Climbing 5C comfortably

When we first joined Facebook it was filled with chronological timelines kept active by university friends. At that time algorithms did not affect what we saw or how frequently and there was a sense of community. In the last two or three weeks we have heard a lot about Cambridge Analytica and other companies because they have siphoned off user data and used it to manipulate people in a number of political events. 

During this time articles have been written detailing privacy and the threat that social networks pose. I have seen very few, if any articles looking at people and how easily misled they have been. I see very few articles exploring the issues surrounding how such a large portion of the population is susceptible to being misled. 

The events of the last week are a perfect demonstration of the Manufacturing of Consent that Noam Chomsky wrote about in his books and discussed at his lectures. He spoke about looking at the dominant headlines and looking at what was ignored. He spoke about taking an active look at what is being said and by whom. In theory, the very people that were misled by the manipulation are the people that would have been seduced by his rhetoric. 

What I really want to see, is a shift away from websites like Facebook towards blogs and online communities where users interacting with each other are not manipulated by algorithms. I want to go back to an age where web forums, chronological timelines and more, are the norm. Facebook experimented with emotions in timelines a few years ago, now they have allowed companies to syphon off data and most importantly they are being accused of helping aggravate the situation in places like Myanmar.

The best way to hurt a company like Facebook is not to delete your account. It is for them to lose your eyeballs. It is for you to stop using the site, to start using others, and to reduce their income. If they want to treat us like a commodity then we can return the favour. We can use them fleetingly. 

Twitter is obviously never going to sort out it’s issues so from midnight today I will no longer be using the service during a month. I’ll be using all the other sites, just don’t feel like having my time wasted by twitter anymore.

For all friends just continue interacting via all the services that have a 99.9% uptime rather than 3% downtime.

See you then.

A lot of people love the re-tweet because they believe that it is a fast and effective way to tell both their followers on twitter as well as the person being retweeted that they are listening or that they thought this was a interesting point. This is true in a number of situations but this was not always the case. There was a time on twitter when people who liked what you linked to would comment on the topic and converstions would grow. It would take time, and involvment, and it would create noise, but it did provide one thing. Indications of friendship.

You see friendship on twitter is a feature that you see less and less on twitter as the emphasis is on following, rather than conversing with people. Many of those I used t follow now follow thousands of people as a result of which they lose track of what they sad to who. Answering every tweet takes a lot of time, and time is a commodity people are rarely willing to give to others. I wasn’t willing to watch five minute videos on seesmic because I felt there were more effective ways of conversing. People feel the same way about conversation on twitter. They’ve given up on it and this is a shame.

Twitter is all about the short form. The more short messages you send the more people will know about your likes and dislikes. If you retweet the short form loses some of that value. You are more succinct about why one point is more interesting than another by discussing the topic with the person. Every message contributes to the grand picture.

If you want to show that you like a tweet, or like a link, don’t retweet it. Go to friendfeed and mark it as liked, share it. Write a little comment at the bottom. This provides so much more information to those that decided that what you have to say is of interest. No single network can do everything, so experiment and see which is best for which purpose. Your experience will be enriched by such a process.

Today I went to try the new macbook pro and macbooks and I found that I prefered the macbook to the other device. I like that the keyboard is there and there’s nothing to the side. it’s a better feeling machine for when you move around.

The biggest difference between these two machines and older models is the touchpad interface. Rather than have a seperate button and tactile area both are integrated. press down on the touchpad and you’ve got the same reaction as when you pressed the button. Use two fingers and you scroll. Use three fingers in apps like iphoto and you move from one picture to another. Use four fingers and there are three reactions. The first is when going up then down. It minimises the window, to the sides and it changes apps. Down and you go to see several windows. It’s not as intuitive as it sounds.

Whilst the trackpad is a nice idea I think it’s going to take people some getting used to. At first it was really great but within a few minutes I would accidentaly drag things across, select something I didn’t want to or other. In brief whilst it’s meant to be intuitive it wasn’t.