Replying to "Higher" Amount of Upset People

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.

Because that never happens with forums and phone calls.

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.

Wait. What? You wrote you DON'T consider this forum social media? Wait. What? Re-read your own post, fits the description of many threads in these forums to a "T".

Wait. What?

As sad as it may sound ..........

If some one needs to do Biz with me or chat with me I have 6 Emails ... 2 YIMs 2 Phone #s 4 Skype's that they can deal with ......
Call me stuck up but if they are too lame to use a phone or at the least text me or email , then its not likely that person is worth dealing with ..
its not like I only use a 14.4Kbaud FAX machine ......

Yes I am a 25 YO Luddite ..

Peter

Someone that uses Skype, IM and Email a Luddite? Strange definition of Luddite that would be AFAIAC. Now if you tried to do all of that over a 1200 Baud Acoustic Coupler Modem, well then maybe

I actually use all of those to a very large extent too. Most IM systems and Skype allow multiple party conversations, which is one of the most useful ways to conduct business in my experience. I spend half of each day on such it seems.

It also looks like you use at least one device from which you can access AU, so you do use a browser which you don't mention . Other than the phone, if you use one that is not VOIP based that is, everything else appears to be Internet front ends, and all come with some level of both the pluses and minuses of such.

Seriously, you don't have to be a Facebook or Twitter user to be a non-Luddite just like you don't have to be a party junky to be a socially adept person.

As sad as it may sound ..........

If some one needs to do Biz with me or chat with me I have 6 Emails ... 2 YIMs 2 Phone #s 4 Skype's that they can deal with ......
Call me stuck up but if they are too lame to use a phone or at the least text me or email , then its not likely that person is worth dealing with ..
its not like I only use a 14.4Kbaud FAX machine ......

Yes I am a 25 YO Luddite ..

Peter

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.