

Growing Old on Facebook - 10char
http://clayallsopp.com/posts/mirror-mirror/?

======
tokenadult
The interesting comments posted before mine prompted me to read the whole fine
article kindly submitted here. The article beings with "There's an entire
generation where every photo, message, post, idea between adolescence and
adulthood is cataloged on Facebook." The posting of photos as conveniently as
Facebook allows posting photos is somewhat new (as is home Internet
connections with enough bandwidth to put up with an online service jam full of
photos), but on the whole this doesn't feel new to me.

Maybe Facebook doesn't feel new to me because I am old (born during the
Eisenhower administration, just as the Space Age was beginning). To me,
Facebook in 2012 seems much like AOL in 1998: a huge, dominant force in
Internet interaction among the general public that is already doomed by
fundamental flaws in its business plan. I'm old, and I have seen predictions
come and go over the years, but this is my prediction about Facebook, and I'm
sticking to it: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the
industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that
could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it."

Facebook makes it MORE apparent, if anything, than the earlier forms of online
communication did how selectively people report details about their lives in
online communities. I've known some good friends through online acquaintance,
interspersed with real-world interaction, for twenty years. I'm well aware
that the online picture of any person is incomplete, just as the knowledge of
one person by any one acquaintance is incomplete. I think Facebook provides
some convenience in keeping up with a varied group of Facebook "friends"
including several of my first cousins, one of my children who has grown up and
moved away from home (he was an early adopter of Facebook, and is now largely
tired of it), former co-workers, classmates, current members of the same
professional associations, and so on. It's a lot of fun to see friends from
different phases of my life interact and learn from one another. I've managed
to make my Facebook wall be like a targeted Hacker News: a place where I can
find thoughtful discussion of links I discover while Web-browsing. To me,
that's something well worth growing old with.

The article includes the paragraph: "You can message someone you haven't
spoken with in years, and yet it visually flows right under some unimaginably
unrelated conversation from 2007. And when you realize that exact numerical
gap between the years, it stings a little. Reading how you've changed, how
they've changed, and thinking about everything that didn't happen in-between."
That is the most startling default setting of the Facebook messaging system.
My email inbox, which is sorted strictly by date order, obscures the gaps in
communication I have with some correspondents. (Cleaning out my drafts folder
from time to time discloses those gaps.) But real-world analogies of this are
receiving Christmas cards after a gap of a few years in correspondence, and
the like. The strength of communication in each relationship ebbs and flows,
or so I have observed for more than five decades now.

~~~
notlisted
Totally agree. I've seen several things like this surge and die before.

With the Nov. 2011 edgerank changes, ie forced "close friend" newsfeed, the
one magical thing about FB, which I call _digital osmosis_ \-- ie keeping up
with people without interaction -- has gone the way of the dodo.

I'm planning my escape: Valentines Day 2013 I'm closing my account. Working on
a toolset to host my own timeline, on my own server. May keep a fake account
to access a site here or there and keep up with a few vague acquaintances, but
will stop posting and handing my data over to FB.

FWIW, I find many high quality conversations on Google+ these days since
they've launched their communities (e/g/ big data community, DDD).

Now get off my astroturf ;-)

------
officemonkey
I love it when 20-somethings talk about "growing old."

I'm in my 40s, and I'm pretty much the same person I was in 2007. Same
haircut, same career, and mostly the same friends.

~~~
gregpilling
I am in my 40s also. I have not changed much in the last 5 years, but then
again that is just over 10% of my life. At 25, 5 years represents 20% of your
life and the part of your life where most people change a lot. Perhaps we
should both do something crazy and change our hairstyle for a couple months.
Then we can reminisce later about that crazy period in our forties.

"Youth is wasted on the young" - George Bernard Shaw

~~~
bobbydavid
That quote always makes me uncomfortable. I'm 27. I spend a fair amount of
time desperately trying to uncover what it is I'm wasting my youth on, or else
determining what it is I've already wasted it on.

Hah. Okay, maybe that was an accidental joke.

~~~
DavidAdams
That quote was written specifically to make you feel uncomfortable. Older
people love to quote it, because we all have a catalog of things that we'd
love to go back and relive more fully, or do right the first time, or not do
at all. The cruel irony of it all is that you probably don't know how you're
wasting your youth until you look back on it in retrospect and facepalm.
Sorry.

------
sergiotapia
I have many aunts and married friends on Facebook who upload tons of images of
their kids.

I wonder what plans, if any, Facebook has to reach out to those kids in 10
years time when they are "old enough" (heh) to use Facebook.

