Living our lives on social media

Michelle wrote:

I found myself consciously telling myself throughout that trip to put the camera down more often and just look at things, just experience them myself.  And I found myself watching people on the tours we took, blocking the windows of the tour buses with their arms and cameras and looking at the scenery through the tiny screen on their camera instead of just looking at it.  The gorgeous things whiz by and you're trying so hard to get the perfect shot of it that you don't really look at it yourself - you look at it later when you upload it to Facebook.

I understand your reaction to the Facebook phenomenon, but in my own life, taking photos and videos and audio is really important. I do get a momentary rush from seeing or hearing beautiful things, but I don't have a photographic / phonographic memory. Photos and videos are precious tools to remind me of important experiences and enhance them in my recollection. For example, I find it hard to re-create a person's voice in my memory - an audio clip can be priceless. I've had the experience of older friends and relatives contacting me after the death of a loved one and asking if I have any video or audio of them. Imagine how wrenching that can be when the answer is "no".

I guess what I'm saying is that with the advent of simple cheap high-quality technology, I'm not as enamoured of "real life" as I once was. As long as I can strike an appropriate balance, I can do better than real life.

I'm still going to think about the social media part for a while, and yes, I recognize that that's your main focus, rather than living "in the moment". Again, I'm not sure what's wrong with having friends and contacts and acquaintances that you rarely see in real life, and in looking at youth, I definitely don't see them using social media as a substitute for real-life contact. More a supplement.

Great topic Michelle.

Sometimes I wonder about the whole naming "narcissistic" of an entire generation. My generation was called the "me" generation and the prediction was that great doom was to fall upon those of us with short attention spans (caused by Sesame Street, a downright ancient and plodding show at this point), those of us who lived beyond our means, we were the first "raised-with-t.v. generation", focussed only on self, etc etc.

That said, I didn't grow up in a time where every second thought that popped into my head could be broadcast far and wide within a few seconds. 

On the topic of photos, for about 10ish years starting in the late 90s I found something very odd happening. Digital cameras became more widespread and there was a decrease in let's call it highly selective photo-taking, which I used to do, to rampant photo-taking, with a later selection of those photos deemed to make the cut and be printed onto nice photo paper. I found that when my photos were only available on my computer, there was no way to show them to people, including the people in them, aside from email, which removes the "community" aspect of looking at photos together with a group of people from a shared experience.

Facebook is very much about community for me. I limit the "friends" I have to (mostly) people I've met in real life, and I find I'm caught up with people on more outer rings of my spheres, and share jokes, comments and interests with people I would otherwise have contact with maybe a few times a year at community events, if at all.

I will confess to being one of those photo sharers, including meals I prepare for friends (I never used to take photos of my food) as well as cute photos of my cats, etc.

As an educator I've found many dozens of videos and links to blogs, news articles and other media that I wouldn't otherwise know about, in my news feed posted and re-posted by friends and community peeps, and for that I'm very grateful.

I don't take photos thinking "I have to take photos so I can post them on Facebook", but a funny thing I will do is, when I hear or say a particular funny or sarcastic sentence, say, "That's sooo my new Facebook status."

But .....  it's also a huge time-waster, and keeps me in front of the computer (not writing, not working) more than before. And I'm a pretty bad procrastinator as it is. However, I can't blame Facebook for that, it's just fitting into lots of bad habits I've cultivated over the years.

@ Michelle

I go through my pics each time I download them, and make prints of at least some of it. But then, I am painfully aware of the problem you mention. I don't think most people are. 

Same problem for reel-to-reel tape, of course. Actually I think this is less a case of lost technology than a ripe market for people who have the means to transfer data. After all, you still can find 5-inch floppy drive sif you really want to..

Hopefully we will be a bit smarter in the future, when it comes to backing up data.

As an aside, if you have ever had to deal with old photos from the 30s and 40s, many of them are direct negative prints. In other words, there is an incredible depth of resolution in them , despite their tiny size. I have pulled up clear faces which were only a few milimetres wide. 

Maysie wrote:

I've found many dozens of videos and links to blogs, news articles and other media that I wouldn't otherwise know about, in my news feed posted and re-posted by friends and community peeps, and for that I'm very grateful.

