Rethinking Facebook: Some reflections

“They have their story, and I have mine.”

These words have been on my mind a lot over the last few months. The idea, as deftly explained in this blog post by a friend of Donald Miller’s, is that we can’t compare ourselves to others, since our respective paths through life are never so parallel. So these words make for a pretty good mantra when browsing Facebook.

I read an article on CNN’s website recently that really resonated with me. (Not something I frequently say about CNN, but hey.) It cited several studies as saying that the more time we spend browsing Facebook, the more likely we are to feel worse about our own lives:

In early 2012, a study out of Utah Valley University also found that many people had a case of the blues after checking Facebook. The researchers talked to a group of 425 students and found correlations between the amount of time people spent checking Facebook and negative feelings about their own lives. The more time their subjects spent on the social network, the higher probability that they would think their friends lived better, happier lives.

In January, a study from Germany found that a third of people felt worse after spending time on Facebook. Seeing updates of friends' successful careers, cute babies and fabulous vacations inspired feelings of envy, loneliness and even anger.

I can sympathize with this. When my Facebook friends post photos of cool vacations, cottage outings, excursions with friends, etc., it’s hard for this introvert to not feel like a pretty boring person by comparison, even though I know that my life is anything but boring. It seems to me that Facebook was designed more for extroverts than introverts, and that the constant pressure to share our experiences runs counter to the way introverts interact with each other.

People put their best foot forward on Facebook – I’m certainly no exception – but the result is that using Facebook has increasingly been feeling like performance art, like I’m trying to come off as a more interesting and extroverted person. When I post some sort of funny status or anecdote, or even a YouTube video of some obscure musical piece, it’s hard not to hope for some kind of reaction. This is an awkward feeling in that we’re usually told we should live life without being worried about what others think of us – but everything we do on Facebook provides the opportunity for “Likes” and comments from others, and it’s hard not to judge the success of one of my Facebook posts according to the number of “Likes” and quality of comments it receives. In other words, the value of what I post on Facebook seems inherently tied to what others think of it, since by definition, I’m posting it to a social media site, and I’m not posting it in a vacuum for my own use.

***

Part of the problem, I think, is that Facebook has become a social destination in itself as opposed to a social tool. Ideally, social media should be part of a balanced social life: it provides the ultimate place to see and be seen, but it doesn’t always foster real connection on its own. After I post anything to Facebook, I check that browser tab frequently to see how many comments and “Likes” it's accumulated, but none of it is as satisfying or memorable as a good long-form conversation with a friend, or a dinner outing, or a university event. It’s hard to shake the feeling that I’ve spent too much time browsing and updating Facebook and not enough time being social.

And Facebook is indeed an addicting thing to browse and update: there’s lots of ways to update our profiles to reflect our interests, since it’s both a place to create an online identity and a place for advertisers to play to our interests. It occurred to me recently just how much junk from high school there is on my profile these days: bands I once had a passing interest in, books and movies I read and watched years ago and haven't revisited, and notes and status updates that don’t necessarily reflect who I am today. It’s almost as though Facebook expects you to constantly curate your profile as you change throughout life, but that’s pretty narcissistic in and of itself. Still, if I become Facebook friends nowadays with someone who maybe doesn’t know me all that well, and they look at this stuff, what message does it send about who I am today?

***

There’s lots of other arguments to raise in regards to Facebook, such as the ethics of a profit model based on targeted advertisements, the constant cat-and-mouse game of privacy, the contradictions inherent in “Facebook creeping”, the ubiquity of cyber-bullying, etc. Maybe I’ll touch on some of these in a future post.

In the meantime, I’m planning to refocus my use of Facebook. I’ve been removing some of the junk from my profile, but I’ll also pay more attention to what I post and why, and give more attention to social opportunities outside of my computer screen. I might even post photos more frequently, if that proves to be a better way of using this tool to connect with people!

Facebook has certainly been a valuable tool for me: it’s the only way I’m still in touch with various people, and it’s been useful for sharing updates on my health situation (and receiving lots of lovely encouragement in return). But sometimes it feels like it comprises too large a portion of this introvert’s social life.

[Author’s note: This was the first post I started writing in this new wave of blog posts, around July 31st by the looks of it (and before the CNN article was published). It originally sounded a bit apprehensive and depressing, and I hope I’ve succeeded in minimizing this.]

