It might comfort you to know that what you are describing has been around much longer than you'd think, in some form or another. The cartoonist Randall Munroe wrote this which I believe is addressing your point:
https://xkcd.com/1227/

Here is a discussion of the same cartoon:
http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1227:_The_Pace_of_Modern_Life

Is this how you currently feel, at least nearly?

Thanks for sharing but not really. Like I mentioned - I haven't used the platform for about 3 years now and don't see the point to having something that is 'linked' to me via other people freely available to anyone who wants to look.

Interesting, but if you are largely closing your account due to disuse, why the PSA?

PSA?

Public Service Announcement. Meaning why did you want to inform this community?

In case they want to qrite him a letter, send him an email or call or text?

write*

I do use Facebook, and on occasion get "Events" invites locally that appear before a smail mail invite to the same event. - I object to the publication by FB of dates of birth & have warned "Family" members on FB about it. - FB did ban one acquaintance's "membership" or whatever it is; he had some sort of radical idea that he could post his own opinions. He's a published playwright & mebbe has some reason to object to drama criticism, which in the Internet age is a dead issue. We are now all critics. And that's boring and takes time. And FB - Betty White on SNL had it right; plus a "Poke", is that worthy of post-Age of Aquarius? Seriously, why the need to see your "Friend" face up in vomit drunk as a skunk in the frat house?

Having never joined, my impression was that Facebook made it nearly impossible to actually quit. Probably 5 years ago, a coworker told me that he had come across data showing that a massive percentage of their claimed members had not logged in in the previous 6 months and described at some length the amount of time and energy it had taken him to delete his account. Admittedly, I have been waiting for some time to see what happens when companies that do not really make that much money suddenly transition to market capitalizations more in line with their rather minimal actual earnings. Given that one of my closest friends is a relatively high ranking employee within Amazon for whom stock options represent the preponderance of his assets, my interest in more intellectual curiosity than malice or envy.

I made the conscious decision at the bleeding edge of digital culture that I wished to avoid the kind of socializing that I predicted would be spawned by a service called Friendster, which I believe was three generations before Facebook within that realm.

That is very interesting decision, gopher. Did you try Friendster and dislike that style of community, or someother reason?

I believe that I made a pretty accurate prediction of what the nature of such socializing would be.

Huh. Different from the socializing you do here? I only ask because my Facebook interactions are not that unlike the forum posts here, some inane, but many are thought provoking, intelligent conversations. Perhaps you are discussing different part of the community than I participate in.

+1 just for using my favorite "archaic" word, whilst.

Now that I finished your post, you should know that email and phone calls are monitored by far worse than "big data". They are monitored by "big brother" for far more nefarious purposes than selling you crap you didn't know you wanted nor needed and they do it under the guise of "national security" and "the public good".

Gopher, Amazon and facebook are very different types of entities. Their only similarity is their online only presence to their customers. But Amazon sells products of both and digital and real nature where as Facebooks only product is it's social networking service which is supported through ad revenue. Two very different beasts indeed. One sells bus tickets you can use to visit friends and the other sells actual cars (best analogy I could think of).

I never created any fb account and the reason is that I dislike having to produce content for the sole purpose of satisfying my friends and family in order to improve their image of myself. People anyhow only show an glamorous fasade. Name it "fasadebook" instead. If I am to produce content is has to be to satisfy myself, my interests and my own hobbies.

I occasionally talk with my high school friends via facebook, when we don't feel like using wechat.

Other than that facebook is just a tool I use to sort of keep track of acquaintances.

*facade
Why do you 'have' to produce content? What part of merely having an account forces you to go out of your way to post things?

I primarily use Facebook for the messaging service, especially group chats. It's just more convenient than dedicated applications, given that most of them require actively convincing all the friends I want to talk to regularly to 'buy in'. Think the last thing I actually posted was some time last year, noting I'd be moving across the country for an indeterminate period.

Far cry from what I originally signed up for, which was entirely about seeing events happening around college, or with clubs. But, usage evolves over time, as did the site itself. Can't say I approve of all of the changes, especially the ones that push over-sharing and restrict privacy and security, but it's still not that difficult to just not post any info you're concerned about posting...

* façade

@Caerus.....the pressure to over-share into the ether....the labeling of near strangers as "friends"....the "communal"-izing of certain aspects of interactions....the quasi-public cataloging of social ecosystems....the automating of maintaining social illusions of real connection, to name but a few.