That's the main value of FB for me... as an aggregator of interesting reading material (and now that I'm no longer on dial-up; video and audio!). That, and the fact that discussions/arguments about said reading materials no longer flood my e-mail inbox the way they did 8-10 years ago.

I post fairly regularly, under my real name, but I have no pictures of myself, no birthday, and very little information. I just don't like putting all that much out there for everyone to see. 

Also, there are some people I have not friended, like my mother. We have a family page for that. If she really wanted to go look at the things I post to everyone else she could, but I don't think there is much there of interest to her.

Speaking of the "am I pretty" idea, one of my nephews friended me a few months ago, and regularly posts way too much teenage information. I called him once, in a friendly way, on something homophobic he posted, and I remember some time later wondering if I should mention his habits to his parents, because he was posting some embarrasingly personal stuff.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that I should just not read his stuff, and that really, he should not have friended me in the first place, Just because we are both in an open forum like facebook doesn't mean it is appropriate for me to be reading juvenile teenage chatter. And yes, a few people have pestered me with farmville and shit like that, but really, I think people who are into shit like that are going to gravitate to other people who are into shit like that.

In the same way, while there are some people who use social media as a way to get attention or set themselves up to be judged by other people,  how is that any different than doing the same thing on a telephone, or by doing karaoke, or whatever? 

Really, that is the only way I can see that this new technology is different. For the most part people are doing the same things as we were 30 years ago; it's just that now we're all doing it in the same big room.

I recently asked a friend of mine who is a college communications professor what his impressions are regarding the general writing ability of today's students relative to his earlier years of teaching. In his experience, he thinks writing skills have deteriorated.  Assuming that is true, I've got to believe that the highly fragmented communication that kids engage in all day long cannot exert a positive influence on a student's ability to write thoughtful and relatively complex compositions.  If someone sends out hundreds of text messages throughout a day, on a day-in and day-out basis, that probably isn't the best way to train a mind to write things that aren't just superficial, stream-of-consciousness compositions. 

For example, good writing requires a process of carefully re-reading and editing what one writes (and often several rounds of re-reading and editing). That requires an enormous amount of effort and sustained concentration.  Machine-gun texting develops habits that are directly contrary to that process. 

@ Sven

I get annoyed by lazy writing as well, but I think some of it is adaptation. It is like the story of Lincoln's Gettysburg address being thought of as a bomb at the time he delivered it, because it was only two minutes long, in contrast to the two-hour long speech by Edward Everett just before him.

My grandmother told me that when she was young there used to be two mail deliveries per day (this was in Winnipeg). People did not tend to write letters for a lot of their messages - they scribbled them on postcards, and it was common to send an invitation in the mail in the morning, get a response in the afternoon, and have the person over for supper that same evening.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

My grandmother told me that when she was young there used to be two mail deliveries per day (this was in Winnipeg). People did not tend to write letters for a lot of their messages - they scribbled them on postcards, and it was common to send an invitation in the mail in the morning, get a response in the afternoon, and have the person over for supper that same evening.

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That's a great story. 

Thinking of unusual (relative to today) uses of the mail, when my dad was in college (about 65 years ago), he would send his dirty clothes back home to his mother who would wash them and then mail back his clean clothes. Dad said that was a pretty common practice at that time. 

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Bob Sullivan wrote:

Student-athletes in colleges around the country also are finding out they can no longer maintain privacy in Facebook communications because schools are requiring them to "friend" a coach or compliance officer, giving that person access to their "friends-only" posts.

I know for sure that FB pages of prospective junior and college league hockey players are examined by people connected to the pros.

Pictures like that have always been relevant in a civil law suit. The only difference is now people post them on a medium that reaches far more people. A lawyer facing the same type of suit 30 years ago would likely have sought and obtained disclosure documents relating to a ski holiday etc if those events had been published in a Society News column.

What most people don't realize is that our internet security is like a needle in a haystack for isolating a single person's behaviour on line. However once a person is isolated the police and corporate security people can then go back and find the most intimate and mundane details of everything from purchases to admissions of guilt in e-mails and other communications.  Big Brother is watching but until you make yourself known to the state/corporate apparatus you can fly under the radar. 

Just ask 6079 Smith W what happens when you get on the radar.