Rethinking blogging: Some reflections

As I hinted in a previous post, I’ve been feeling more compelled to write recently. And blogging seems like the most suitable venue for it! I’ve recently been inspired by Lifehacker posts like this and this, and also by a fascinating article in Scientific American that spoke deeply to this brain-tumour patient. But in a larger sense, as I explained earlier, I’ve been inspired by the growing feeling that I need to create something, and find sources of self-development, motivation, and satisfaction outside of my coursework and co-op job duties. There’s also the fact that I’m currently on crutches and unable to explore Toronto as thoroughly as I had wanted to this summer...but that’s a story for another day!

I’ve been hesitant to use my blog for a while, and I think there’s a few things at play here. First is that back in 2007, when I created this blog, I think I saw it as a fairly simple way of publishing interesting links, with the hope that maybe further discussion would ensue. (Nowadays, of course, I tend to do this on Facebook – but back in 2007, I think links were relegated to a different part of your profile rather than showing up with your statuses and everything else.) Starting in 2009 or so, however, I started to post some more “long-form” writing. University makes you think through everything in a bit more depth, I guess, so this is the path I’d like to continue on, even if the long-form writing looks inconsistent with my earlier blog posts. But the ironic thing here is that university also tends to sap any excess intellectual energy out of me, so it’s made this sort of long-form writing and the ensuing discussion more taxing for me (my deepest apologies, Luke).

The other issue is that I’m toying with the idea of creating a personal website again, but using it more for professional purposes, with these lengthier blog posts and a digital portfolio. So in the meantime, I’ve been hesitant to put more effort into this here Blogger blog. (Really personal blog posts, however, would stay here.) I recently used WordPress to build a new website for my church, and fell in love with it, so I’d want to use WordPress instead of Blogger for the new site. I’d blog about environmental and social-justice issues, like I’ve tended to since 2009, but I’d also like to get into topics of Geomatics and geography, human–computer interaction, and my various discoveries during daily life as a computer geek. In another previous post, I quoted from science-fiction author Bruce Sterling’s column about simplifying your life by getting miscellany out of your time-space. I re-read this piece every now and then, and there’s several things in it that I rather disagree with, but something that always jumps out at me is this point: (emphasis his)

Experiments need to be slotted into some larger context of research, and their results need to be communicated to other practitioners. That's what makes them true "experiments" instead of private fetishes.

If you're buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know what you are trying to prove by that. You also need to tell other people useful things about it. If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You may be wasting some space and time, but you'll be saving space and time for others less adventurous. Good.

If you're becoming a techie magpie packrat who never leaves your couch – that's not good. Forget the shiny gadget. You need to look in the shiny mirror.

The thing about buying weird tech gizmos isn’t particularly relevant to me, as I’m notoriously frugal, and I also spend most of my digital time on my laptop. But it occurs to me that even my laptop exploits can sometimes be considered mere hedonism if there isn’t some intention of sharing my discoveries. That is to say, the various apps I test out for my own purposes and the solutions to random problems I have with Windows might be worth talking about, especially if they can make someone else’s life easier. I don’t intend to become Paul Thurrott or anything, but I think it would be interesting to share random tips I might come across.

So that’s the idea at the moment. Since I’m just not sure I can wait any longer, I’ve been working on a few other blog posts which I'll hopefully share within the next week or so: one on golf, one on the relationship between karma and crutches, and one on rethinking my use of Facebook. I can also think of a couple tech-related blog posts I could write fairly efficiently: one on a little-known-but-pesky Windows Vista bug I investigated a few years ago, and one on my varied opinions of Windows 8 and 8.1. Looking forward to seeing where this goes!

"The Right Man For the Job": A Short Story

In Grade 11 English class, we were shown this photo, without being told who the subject of the photo was. We had to imagine who he might have been, and write about him, relating his story to our interests in some way. This is who I made him.

It's certainly the best piece of fiction I've ever written, though of course that's not saying much since I tend to stick to non-fiction. Here it is, with a couple minor word changes:

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THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB
By Jonathan Van Dusen

EDINBURGH, 1894.

Click, tap, clack, thwump. Click, tap, clack, thwump. Click, tap, clack, thwump.

It was a sound that grew monotonous, but Reynolds knew that the process took patience. He watched the gears turn, the steel output rods dancing up and down to the mechanical beat, and the stack of punch cards that the analytical engine swallowed one by one. He crinkled his nose as he watched the translucent puffs of steam fly out the window into the Victorian winter.