@YCHTT.....each firm has an enterprise value divided by EBITDA over 35. The respective figures are not that far apart at 35.5 and 37.9. They both issue stock as a substitute for wage costs. While there was efforts to account for these costs, the methods are imperfect and somewhat reduce the wage costs that appear on their balance sheets. Amazon probably has a greater chance of imploding that Facebook as it has essentially never made any money and is actually making less money than it did a decade ago. Amazon also plays all sorts of games with how it books infrastructure costs. I was stunned the last time they missed their minuscule earnings targets and they said "well, but" and pointed to growth in their "Web Services" business. AWS is almost a textbook example of a commodity business destined to see profit margins collapsing to zero. The only possible advantage that Amazon could have would be in capital costs driven by an inflated stock price, but even there equipment will have to be replaced. When you are bragging about revenue growth in a business line that can only ever be a low ROI capital sink, then you have problems. As an exercise in sociology, employees at Amazon (and I presume at Facebook) constantly compare their stock grants without much discussing their actual wage income, so what would happen to both morale and the cost structure if the stock price stopped levitating?

Gopher, I think I was trying echo Mouse's sentiments. There is no obligation to over share. Communal-ized interaction, if I understand you, is exactly what we are doing here, and is a positive point. Your third point, about a quasi-public catalog, I am not sure I understand. And lastly, the social illusion will always perpetuate, regardless of its state of automation.

I actually never post anything on fb, except for a new profile picture once a year. I use it mainly to communicate with friends who don't have whatsapp (though that belongs to fb too) and to find people I met while travelling, on festivals or parties to stay in touch with them. Another important feature is seeing which events are going to happen in my area. Without that, I'd miss a lot (one could debate that point of course, but that's how I feel).
Soo, fb for me is mainly a tool to extract information that I want/need, or info other want about me. Works fine, won't quit it anytime soon I guess.

@ Caerus.....(1) I am quite able to resist the pressure to over share, but that does not change the fact that that pressure is a defining aspect of the thing in itself; (2) I disagree as this interaction is topical rather than communal; (3) I interact with you if I choose to interact with you, and my interacting with you does not imply that I give a flying rat's ass about someone else you happen to know nor should it; (4) if you are claiming that this does not matter, then I disagree profoundly (and the social science actually backs me up to a degree).

Gopher , 0) I want clarify this list format. Because of asynchronous method of communication, you are able to pose multiple points, which each require a separate answer. I am genuinely interested in your view on the matter, not simply trying to bury your points in a wall of response. 1) I have no doubt that you can resist such an urge. In fact, I would assume anyone can. It is only that some chose to not resist the urge. The pressure inherent in the thing is not, in my opinion, a good enough reason for me to shun it, as I am confident I can avoid such temptation, as others have noted. 2) it would appear that I misunderstand what you mean by Communalized communication. Could you please clarify. 3) I still do not understand what you mean by a quasi-catalog. Are you referring to the software attempting to increase your by suggesting "friends" to add? (3.1) as a note, I have no problem with the watering down of the word friend. As I understand it, such a title Carey's a great deal of weight in some other languages, but, because we speak living languages, the meanings of words is bound to change over time. (4) my claim was not that it does matter, but rather that is the natural course of things: when something is difficult to do, we devise a means to make it easier, even if that device dilutes our understanding of the thing in the first place. That said, this is simply a very general understanding applied to a very specific instance. I would love to hear more about the social science you are referencing.

@Caerus....I can resist the pressure to hand money over to a performer at a strip club; however, the pressure to hand money over to such a performer is the defining aspect of a strip club. In general, I believe that my responses are clear in their meaning and do not see manners of further clarifying that are worth the effort involved. But I will say that if you "have no problem" with redefining down words like "love", "friendship" and "family", then there are few things we can productively discuss in depth on this topic or in fact many others. Perhaps you are who Senator Moynihan warned me about. :oP

Is that a straw man and an ad hominem in one response? My, you must really be done with this conversation.

The pressure to hand over money is not, in my opinion, a good enough reason for me to shun strip clubs. However, their overall lack of any other appeal has caused me to simply not go, as it offers nothing I need or want. Casinos have the exact same pressure to hand over money inherently built in, and I happily attend such places, because there are things there I want. If you are going to put up straw-men, let them be at least a little more sturdy.

I am not advocating throwing out the preconceived meaning of those words, more like state that without context they are worthless alone and the software is defining a new context.there is nothing wrong with having different contexts. Who is in your Family? your mother? Almost certainly. Daughter? Sure. Great-Great-Great Grandfather? well I wasn't thinking about him but yeah. Your step-child from your deceased ex-wife that lives in your house? Your grandma's cousin's daughter that you only see at weddings and funerals (your second cousin once removed)? Without context, I have no idea if you mean 5-10 people or hundreads. That is just "family". Imagine if we look at how you love pizza verses how you love a child?

I daresay you are quite correct, if you assume you context is unversal and words like "friend, "family" and "love" always mean the same thing, I also doubt we can have a meaningful conversation.

