Sunday, November 15, 2020

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

 I know I've said this before, but as annoyed and terrified as I am of facebook, I truly loathe twitter, everything about it, and I loathe it much more than I hate facebook. It's not that facebook isn't evil, I mean, come on, but on facebook, at least there's room for expansion and thought for people who want to use it, and even if it gets heated, there's at least a social contract to prevent it from going code:red on every disagreement among people who go anywhere from loving each other to at very least kindasorta tolerating each other out of some constrictions of the social contract. The danger of facebook is its confirmation bias, and the confirmation bias is only possible because facebook can in fact generate a sense of community, but on twitter, the whole point is simplicity and concision. You can't get to know the poster except through the brightest primary colors, and because you can't get to know them, the postings only encourage opposition. On facebook you can make friends, on twitter, you only find allies. People say that facebook is terrible because of how it's run, but that, in fact, is the whole point of why it's better than twitter. On facebook, there's no crackdowns, and if there were, it would at least be a better format than this. On twitter, there's always crackdowns, and it's still that terrible!

1 comment:

  1. Absolutely! Which is why I continue to find resisting the supposed lure of Twitter so easy. I'm a big fan of nuance (which, of course, links into your recent middle-of-the-night post about grammar and spelling*), and while there's precious little scope for nuance on Facebook, there's absolutely none when you're constricted by a risible character limit.

    Nuance is, of course, deeply unfashionable at the minute, but the real chicken/egg conundrum there is: what made it so? Twitter itself? Or was it already unfashionable, thereby making the rise of Twitter possible?

    * My own circumstances (editor by trade; English teacher father) are another reason why I'm a big fan of that.

    ReplyDelete