FACEBOOK BOON OR BANE?
Most of the essays about Facebook’s being a waste of time have focused on the sheer amountof time spent on it, e.g. “If you check Facebook for 15 minutes each morning, then check it again for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, then add five minutes here and there when you’re at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you will lose at least half a day every week. The amount of time spent on Facebook is not a problem, if the use of time is worthwhile. It is not in that case a “loss” but a gain or at least a breakeven, praxeologically.
The problem with much of the communication that occurs on Facebook is that, while it resembles what occurs in other communication venues, and even seems to be, at first glance, superior in terms of result, the medium has some very serious (but easily pushed to the back of one’s mind) flaws, most of which pertain to the insidiouslyephemeral nature of the medium. What is here today is buried tomorrow, because it’s not completely deleted, it does not trigger the sense of loss and futility that would otherwise occur. You can dig up it would be so costly. It you just probably won’t, because Chinese abroad; down, but from is reminiscent of how don’t entirely stop, Internet traffic the outcry that a total use of those sites without causing embargo would. let’s start with what Facebook But first, is useful for. Facebook is useful for finding long-lost friends and acquaintances. It’s somewhat useful for assembling groups of people (e.g. likers of Facebook fan pages) interested in a topic, and distributing information to them. It’s a good way to distribute images whose copyright is owned by someone else, since the lack of searchability by the general public makes it hard for the copyright owners to catch you (email also has this advantage). It also apparently has algorithms that reduce how often you’re exposed to the same content (e.g. images) posted and re-posted by many different users. Who knows what else its proprietary algorithms do (or how they do it) to help users find stuff that they’re likely to be interested in, and weed out what they are unlikely to be interested in Facebook is designed to be an easy way for procrastinators, or those who have a few idle minutes to fill, to find stimulating material.
There is always something new and entertaining on the feed, and it’s coming from a multitude of diverse sources, rather than being monotonous One does not need to ponder what site goes to Facebook and is presented with whatever content has most immediately been posted. It’s much like surfing TV instead of browsing a magazine rack or bookcase. Likewise, it is designed to provide instant gratification to those who want to be heard. You can post a status and get immediate responses. The site is designed to bias these responses positively (since there is a “like” feature but not a “dislike” feature), fuelling the crack-like addictiveness of this means of obtaining positive feedback The share” feature reduces the workload involved in reposting content and makes people think, ‘Wow, I’m really disseminating my content quickly and virally!” The fact that random people can’t post messages have to be added as friends first, is a prophylactic against but the kinds of vandalism, spam, and other misbehavior that requires people to vigilantly play the role of moderator on wikis and blogs. Facebook lets each person have a venue for personal expression, without requiring him to set up, maintain and publicize a website. In fact, friends will search for and come to him. It can work synergistically with one’s personal website; one can post status updates and create fan pages linking to the website, and one can post on the website links to Facebook profiles, fan pages, etc.
- Also Read : What is Facebook? Why use Facebook?
Compared to email and Yahoo Groups :Facebook makes it possible to create as many different mailing lists as there are users. Each “friend” is a subscriber to the “mailing list” whose content consists of his friend’s status updates The mailing list allows for varying levels of subscription, such as “close friend” or “acquaintance.” Facebook makes it easy to find people with whom you have friends in common and to be trusted by others based on mutual friendships an email from a random person might be overlooked or relegated to the spam folder, or you might not immediately be aware of the person’s significance in your circle of friends. Facebook also makes possible the creation of ad hoc mailing lists, in which com menting subscribes the user to be notified when more comments are added. It would be impractical to ask people to go through the formal of signing up for new email lists or Yahoo groups every time one wanted to start a discussion that would end in a few hours or days. Users get bored with a thread need not unsubscribe when the it simply ends. Sometimes, there is no other substitute for what Facebook provides. If one were to email all of his friends a message, a recipient could hit “Reply all” but this would send a reply not only to fellow commenters but to those who did not express an interest in the thread. Also, email does not give users the ability to more quietly “like” a comment. Compared to blogs Facebook is superior to a blog in that users can post to a user’s wall, essentially creating a new blog post; normally, blogs only allow the owners to post new blog entries, to which readers can comment in response.
Compared to wikis Facebook is superior to a wiki in that wikis are designed to help people monitor their adversaries (e.g. vandals) through the Recent Changes page, while Facebook is designed to help people monitor their friends Wikis generally lack friending features that update them on what their friends are doing; it would be necessary to check the contributions of individual users one by one, except small wikis where Recent Changes is easy to monitor.
