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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Spokane Public Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In
computer news this week
02/22/2012 My
thoughts on the upcoming Facebook IPO
I
don’t have a Facebook page, and I don’t want one. I find my own
private email is fine for me to communicate to my circle of friends things I
am doing, projects I’m working on, places I’ve been, and plans
for the future. I’ve had a web page for my business since the late
1990’s. Some
people are amazed that I don’t have a Facebook page – how could I
possibly exist without one; how could I not want to tell the world every
smallest item of my life that I am doing or thinking; how could I not want to
have a friend list in the hundreds or thousands; how can I have any semblance
of a social life without a Facebook page. But I’m doing quite well
enough without one, thank you. Back
in the 1990’s when AOL was the biggest online service and before the
internet really took off, AOL had the equivalent of a Facebook type area, and
there were probably millions of people who had one of the first social media
pages. When the internet really took off, Myspace emerged as one of the
biggest social media pages, and then Facebook eclipsed Myspace. And
I believe something will eclipse Facebook; it’s just the nature of the
PC world. There’s always something bigger and better and trendier with
more features, and people will flock to the new technology. Google
has already attempted a coup on facebook with Google’s equivalent of a
social media site, and Google has many more revenue streams than facebook. Social networking has its supporters and its critics. I’ve already reviewed a couple books on Raw Bytes from the critics; The
Dumbest generation – How the Digital Age Stupefies young Americans
and jeopardizes our future, by Mark Bauerlein - a
professor of English at Emory university, His thesis is that young Americans
today have less knowledge and lower literacy than any generation before,
despite overwhelming advances in access to information via the internet. His findings are that we are facing an
intellectual crisis as the current generation is drastically uniformed about
basic scientific, political and historical facts. Instead of using the
internet as a source of information, they are using the internet for
self-absorbed social networking, and aren’t digesting knowledge online.
The Cult of the Amateur – How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture - by Andrew Keen http://thecultoftheamateur.com/, how amateurism is celebrated, and how anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video, or change an entry on Wikipedia – and the distinction between trained expert and uniformed amateurs has become dangerously blurred. Andrew is coming out with a new book this May - Digital Vertigo, in which he presents today’s social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution, and argues that the social media transformation is weakening, disorienting and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age. The tragic paradox of life in the social media age, Keen says, is the incompatibility between our internet longings for community and friendship and our equally powerful desire for online individual freedom. By exposing the shallow core of social networks, Andrew Keen shows us that the more electronically connected we become, the lonelier and less powerful we seem to be. For Raw Bytes, this
is Frank Delaney and Facebook Free I’ll Be …. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2012 MTA Micro Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbxmenu.html (509)624-7230 |
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