Sit On My Facebook, And Tell Me That You Love Me
I love when people who would think I’m an old fuddie duddie join the Order Of The Old Man That Yells At Cloud. The interesting and influential John Scalzi has seen Facebook, and he’s not happy.
Facebook has made substandard versions of everything on the Web, bundled it together and somehow found itself being lauded for it, as if AOL, Friendster and MySpace had never managed the same slightly embarrassing trick. Facebook had the advantage of not being saddled with AOL’s last-gen baggage, Friendster’s too-early-for-its-moment-ness, or MySpace’s aggressive ugliness, and it had the largely accidental advantage of being upmarket first — it was originally limited to college students and gaining some cachet therein — before it let in the rabble. But the idea that it’s doing something better, new or innovative is largely PR and faffery. Zuckerberg is in fact not a genius; he’s an ambitious nerd who was in the right place at the right time, and was apparently willing to be a ruthless dick when he had to be. Now he has billions because of it. Good for him. It doesn’t make me like his monstrosity any better.
Preach it, brother. I’m constantly bombarded with advice — and just plain demands–to get a Facebook page and Twitter presence going, and LinkedIn requests, and lots of other utilities with problems with spaces between words and capitalization, but I just can’t bring myself to slice my onion any thinner. I recently read an article about an NFL player from a small town in the midwest, and ESPN needed a thumbnail sketch to illustrate how backward the place was, so they pointed out that most of the denizens of this particular benighted place in their mysterious flyover state still had phones that, get this, fold in the middle. They may be pooping indoors now, but they’re not Twittering about it realtime. The horror!
[Update: A møøse once bit my sister –and then accumulated 1000 Facebook friends and lots of lungworms and died.]
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