DISADVANTAGES OF FACEBOOK
Inefficient searching of private messages The main problem with Facebook is its lack of Even messages aren’t all that easy to search If you’re trying to search your whole mayou can only search by the title of conversation rather than by keyword, as you can with, say, Gmail. You can search each conversation by keyword, if you want, using yourbrowser’s “find” feature, buit’s not as powerful as the kind of search Gmail allow Suppose you have a message with the sentence, “As the ACLU has discussed such laws can be used to censor photoes with political importance. You can’t remember the exact phraseology, but you remember it had the words “ACLU” and “photos”. With Gmail, it would be easy to find by searching your whole mailbox for those two words. With Facebook, you would have to remember which person you had the conversation with, and then have your browser do a “find” by either “ACLU” or “photos (not both), which could bring up all kinds of irrelevant hits.
Inefficient searching of private messages The main problem with Facebook is its lack of Even messages aren’t all that easy to search If you’re trying to search your whole mayou can only search by the title of conversation rather than by keyword, as you can with, say, Gmail. You can search each conversation by keyword, if you want, using yourbrowser’s “find” feature, buit’s not as powerful as the kind of search Gmail allow Suppose you have a message with the sentence, “As the ACLU has discussed such laws can be used to censor photoes with political importance. You can’t remember the exact phraseology, but you remember it had the words “ACLU” and “photos”. With Gmail, it would be easy to find by searching your whole mailbox for those two words. With Facebook, you would have to remember which person you had the conversation with, and then have your browser do a “find” by either “ACLU” or “photos (not both), which could bring up all kinds of irrelevant hits.
- Also Read : How to find Who follow you on Twitter
Difficulty finding old status updates and conversations:
Facebook does give each thread a permanent url, e.g. https://www.facebook.com/Chris.V.Snyder/posts/10202102325020368 for Chris Lyspooner’s post “l have just been asked to sign and post a petition to the government to stop chemtrails You get these urls by clicking on the “Notifications” globe icon and clicking on particular notifications. However, this list is cumbersome to scroll through if you’re trying to find a particular old thread Really, this is similar to the problem that arises with Yahoo Groups, which only lets you search through a few hundred messages at a time, rather than the entire archives of a group. It detracts from the ability to make efficient use of institutional memory. Part of the point of using computers rather than paper for our communications is so that the archives can be easily searched, this takes away from that. Facebook is in some respects worse than paper because Facebook is always burying content that, if it were on paper, you could choose to keep easily accessible allow the creation of talk page archives with permanent URLs and section links. Each revision isn’t a permanent link, assuming the whole deleted. The most insidious aspect of Facebook is that only a little bit a at more, you to incrementally scroll down, which is time consuming, Even private messages Krsrk It is designed to make it hard fo look into.
Facebook does give each thread a permanent url, e.g. https://www.facebook.com/Chris.V.Snyder/posts/10202102325020368 for Chris Lyspooner’s post “l have just been asked to sign and post a petition to the government to stop chemtrails You get these urls by clicking on the “Notifications” globe icon and clicking on particular notifications. However, this list is cumbersome to scroll through if you’re trying to find a particular old thread Really, this is similar to the problem that arises with Yahoo Groups, which only lets you search through a few hundred messages at a time, rather than the entire archives of a group. It detracts from the ability to make efficient use of institutional memory. Part of the point of using computers rather than paper for our communications is so that the archives can be easily searched, this takes away from that. Facebook is in some respects worse than paper because Facebook is always burying content that, if it were on paper, you could choose to keep easily accessible allow the creation of talk page archives with permanent URLs and section links. Each revision isn’t a permanent link, assuming the whole deleted. The most insidious aspect of Facebook is that only a little bit a at more, you to incrementally scroll down, which is time consuming, Even private messages Krsrk It is designed to make it hard fo look into.
You could save those URLs of old convers But will you think to do it, before it beomes easily find them? It’s not like Faceussk has Contributions page like Media Mik’s, that would find stuff based on your own or others’ contribivs It’s wonderful that Facebook can be s venue starting revolutions, but what record will we have of specific conversations that produced thoseHistory is made with the help of Facebook, but she cannot easily use Facebook for research that would prod an accurate, objectively confirmable historical record
Privacy settings :: It does not seem to be any possible to write an app that will periodically downlod at all the messages in Facebook user’s status update. Some users post a lou f interesting statuses, but ones can’t be indexed d Googled the way the be if they were on another website. Were it not for the way Facebook is programmet one could fix that deficiency by downloading the fret and posting the statuses to one’s site. But it does to seem possible to poll the Facebook API for those fees without the user’s keeping his browser open and logo in to the site that integrates with Facebook. Getting feed data requires a short-lived access token that has be frequently renewed. It seems like Facebook wants tightly control this data. The API does not seem as as it used to be back in the days of open Book
Censorship:: Facebook censors content based America’s prudish standards. Thus, certain photograph that might offend some people cannot be posted there.
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