Facebook Friends Without Benefits (broken heart) and Other Newsfeeds
You have a secret. You are a masochist. You were feeling down on yourself and so you checked the Facebook profiles of the last three people you have been involved with. Kendra Robinson wrote on Nick Patterson’s wall. Sure, no big deal, right? But, then why is Kendra’s profile picture of her and Nick? And, if you scroll down further, why did Nick post a picture of the two of them when he has never posted any of ...
I Facebook, Therefore I Am
Last month I committed social suicide. I deleted my Facebook account. With no small sense of irony, I went to see The Social Network shortly after. What struck me about the film wasn’t the portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg’s lack of social skills (funny, for a guy who now runs our social lives), the speed of his success, or even how Justin Timberlake brought sexy back to hacking. All I could fo...
Insecurity, Creativity, and Superiority
At the end of The Social Network, David Fincher’s film chronicling the creation of the social networking site Facebook, I found myself asking the question, What motivates my own creativity? Why do I feel the need to make or say something meaningful? I know the answer isn’t all benign. Mixed with the joy of creating and communicating are feelings of insecurity and the need to prove my worth. In the film, ingenuity...
Facebook Exodus
From the New York Times: Facebook Exodus. The exodus is not evident from the site's overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing - some of them ostentatiously. Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. H...
Does Professional Journalism Matter Anymore?
A couple of weeks ago, a plane landed on the Hudson River, just a stone's throw from where I was sitting at Space 38|39. I did not learn about it from CNN or MSNBC. I found out about the "Miracle on the Hudson" from Facebook, just minutes after it happened. My friend Peter's status read, "Did a plane really just land on the Hudson?" and I immediately went to work trying to find out what he was talking about. I w...
Broken Windows and Internet Civility
Earlier this year, on my way to work, I opened the latest issue of the New Yorker and was drawn into an article entitled "Friend Game", which covers the MySpace-related suicide of thirteen-year-old Megan Meier. You can read the full article here. You probably read the story and were as outraged as everyone else; Megan was first wooed, then harassed by a fake sixteen-year-old boy whose MySpace profile was set up ...
