Thursday, October 7, 2010

Habemus cohors

Zuckerberg and company labored mightily over the last two months, and, with a puff of white smoke rising above Silicon Valley, announced the latest Facebook "advance" in the high-schoolization of the world: We Have Groups ! Wow. At last, we can create and enforce a hierarchy of friends and acquaintances--just like when we were 15-- so that not just anyone can find out whether we butter our popcorn, among other data critical to the advancement of civilization. "Please please please, Henry, I promise to flame MaryLou online if you let me into your group......"

Have been migrating more of my online time to following Twitter feeds and especially the retweets and who is being followed by friends and thinkers/writers I admire. This is not to deny the extraordinary power of the vast social networking media apparatus. Just that I often grow weary of the constant drumbeat of self promotion and big ideas crammed into 12-word bits and phrases. Am I a living anachronism in a 21st century world? Yeah, probably.....

1 comment:

  1. OK, I found you on Twitter too but if you only follow 12 people how do you use it as an RSS feed? And how is twitter different from FB? I think the groups thing on FB is interesting if you believe Zuckerberg has vision about how people want to communicate. But even he is quoted as saying he only expects about 10-15% to use the groups function. Nothing beats a good dinner party with interesting people particularly if someone else is cooking.

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