[all of the above said with the same tongue-in-cheek humor that I assumed was in gopher's statement]

The recognition of unbridgeable differences in premises (which you explicitly acknowledge) is not an ad hominem attack. You label a construction a "straw man" argument and then essentially agree with.

A straw-man argument, when properly constructed I'd is an argument that you can't help but agree with. It's problem is with relevance. I agree that that there is no reason to go to strip clubs, but that has no connection to Facebook, regardless of how you frame it. My response was not but another straw-man, because Casinos also have no connection with Facebook, but do love a good straw-man argument.

I will admit that the ad hominem might have been misidentified. I don't know quite enough about Senator Moynihan to know whether or not being one of "those people" that he warned about was a personal attack or not. If it wasn't, I stand corrected, and withdraw the statement about the ad hominem.

I haven't had this much fun since college!

Your application of the label "straw man" is fallacious. You were claiming that the central aspect of a thing was peripheral to its nature. One can go to strip clubs for the free breakfast buffet but that does not change the defining aspect of what a strip club is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SesIRc7Agso

Moynihan is famous as an originator of phrases and in the early 1990s he wrote of "defining deviancy down". It had nothing to do with the substance and was just a joke about language.

It would still be a strip club if no money changed hands; thus the transaction cannot be the defining feature. Attempting to assert that it is is at minimum fallacious, if not deliberately disingenuous - completely aside from if such an argument constitutes a straw man or not.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding something, but a Straw-man Argument is an argument where you replace your opponent's point with a similar (but different) point that is easier to refute. In theses cases, the point being replaced is the legitimacy of facebook based on an aspect of it's nature. Your point (strip club) is easy to defeat because there is no other legitimate reason to attend a strip club except /entertainment/ (and and food, I suppose). Those are not good enough reasons for me to go to a strip club (and apparently you). In fact, if those things were available without the pressure to hand over money top performers, I would probably still not go. Even without the perceived negative, there are not enough positives to draw me.

My counter example, (Casino) has enough positives to draw me (magic shows, Slot machines, Blackjack) all of these things I happily participate in with or without the pressure inherent.

But neither of these actually address the matter of Facebook, which is why they are straw-men. If examine in the light of our arguments, however, it would appear that you are saying the inherent pressure to overshare on facebook (or friendster, our initial discussion) invalidates any usefulness for facebook. My responses is that that pressure must be viewed in conjunction with the other benefits gain by the software and only to the extent that that pressure has an effect. Facebook does allow me to easily contact old friend who I would otherwise be unable to contact due to lost/changed numbers, Allows me to play games, and is a handy reminder to myself of important dates in my past (Updating my rèsumè, I have often used my facebook account to remember when i left certain jobs). Yes, I can use other solutions to achieve these goods, but I find the minimal cost of a little pressure well worth the gain. Perhaps you are saying that any such gain could never, for yourself, out weigh the cost of that presure? If that is the case, I wonder why you value the pressure so highly.

Re: Moynihan, I then apologize. My ignorance got the best of me. And that you for the read. I haven't had a chance yet to read all of it, but so far it is facinating... "Deviant persons can be said to supply needed services to society." Interesting. I haven't actually made it to his response, just simple through his summary of a few points others have made. I am looking forward to it.

And *thank* you for the read.

I really should proofread before hitting send... ↑ That was just riddled with grammatical errors.

@mouse....If you read closely both what I wrote and what you wrote, you should be able to recognize that you have shifted what I said in precisely the manner that one does to create a straw man. Your interactions with a waitress at a restaurant (in the US) can occur without you leaving a tip but not without the pressure to leave a tip.

@Caerus....You frequent casinos in which you can enjoy Blackjack and slot machines without parting with money? Moynihan was the great Cassandra of American political life. By the time he died, he was practically introduced to audiences as the man who was always right about what was coming, and he still couldn't get people to listen to him about things that needed to be tackled.

@Gopher, no I don't frequent Casinos without parting with money, but that is a cost I am willing to pay to attend. You can play blackjack and Slot machines without losing money. In fact, my grandmother has one of those handheld games in every bathroom at her house. It is because I enjoy those benefits that I attend casinos in spite of that cost, as it is a great place to find such benefits.

So let us leave our Straw men at home and come to the matter at hand. with regard to Facebook, "Yes, I can use other solutions to achieve these goods, but I find the minimal cost of a little pressure well worth the gain. Perhaps you are saying that any such gain could never, for yourself, out weigh the cost of that pressure? If that is the case, I wonder why you value the pressure so highly."

I find it interesting that whenever Gopher participates in a conversation, regardless of what the originally conversation was about, it rapidly turns into an extremely serious and even slightly combative exchange.

I shall hereby call this the "Gopher Phenomenon". Please notify me of any exceptions to this.