Comment by foobiekr
5 years ago
Without going into details, for various reasons, my relationship with my employer essentially made it critical that I delete my account several years ago. I resented it at the time, because while I considered facebook fundamentally unhealthy, I justified it as a way to keep in touch with friends, and, very cynically, use it as a propaganda tool for career advancement.
In hindsight, though. I couldn't be more glad for the push. For at least a few years, I had actively unfollowed a good majority of friends from my feed because watching their gyrations (posing, fighting, echoing, ...) was making me lose respect for a lot of people. I don't need their mental hygiene and low-effort politics rubbed in my face and I'm happier not seeing it.
Looking back, one thing I did conclude was that the death of email was one of the few things that made Facebook valuable. I had email contact for pretty much every person I was "friends" with on FB, but many of those addresses have expired, or they are so flooded with spam that when you message someone, they don't see it at all or not for +a week or so. I'm like that myself - I only look at my personal email once a week, on Friday night.
Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site. They should have called it "Socially Mandated Fronting' or something instead of trying to make an awkward and not very meaningful global climate change analogy.
Not only is the "climate change" analogy strained, it perfectly contradicts their argument, showing both its weakness and their total lack of self-awareness.
The positions on climate change range from "existential threat to all life on the planet within 20 years and our way of life" to "mass hysteria founded by fault-ridden scientific evidence whose solutions are an existential threat to the global economy and our way of life". These positions in particular are held by a significant percentage of the population of the Western world, and most people cluster near one of these two extremes. In other words, it is an extremely polarizing issue that, for many, colors how they perceive other people, should they discover their positions.
The creators of this website suggest that social media and data-mining are forcing people to self-censor and not freely express themselves, but then proceed to frame the contentious political issue of climate change as a believer/denialist modality. The authors make it clear that they don't want people to have a nuanced opinion on climate change, they want them to conform to the "unquestionable truth".
But it is this form of rigid thinking that causes people to self-censor, not the intangible specter of "big-data" and "the algorithm". If you were employed by someone who made it clear that they are only interested in hiring people who were devout Christian, you wouldn't openly share your atheist views publicly. Western society as a whole is selecting more and more topics, like climate change, where to be on the record holding a conflicting opinion is disastrous for your relationships with friends, family, and employers. This fact isn't a fault of the technology, though the technology might be the reason society is becoming rapidly intolerant of dissent.
Conflict and social guardedness like this is guaranteed to arise when we have a political landscape that is so divided and thinks everything is on the line.
> Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site.
Agreed.
I thought it was going to be about "evaporative cooling", how bad behaviour drives thoughtful people out of a group, producing a feedback cycle where bad behaviour is further amplified.
Which is tangentially related to the topic of the link, but different enough to be actively misleading. Unfortunate.
Wait, is email really dead?
Email is NOT dead. Despite everything that has been invented in an effort to replace it, email is still the only common denominator that everybody in the world uses.
Since getting off social media, I’ve tried using email to connect with friends and it has been a good experience.
> Despite everything that has been invented in an effort to replace it, email is still the only common denominator that everybody in the world uses.
Second after SMS.
I don't think so, but I would never expect an answer to a cold email trying to rekindle a friendship. I all but ignore my email until I am expecting something in particular, anything that was sent to me between now and the last time I expected something I may never read.
To each their own I guess. I usually reply to any non-recruiter human who has taken the time to send me an email directly (not a list), even if it's just a one-line response. Especially if it's an old friend you've lost touch with.
2 replies →
in my personal experience, email is completely dead. even the multiple mailing lists I belong to, some of which I personally run, have moved wholesale into the slack channels we made to augment them.
I'm sure it's alive in some circles, but I haven't contacted any friends through email in years.
So you use a mix of text, FB, WhatsApp, etc?
1 reply →
You can’t sign up for Facebook or Instagram without an email address.
This might not be true for every region, but it has been possible to use a phone number instead of email on both for a few years.