I could not agree more with you. This is something I noticed about 2 years ago and it bugged the ever living shit out of me. Everything had to be photographed, everything had to be uploaded to Facebook. There would be elaborate poses, pictures would be taken multiple times, everything had to be made perfect. That's not capturing a moment, it's some idiotic mixture of photojournalism and voyeurism. But the worst part of it was that it was all in an attempt to make other girls jealous. "we have to show them how much fun we're having" "they have to see what a good time we had" "they have to see how good we look" it was really out of hand. Harumph. Women.
I use facebook for two things: 1. To prove I'm better than people. I look at their miserable lives, and it makes me feel immaculate. This is similar to Wal-Mart. 2. Mass communication. Ever call 50 people to tell them you are having a party? Yeah, it is much simpler to make a facebook event that answers everyone's questions. I also think Twitter is about ready to see a sharp decline in popularity. It suffers from the same thing that Myspace suffers from. It isn't improving its self. It does one thing. It needs to make it's self more useful in a hurry.
Degenerate: "Why in the fuck are you taking pictures of our meals at this shitty resort?" Ex: "Because I want everyone back home to see what we ate each night!" Degenerate: "@#$%, tomorrow is separate activity day! Maybe I'll see you back at the room after I'm done drinking alone." I broke up with her on the plane back home.
A fun thing I've noticed is that 99% of the complaints about social media aren't about the ultimately useful tool in question, but rather about the manner in which retards use it.
This. I didn't "get" Twitter until I found the right people (for me) to follow. I follow about 50-60 people, 10 of which are real life friends who never update. The rest are sports writers/bloggers, comedy accounts and economists that I like. I see very few wasted tweets and I tend to hear about sports news from Twitter before it shows up in my RSS feed. The idea that Twitter is simply a tool for people to post meaningless drivel is a gross generalization. It's a tool for people to post whatever the fuck they'd like. It's up to you to find the posts you'd like to follow. You don't have to see anything you don't want. The only other social networking site I frequent is Facebook, which I'll admit to checking frequently - largely because my job consists of about 3 hours of actual work per day and 5 hours of smoking cigarettes and dicking around on the internet. While most of the news feed is utterly worthless, I can easily hide anything or anyone I don't want to see. However, I tend to like seeing everything. In the very least, I can forward ridiculous status updates to whichever of my friends happens to be on Gchat (I guess, there's another one use). Benefits I've seen from Facebook: 1. Friends have created a 100+ photograph album of me without my owning a camera or lifting a finger. 2. Bikini pictures of hot girls frequently uploaded. 3. Keeping in touch with friends and family who have moved out of state. 4. Many of my friends are funny and interesting (precisely the reasons I chose them as friends), so they tend to post funny and/or interesting things on Facebook. Point is, in large part, social media is what you decide to make. As Aetius stated, most of the critcism has nothing to do with social media and everything to do with people.
Yeah, after reading this thread and the other one, I've decided that the retard quotient in my friend list must be pretty low and I kind of want to buy them all presents. I mean, if you factor out the sheer number that seem to enjoy playing farmville, mafia wars, and all the variations. Okay, never mind.
I deactivated my Facebook profile today. It felt real good. Now I have only YouTube for distractions.
Wherever there are easily-accessible ways to make you think you are more important, idiots will come and exploit it in droves. Hence MTV (well, MTV now), Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc. But MTV is great if/when it shows music videos as it was originally designed to do. Mysoace/facebook are great when used as strategic, two-way communication tools. Twitter is great as another avenue for me to follow NBA players, teams, etc. Those tools fail when they are not utilized as tools. When the afore-mentioned "idiots" harass people and waste their time with unexpected and unneeded information. Like someone said above me, it isn't so much the medium that people have a problem with, it is a select group of that medium's users. I use Facebook, heavily, for work. It's a great way to ultimately build morale and get ideas. Plus, ONLY my "friends" are actual people I talk to and/or want to communicate with through that medium, and I approach Facebook as a tool through which I can communicate with a select group of people. Unfortunately, I don't think Facebook designers care for it to be utilized in that way. Ultimately, I predict that what we know now as "social media" is going to disappear (or otherwise be marginalized) because of the "idiots" I mentioned before. But the lessons and the new ideas inspired by out current "social media" will hopefully inspire new, more refined and task-specific tools of that kind. Er, uh, I mean..... GO NASCAR!!! wooohoooo!!!
I'm on facebook every day. I'm at my computer for 90% of the 8 hour day so I post links to funny stuff I find here or on fark/youtube and I just leave it on in the background and use it as an instant messaging program to make my day go faster. It's also a good distraction tool if I get extremely bored to post inappropriate comments on peoples walls/statuses and see how many people I don't know I can offend. Like when my buddy posted a status update about the earthquake in haiti and I commented that "a lot of people were killed via proxy when rubble fell on the voodoo dolls" one of his friends posted that she was amazed he would be friends with someone like me and how she wanted to punch me in the face. I'd have to agree with Aetius though, some of you people care way to much what other people are doing. So there are people in bars taking pictures of themselves to put on facebook, do you really care that much? Maybe me and my friends are too old for the "OMG pictures!!!" phase of our lives but I can't remember the last time we were out at the bars, for a non celebratory reason, (friend in from out of town, b-day, weddings etc...) and there were cameras present. And if someone is so annoying that you cant stand reading their updates, why is this person your friend anyway? If you feel bad for not adding them/deleting them you can just hide all their updates from your news feed. I can understand certain people not wanting them, read a story about a teacher who got suspended because a photo of her drinking was uploaded and people saw it. First of all that is completely retarded to suspend someone for doing something on their own time, but can't you just make your profile private/unsearchable and locked down so only certain people can see certain things from it? I know at my old job I made it so my boss couldn't see my status updates.