Sunday, October 3, 2010

I Hate Facebook..."like" am I a social nitwit?

This is not an assigned topic for our class.  But, from the very beginning of this term, there has been a quiet little chant running through my head 'I hate Facebook.'  With total respect to our Instructor, Wendy Levy, WHY Facebook?  I don't want 600 close and personal friends.  I don't want a 'wall'.  I don't "like" Facebook.

This week the film, 'Social Network' opened in movie theatres EVERYWHERE!  The official website,  http://www.thesocialnetwork-movie.com/ is surprisingly dull.  In one of those moments of cosmic follie, I realized just how much I hate Facebook.  The thought of screenagers on their 4G iphones in the movies, updating their status with Facebook friends,
who are also watching Facebook, posting faux-ever clever and ironic dialogue is just all too fabulous.  It's hard to imagine any studio investing money & celebrity on a movie version of the founding of IMDb.com!

Before you accuse me of being a digital Luddite, Please hear me out.  Facebook has already begun to move to redefine itself as a fully functioning platform; a site to be used for everything from chatting to watching movies to another E-channel.  Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook), forever plotting revenge for imagined slights, betrayer of BFF's, & Harvard drop-out, has a new strategy to transform the entire WEB into an extension of Facebook.  He has introduced the new "open graph" initiative, which allows Facebook users to "like" content outside of Facebook's website; even if they are not logged in to Facebook.  This ability to register your "like" will provide Facebook with comprehensive data on user behavior which will be sold to advertisers.  Makes Baidu, look so twentieth century by comparison. 
Will Facebook morph into a WEB-utility, like Google or Wikipedia, that we cannot live without?


Or is Facebook the next evil empire?   Am I alone in loathing Facebook, it's entire shtick, and it's creator Zuckerberg?  I read a fellow classmates polite posting on Forum declining the invitation to join our Cine19 group on Facebook. Well, this spring, more than 31,000 users deleted their Facebook profiles in protest.  Another group of users organized a "Quit Facebook Day" event to lobby against the changes being made to the security settings on the site. At some point Facebook's growth like AOL, like Yahoo, has to level off.  Ben Mezrich http://benmezrich.com/ , author of 'The Accidental Billionaires' is quoted as agreeing, "because, let's face it, there are only a limited amount of people on the Internet"  Or are there?  I'm sure everyone will be watching 'Social Network' the Facebook movie in Imax, ipod,iphone and eye-yi-yi-lucy schlock & awe.   

I  love the filmography of this class.  The mysterious little trail of thematic bread crumbs we follow from week to week leads to the discovery of the digital terra incognita of New Media.  Facebook is marked on my map with a warning of 'there be monsters'.  I will continue posting my class assignments on Insight, imail, forum, this blog, YouTube, and more but NOT Facebook. 
Google Search results 1 - 10 of about 6,360,000 for facebook sucks
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2 comments:

  1. cinema19October 3, 2010 at 10:45 PM

    Compelling post Cine Scholar - by including Facebook as a platform in a class on emerging media technologies and documentary, does not mean I endorse it, or even like it. I am simply acknowledging it as a platform that has a significant impact in web 2.0 media, and exploring the type of communication that happens there, and what it's potential impact may or may not be. I would hope you have the critical distance to be able to offer astute and strategic analysis beyond "I Hate" or "I Like."

    No matter how you feel about it, the scale of participation on Facebook makes it a force to be reckoned with, one way or another. Your "opting out" is a part of the story world around the platform. Welcome to the intelligent web.

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  2. cine scholarOctober 9, 2010 at 3:33 AM

    Thank you for reading & responding to the posting. I was caught up in the inane verbal expression on Facebook aka "like" with a very Caligula like thumbs-up.

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