It had been two weeks since his consultation with the local Science Council. His analytical engine was the sort of phenomenon they had only heard about in their yearly conferences in London, when Charles Babbage had introduced his machine, and Ada Lovelace her visions for this invention. But Babbage had been dead for decades now, and his visions for these mechanical mathematical machines had never been truly realized.

This is where Ronald Reynolds came in. He had spent thirty years of his life teaching logic and mathematics, which led to an interest in these analytical engines. His machine was but his hobby, something that he worked on simultaneously with the garden behind his city house. He saw logic as another aspect of the beauty he experienced in this garden, and it was this rustic nature that him from shaving a beard that was turning increasingly grey, and kept him in the sort of unpretentious clothes one would not expect from someone in the Edinburgh city centre.

The Council had said they would send a carriage to transport him to their weekly lunchtime meeting. Noticing on his pocket watch that the time was growing nearer for his departure, Reynolds placed a piece of plywood in the machine’s gears to lock them, and left the house. The carriage arrived at exactly the specified time, and took him to the building the Council had been renting. He was escorted upstairs to their spacious boardroom, where twelve men, seated at a long oak table, were regarding him with a mix of curiosity and excitement.

“Good day, Mr. Reynolds,” came the greeting from a smiling, portly man at the head of the table. It was Higgins, their leader, who had taken an interest in Reynolds' work due to an acquaintance with Babbage himself. He motioned for Reynolds to sit across from him, at the other end.

“We have reviewed your application for a grant. We recognise the usefulness of your discoveries, the potential uses by the military. To this end” – Reynolds shifted nervously in his chair as Higgins began to smile – “we are prepared to invest £5000 in this project.”

Reynolds grinned. “My deepest thanks, gentlemen! I am convinced that this will be of benefit to us all.”

“As are we,” nodded Higgins, who then took a sip of his tea. “However, our grant comes with a condition. Mr. Burton?” He pointed to another seated man.

The young man named Burton stood and nodded towards Reynolds, smiling.

Higgins continued. “Mr. Burton’s current field of study is that of electricity. We assume you are familiar with, for instance, the current studies of Edison and Bell?”

Reynolds gave a small sigh and nodded. He was familiar with the field and found it intriguing, but he had always wondered if such applications would ever truly enter the mainstream. After all, no households owned telegraphs, did they?

“Our friend Mr. Burton is experimenting with such things, and is spending a particular amount of time on the concept for an electric version of your math machine.”

Reynolds raised his eyebrows as Burton, still standing, cleared his throat.

“My training lies in electricity, Mr. Reynolds, and yours in mathematics. We have seen many advances in electricity lately, and we have come to the decision that much of the coming century will involve further advances, possibly to the demise of the mechanical trades within the next few decades. But with electricity, the possibilities are endless. Imagine your logic, contained inside a box the size of a loaf of bread!”

Higgins regained control. “As such, we will give you the grant on the condition that you use your logic skills and experience to aid Mr. Burton with his research; a fusion of sorts between the two areas of study.”

Reynolds leaned back in the padded chair and took a slow drink of tea. It was an avenue he had never considered and didn’t know how to respond to. He would have been perfectly content, oh yes, to use a grant on his beloved apparatus, and then present it to interested clients. He frowned slightly, all eyes on him, as he wondered if it was possible to teach an old scholar new tricks.

He sat up slowly. “It if is possible, gentlemen, would you grant me some more time to consider this proposal?”

Higgins took a look around the table, his face showing both disappointment and irritation. “Very well. You have until our meeting next week to reach a decision.”

Reynolds stood up, put on his coat, and said thank-you. He used the carriage ride home as a chance to gather his thoughts. As they approached the house, however, he could identify the bitter smells of a steam engine, but a smell far stronger than he was accustomed to. Minutes passed, and he noticed the wafts of not just steam, but smoke rising from a corner of his house.

He realised his mistake at once: prior to leaving, he had locked the machine’s gears in place, but had never turned off the steam engine. The machine had overheated, and he entered the workshop to find a warped rack of steel, with gears fused together, and ashes for punch cards.

The fabled analytical machine, the object of Reynolds’ devotion, was no longer.

But its successor was needed, and as Ronald Reynolds sorted through his surviving notes on the fundamentals of logic, he realized that he was still the man for the job.

---

The Right Man For the Job by Jonathan Van Dusen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Run XP programs within Windows 7!

