[Rant] Anti-Anti-Social

facebook popped up a reminder that I have been with them for eight years. And I was a latecomer I think. Unlike the negativity you read in op-eds, I find it a pretty constructive and convenient way to keep up with friends. I suspect for most people it works exactly that way. I have found that by liking certain pages or joining certain groups, I get a pretty relevant news feed, much more so than any haphazard consumer profiling algorithm (although I know they do that too -- and even those are pretty much on target).

My experience with facebook makes me one of the few people who have a positive view of being profiled by marketers. I get a lot of promotions for races and fitness stuff and travel, because that is my real life social circle. I click on them out of organic interest and that reinforces the behavior. Overall it's much better than the ads for over-40 dating and male enhancement pills that I used to get when all they knew about me was that I was an aging male.

I admit that it's a little freaky when I shop for something on Amazon and, within seconds, ads for similar products appear in facebook. Still I don't see the harm or what everyone is up in arms about. I am quite happy to have retailers battling for my eyeballs. I know there are fears of information about your habits freely floating around, but it's been quite remarkable how quickly the developed world has built in legal and technical safeguards to defend against this. Laws have been written such that any organization that gathers truly personal information would instantly become a criminal enterprise by using beyond it's explicitly intended purpose. The Europeans have GDPR now, and since everything is connected globally, it might as well be in place for the entire world. (That's why you suddenly got all those pop-ups asking you to accept security policies suddenly appear on your favorite sites recently).

Note: It's not the brave new technological world that puts your info at risk. Don't delude yourself that you ever had protection against criminals who wanted your info. It is vastly easier for me to steal your snail mail right out of your box, than to hack your bank's server.

Yes, I have some "friends" who reflexively share inane political memes, but they are easy to ignore and it's a small price. So, unlike most, I'm good with facebook. I especially love the local groups that serve the small community live in. They are peppered with people reporting lost and wandering dogs or farm animals, arguing about local road construction issues, engaging in nostalgia, or expressing joy at the fact that the local high school football team just won their first game in five years. I really think this may end up being facebook's highest purpose.

And that's where I draw the line at social media.

• I don't understand what Instagram is that facebook isn't, other than photo oriented. I think if I understood it better I might join, but I would need a practical reason, not just for the sake of entertainment.
• I have a Twitter account, although I have never tweeted. Have you ever seen Twitter. It is a cesspool. You know how a dog will pee on a fire hydrant, then another dog will come and pee on top of it, then another dog pees on top of that. That's Twitter.
• I never understood Snapchat and I still don't. It strikes me as a platform for people to do lurid things then leave no trace. So, kind of like before there was social media. Hmmm, maybe that's it. Providing idiots the promise of the past world, where not every dumbass thing you did lived forever in some data center. Of course, it's a false promise with respect to Snapchat because people can screenshot anything.

The fears of the horrible effects of social media on the culture are, I think, very overblown. Yes, it is possible to fire up a witch hunt in short order, but it's also much easier to counter it with the truth. Yes, the attention span can shorten, but some of that is efficiency, is it not? If I spend less time on my interests it's not necessarily because I care less, I just get the info I need from glancing at my phone instead of rifling through documents.

Since I use it, it's no surprise that facebook has gained a reputation as a site for old folks. Young'uns like Instagram or Snapchat. (Actually most young people I know primarily use SMS more than social networks for communication which is also encouraging. It's not social it's personal.) But I strongly suspect all of these mediums will converge on a main feature set and become an oligopoly, maybe including WeChat from China. If social forces still keep them in check and we avoid giving the government too much power over them, at some point in the future we will end up with them so deeply interwoven into our culture that it will be hard to remember life without them.