Good for Mark Zuckerberg! Facebook still sucks, though…
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) December 2, 2015
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And that’s all I’ve got to say about Zuckerberg…
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Good for Mark Zuckerberg! Facebook still sucks, though…
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) December 2, 2015
Oh, all right — I’ll say a little more…
First, Facebook doesn’t totally suck. It’s a great way of sharing photos with family and close friends. And it’s an essential part of any social media strategy (putting on my ADCO hat), mainly because that’s where the biggest audience is. Most people like Facebook way more than I do, so if you want to reach them, you have to go to there. Twitter scares them, the way it scares Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, so you have to go to their “safe space” to find them, and that’s Facebook.
Saying “Facebook sucks” is like saying “the phone company sucks” 50 years ago. You’re talking about something that you can’t do without; you have no choice. So it’s just blowing off steam.
And in this case, it’s also reaching for a cheap laugh. I don’t usually use the word “suck;” it just struck me, in this incidence, as funnier than “stinks,” or “I still don’t like Facebook as much as Twitter.”
As for Zuckerberg — what he’s doing here really blows the mind.
I remember, back when I was attending Southern Baptist Sunday school in Bennettsville when I was a kid, hearing stories about some rich guy out in Texas or somewhere who turned tithing on its head. He gave away 90 percent of what he made, and just kept 10. (An earthly moral of the story was that he still prospered; he wasn’t really doing without, so go and do likewise, folks.)
Well, it sounds like Zuckerberg is putting that guy in the shade. So, kudos.
Yep, having a child can change you…
Isn’t that about the time Bill Gates decided to get all charitable? Early on, he was derided for not being philanthropic, but sometime after he married Melinda, they started doing wonderful things like trying to eradicate polio and malaria…
My biggest problem with Facebook is a problem with ME. I got off on the wrong foot with it.
When I got laid off from the paper I had a Facebook account, but wasn’t really using it. Then Tim Kelly persuaded me that FB and Twitter could help me promote my blog, so I plunged into both in a big way — failing to understand the essential difference between them.
Since the point was to promote my blog, I said “yes” to every friend request. The more connections, the better, right? And eventually I ended up with more than 1,000 — most of which I either didn’t know at all or knew only slightly.
And that’s just not what Facebook is for.
A number of times I’ve resolved to set up a separate blog account on FB, and try to migrate all but kin and really, really close friends over to it. But I’ve never been exactly sure how to carry out that maneuver smoothly without a lot of hurt feelings and such. It’s like “the roommate swap” on “Seinfeld.” It can’t be done, my friend….
So I endure the situation I have, and grumble…
Anne Postic could probably help you sort it out.
Good for Mark and his wife. Hopefully their generosity will be put to good use. As for giving 99% away by forming a charitable organization, $450 million is not a bad number to live on.
I could scrape by on it.
I like Facebook, but I curate it. I treat it as a giant Rolodex of contacts (people don’t change emails as often as they used to, but they still do), and follow only those who amuse me and don’t harsh my mellow, and use it as a feed for various news sources–The Atlantic posts a steady stream of archived and current pieces that are relevant–so much so that I even subscribed again, after not doing so for years. My hometown has a few groups that are fun, too.
Like.
Some people like an echo chamber.
Well, that’s fine, as long as it’s about staying in touch with friends and distant family.
But beyond that, it’s just not the kind of interaction I’m looking for.
I need to do something about these “safe spaces” that some students expect for themselves. What an appalling concept! How long can you hang with people who say, “Yes! That’s what I think” to everything you say without your mind rotting?
Of course, one of my associate editors used to say I SORT OF had that as editorial page editor. We always had lively discussions, but she claimed that in the end, we always did what I wanted. Which isn’t exactly true. But even if she were right, we had the stimulation of the argument beforehand.
And in the end… this is how it would work: I’d participate in the many-sided debate, and at the end we had to come up with something to say around which we could form consensus — not that everybody’d be happy, but that everybody could live with it, and then fight another day.
From listening to everyone, I would form that consensus position in my mind, and when it was time to move on, I’d say, “OK, here’s what we’ll say,” and I’d sketch out a position that was strong and direct and take all the points around the table into consideration, while the person who would write it would take notes, then go write it.
The colleague I mention saw that as doing what Brad wanted. I saw it as me articulating what the group had said. I seldom got any arguments at that point, and this was not a shy group, so I must have represented their arguments fairly well in formulating the eventual position…
That was the essence of what I did as EPE — that, and overseeing the process of getting the stuff into the paper. Writing and editing were sort of incidental to that.
When I was job-hunting, people thought of me as a writer or editor. I tried explaining what I was really good at, which was essentially leading a team of smart people in formulating and articulating policy for a large institution regarding the most controversial subjects of the day… doing two or three new policies every day.
There wasn’t really a market for that. When people imagined how I could help them, it was always in terms of writing press releases or something. Which is what I did at the Memphis State press office when I was 20 years old.
Frustrating…
I do not enjoy pointless arguments with people who will never change their minds. There was a meme a few days ago that was a pie chart. The key was blue for “% of people who change their opinion based on what someone else posts,” yellow for “% of posters whose opinions are changed by comments they receive, and red was “% of people just pissed off.” The chart was an all red disk.
I do like to find out that everybody around me isn’t a right wing Fox News fan.