it as a "vaguely tolerated" part of my life. There are many things on there that I have not updated since I was 18 or 19, and I've purposefully let it languish for a whole host of reasons...but most of all, I've generally treated it as a glorified phone directory/IM lookup system. I haven't accepted a Facebook game invite in the better part of a decade, I don't think, and there are only two companies that I've "liked"...one of which is Amtrak. And yes, I use Facebook to contact people who insist on using it...but I also tend to make clear my distaste for regular contact on there when it is possible to communicate otherwise and attempted to steer conversations to either AIM or a phone call.*

Additionally, I have taken efforts to create a completely separate non-public persona on there rather than trying to keep everything straight within one account. For what it is worth, I would actually encourage this as a practice. I have also opted not to actively participate in any other "social" sites...I have a nominal Twitter that I set up to test something for a job at one point, but I think it has twitted all of once.

I am decidedly not a fan of social media of the Facebook variety...mainly because I don't like sharing things that I didn't consciously put out there. In general, I've found the push in the direction of "frictionless sharing" to be obnoxious at best...for example, I don't want to tell the world what stories I perused on the Washington Post site (or, for that matter, how much time I spent on AU on a given day). If I mention it to someone, I mention it to them..."them" being either singular or restricted, not global. Likewise, there are plenty of conversations that I would rather not have in public...and so on and so forth. Even if it is just ruminating where a train could be added to the Amtrak network, I don't necessarily want that being put out there in my name for the whole world to hear.

Basically, I like communicating with my friends...and often, only my friends. I put up with Facebook because it is the only way to effectively do so in many cases, but the key is that I "put up with" Facebook. I tolerate it and I do my best not to generate any revenue for them. Yeah, there might have been a time when I enjoyed fiddling around on it, but that time came and went when Facebook decided to roll back its privacy rules and rework the settings to force things out in the open repeatedly. It is also annoying being constantly asked to "like" things (I use these exceedingly sparingly) or to log in elsewhere with the same account (as many sites seem to be under the delusion that I want my FB linked with anything else).

To the extent that AU is "social media", it is substantially different from Facebook. First of all, there is far less of an emphasis on sharing personal information here, while Facebook's functionality largely requires that information. In fact, I can be on here without giving a single bit of personal information to anyone here; on Facebook, unless I set up a pseudonymed account, I at the very least need to give my name...and probably need to feed a bit more information in if I want to associate with other people. What's more, my associations with people are usually made public if I "Friend" them; here, I can associate with y'all without knowing your names if you don't offer them (and without you knowing mine if I don't offer it).

AIM, AU, and a lot of older internet things didn't require the public display of personal information...often, you didn't even need to offer your real name. Facebook and newer internet sites (LinkedIn also comes to mind) are based around that information. That difference, that barrier between the public and the private, is what I don't like about the present generation of social media.


*The biggest exception that I recall making to this has been, by and large, communicating with a friend who was stationed in Afghanistan. It was the only link we had, so I used it with reasonable regularity.

[jis]

I treat Facebook as the bazaar. I do not put things on Facebook that I would not yell out using a megaphone in a crowded bazaar, even though I do not publish anything beyond my "Friends". But since I have no control over what my "Friends" do with the posts, it is as good as no restrictions. I don't bother with separate persona for private things on FB since I don't trust them enough to handle such stuff. For more private conversations home or a quiet table in a coffee house is more appropriate and that is not what Facebook is, and there is no way to set up such a corner within Facebook with any certainty. So I take such conversations elsewhere - say to 1:1 email. Oh, I also generally do not accept any app invites which requires permission to use any info of mine, nor do I use FB to link to other things that are not as wide open as FB themselves.

AU is more like a great hall where anyone can enter and people talk about stuff in various corners of the hall, while wearing strange masks, sort of like in "Eyes Wide Shut" - well the activity there was of a different nature, but you get the idea. The party in the movie was way more private than AU is.

Facebook's policy of actively pushing info around is what makes it like a bazaar. Some people like it others don't and everyone is free to decide for themselves.

Actually article posted on AU are exactly as publicly available as Facebook posts. The difference is that AU does not actively push articles out. One has to know where to go to get access. But once one knows where to go, the Forums are completely open for perusal. And that IMHO is a good thing. Just wanted to make sure that people were not under any misconception about the level of privacy beyond what is afforded by pseudonyms and handles.

Follow up on the previous sub-thread....

WOW, very well written Jis (for an old guy - just kidding about the "old" part - you are only a few months older than I am)

Thank you! "Old" and all

Edited by jis, 15 June 2012 - 08:27 AM.

[AlanB]

I joined Facebook for one reason, to follow a group regarding a camp that my family & I have supported for years. I've never put a single piece of information into my profile, beyond my name and that fact that I'm a guy. And I existed like that for a couple of years without a friend. Then Amtrak released their App for the iPhone.

Both my brother & sister have always had my nieces & nephews track where GrandMa and I go on our trips. The App made it very easy to follow where we were going, as it can make posts to my Facebook wall. So I turned that on and invited the family to follow me that way. Since then, others from here have found me and befriended me too.

But that's about all you'll find on my wall, is the postings by the App. I rarely ever make any posts on my wall, and when I do, it's usually to answer a question from someone else. And it's rare that I ever post on any friend or family member's pages. Heck, save family, I rarely even go to other friends pages. Sorry guys & gals. I also don't bother with any gamer stuff, calendar stuff, or just about anything else on FB.

[Green Maned Lion]

This is not social media. This is a discussion board. We are interacting as human beings... but not in the way of Social Media. We are here to discuss a specific subject. We consist of geeks and people who want to talk to us geeks. I do not come on here and tell you that I just used the toilet, that I made or lost a lot of money at work, that my truck just broke down, that I got sick, that I gave myself a second degree burn, or many of the other generally boring to anyone who isn't my friend- and to many of them too- things that make up the boring nature of a human life.

Some of us are friends, although- I don't think I'm actually friends with anyone on here, besides a guy who stopped posting here- OBS Gone Freight- but that is not the nature of our interaction.

Social media is a way for people who know each other to communicate in a personal way, or to meet people they don't know. It is for personal communication betweenT people as people in a about life manner. Contemplate Facebook as an online bar. Consider this an online version of a railfan meet, or a chess club meet. They are very different. We come on here to discuss a subject- and may leave with some friends. You go onto Facebook to communicate with friends, and may possibly discuss something with them.

[roomette]

You go onto Facebook to communicate with friends, and may possibly discuss something with them.

I do? What do you do "onto" Facebook?

Edited by roomette, 15 June 2012 - 10:18 PM.