How is that for timing? The day after last rant about the way Facebook sends messages by email (“You have a message! I know it! You Don’t! But I wont tell you unless you visit me and get sucked into my vortex! hahahaha” might that be McLuhan on the side, “the message is not the message”??), apparently they changed their ways, and now include the message in the email.
Hallelujah? Hardly.
Since I turned all notifications off, my inbox has been mostly clean of FaceGunk.
Mostly.
I am still getting notifications of these “X-me” items, although I dont have the application installed, and thus I cannot dictate its messaging. This use of email to me just reeks of the worthlessness of the message. “Click here to see the message’!!!! Click here, Facebook, I got a message for ya.
Now this perhaps angry, growling post is mostly in jest, and while I am not putting great efforts of time or screen time to Facebook, in no way do I dismiss others that do (heck, I have good friends that like to watch golf on TV, I don’t hold that against them 😉 nor do I discount there are good things in Facebook.
But not all new social tech is necessarily good tech for all. And for me, the constructs of it, the stinginess of the way it manages content (oh it will draw your content in from the rest of the web, will it give back out? Nah. Does it have an creative commons license for stuff you stick in it? Nah. Is the content widely available as RSS? Nope, no singles ads appear in those things. Does it ask you to re-upload to itself media you have stored elsewhere on the web? You betcha) is what gets to me.
It just does not feel right. It may change. I may change. The moon may crash into the Pacific. Who knows?
But I have a new strategy to deal with concerns over privacy. First of all, I clamped down the access to information, restricted it to friends, and dumped most of the riff raf of applications that had piled up even in my minimal use.
Then I went more devious.
I started lying.
My birthdate is now April 1 😉
Heck, I may even have a PhD from Harvard form 1935 (way before that birthday).
I may have once worked as CEO of Microsoft.
I own a mansion in Beverly Hills.
It really does not matter to me.
Well it might, if some future employer starts sniffing around my background. But I’m not sure if I want to work for that outfit….
It ought to be so ridiculous that it is obvious My Facebook Life is a Lie. You can send me a message, but only if the message is the message, not a message to go somewhere else to get the message.
Avast, ye facebook Mongers!