Did I just say that Paul Thurrott was getting on my nerves?

I take it back.

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/04/24/secret-no-more-revealing-virtual-windows-xp-for-windows-7.aspx

I just wish it weren't limited to the higher-end versions. But on the other hand, how many home users are willing to set up a Virtual PC in order to prevent old programs from crashing? Either way, this is seriously awesome.

Why I don't use Twitter...

I've started reading ZDNet (partly because Paul Thurrott has been getting on my nerves lately). Found this article today: this basically sums up why I've never actually joined Twitter, and I'm glad I'm not alone in feeling this way.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=1540

Note to Facebook: “Don’t let the whiners get you down, but…”

My feedback to Facebook, word-for-word:

I don't mind the new home page, but I am still respectfully concerned about a few things.

1. The new style for Wall posts -- they now look far too much like status messages. Were a person to change their status and then write on their own wall, the two events would look almost exactly the same.

2. "Recent Activities" seem to be arranged illogically, grouping them between Wall posts. It made more sense when everything was arranged chronologically, and when each Activity had its own date and time by default.

3. The new advertisement sidebar makes the pages too wide for a 1024x768 monitor. I could be wrong, but this is still the dominant monitor resolution.

I don’t really like this week’s redesign that much, but (a) it won’t cause me to stop using Facebook in protest, (b) it’s not even worth whining over, and (c) it’s not as major as the last upgrade, the “New Facebook” we received over the summer. As I said in a status message, technology evolves. (Would you like it if your new iPod classic didn’t support photos or videos?)

That said, I do think this Facebook is too much like Twitter, and unlike the New Facebook, I actually dislike it overall. Here’s the thing, though. With the New Facebook, we had a lengthy chance to test it before it was released. With this one, you really had to be paying attention to know it was going to happen (Facebook announced it on their blog weeks ago), and only then would you even have the chance to provide feedback. (I suppose this could be compared to the development cycles of Windows Vista and Windows 7, respectively!)

When the New Facebook was in beta, I sent Facebook feedback then too, suggesting that profiles should have ways to filter Wall posts from actions, and reminding them that each profile should have a link to your Wall-to-Wall with the person, instead of only showing this link on Wall posts themselves. Both of these features were eventually implemented, or in the case of the Wall-to-Wall link, re-implemented. Hopefully Facebook will take feedback as seriously this time around.

 

P.S. – Yes, I am blogging again! I seem to have more time for it nowadays. Hopefully my next blog post won’t take seven months. Probably closer to seven days this time around.

Well...

Those promised blog posts didn't really happen.

Stupid hard drive failure.

Not to make excuses, but our laptop's hard drive crashed about a week ago. For the curious, I usually spend the first week of a vacation to "exhale" whatever stresses I might have accumulated, and then use the second to "get to work", whatever that means given the circumstances. Sometimes it's doing homework. Sometimes, as here, it's stuff that I assign myself.

So with a defunct laptop, and, counting a trip to the library, only one chance at Internet until today (we're back in Sarnia now), I couldn't write the blog entries, or accomplish the other computer-based goals I had set for myself for the trip (i.e., mixing some audio, cleaning out my Inbox, etc). And it's unlikely these will get accomplished during the next week too, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Not like anyone was eagerly waiting for the blog entries anyway. Or that anyone will even read this sentence. Ah well.

P.S. If anyone's curious, the computer that crashed was five years old, ran XP, had a mere 128 MB of RAM, and -- worse yet, perhaps -- 16 gigs of total hard drive space. If anyone can commandeer such a system in 2008, it'd be a nerd like me, but sometimes things fall apart on even the most cautious users. You have been warned. That said, I made a backup before we left, so it's not as bad as it could have been.

P.P.S. Re: the last sentence before the post-script: some comments here would be nice! I suspect that there's at least a couple people reading this. So, in the hopefully-immortal words of Chris Martin, "If you love me, won't you let me know?" I have little free time as it is, and I'm not going to waste it on a thoughtful, insightful blog series if no one's going to read it.

A new experience...

So, I'm on Blogger now. It's mainly because I'm growing increasingly lazier with my website, and, realising that my previous hand-made blog lacked comments, I'm using this instead of coming up with code for a comment engine. Eventually, this page will be integrated into the new version of my website, but I wanted to get a head start since I haven't been blogging in awhile.

More to come soon. Stay tuned.

-Jonathan