Can you imagine having your entire life documented on some website? Pretty
creepy in my opinion. I have to discourage my wife to upload images of our
kids.

~~~
officemonkey
I have a four-year old, and I've actually started thinking about that quite a
bit.

I think an infant has no expectation of privacy. Any decisions regarding a
baby's on-line presence is limited to the parent's common sense.

Now that my son is in pre-school, we're dialing back on his on-line presence.
Pictures on flickr and facebook are being re-categorized to "friends and
family."

As he gets older, we're going to respect his wishes as to what should be made
"public." If he doesn't want the story of the cute thing he did put up on
facebook, we'll honor that request.

I'll also help him navigate being on-line. I know a pre-teen whose parents
won't let him use a Minecraft public server (because of the risk of creepy
douchebags), but a LAN server for him and his buddies is okay.

~~~
samspot
> I think an infant has no expectation of privacy.

This is really funny out of context :)

------
keithpeter
We have photo albums going back 4 and 5 generations. We have postcards sent by
great grandparents and grandparents during the first world war. I can imagine
Neal Stephenson like alternative stories about people falling out when they
come back...

I think that - as often with the digital/Internet thing - it is not
qualitatively _new_ having documents of yourself, but the huge increase in the
_quantity_ of this information and the way it lives _outside your control_.
Same way that mix tapes in the two tape drive days were copyright violation,
but had a considerable time and effort barrier so not too many got made and
they had limited distribution. Digital copying is low effort, and broadcasting
trivial. Hence problems...

PS: I'm 54 and think about Life, Time &c quite often.

------
Wintamute
I'm 32 and Facebook has turned into a nightmare cavalcade of weddings and
other people's children. No more smiling faces, parties or high jinks, just
more wrinkles, more responsibilities, more towing the line.

~~~
acheron
Pictures of my kid are about all I post on Facebook anymore. The constantly
changing privacy settings mean I don't trust it for posting anything
especially interesting, so I've mostly stopped posting at all. Every once in
awhile I put up a kid picture to make relatives etc. happy, but that's
basically my only use case for FB now. Especially since I stopped wanting to
read other people's updates too, when I discovered that many people I know
have moronic political opinions that they feel compelled to share.

So maybe people block my updates because they are tired of seeing my kid, but
I've probably blocked them because I got tired of reading about how Mitt
Romney wants to ban tampons or whatever.

Also, "toeing" and "hijinks".

~~~
graue
Are you familiar with Facebook's FTC settlement over privacy settings?

 _The order requires Facebook to obtain its users’ “affirmative express
consent” before it can override their own privacy settings. For example, if a
user designated certain content to be visible only to “friends,” Facebook
could allow that content to be shared more broadly only after obtaining the
user’s permission._

[https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-
agree...](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-agrees-to-
ftc-settlement-on-privacy.html?_r=1&);

I'm curious whether folks expect this settlement to keep the hijinks in line.
Nothing particularly egregious seems to have happened to privacy settings
since November 2011.

------
da02
"These pristine reflections of our former selves will live on in the tombs of
archived data; they will outlive us."

True. However, from what I have seen, most people don't even care what they
were like before.

The majority of people are too concerned about their idiot kids and mortgages
to contemplate and ponder about life, time, etc. Once you have kids and a
mortgage, I doubt you will even care about backing up clayallsopp.com.

Don't take my word for it:

* the anti-war hippy generation. * the Ayn Rand crowd of the 60s/70s. * the Springsteen/anti-nuclear generation. * the Ron Paul generation.

They are all now (or will be) a bunch of yuppies worried about their
retirement benefits. They have "better" things to do than to ponder about
life, time, etc.

~~~
neebz
I think you are mis-reading the intention of the post.

It's not about caring. It's not that we want to go back and relive the past.
It's more about how you are ready to message someone and some older
conversation from 2007 pops up. It's a weird nostalgic feeling about something
you don't really care about much. But hey it's out there.

~~~
da02
You're right. I went off on a tangent. Apologies to the author. Thanks for
politely pointing that out to me.

------
waitwhatwhoa
This and a few other interesting concerns are up in Delete[1] by Viktor Mayer-
Schönberger.

This is a very interesting book that explains a lot of historical context for
how the digital age differs from what came before. The linked blog post
highlights the temporal aspect of digital memory - that a post from a day ago
is as easily accessible as one from ten years ago.

Perhaps even more important is that because we limit what we post, context
gets completely removed. So many people carefully curate their identity that
the image we see of a person is not only an image from N years ago, but is
also only what N years ago's version of one's self chose to publish to the
web.

We definitely live in interesting times, I would encourage anyone that thinks
on this phenomenon to check out the book.

1\. <http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8981.html>

------
kmfrk
Someone once reminded me of how all our digitally catalogued photos come with
status messages.

I don't know what difference that will make compared to analogue Kodak
moments, but it's very interesting to think about.

Mostly, I'm happy that my childhood photos won't come with horribly-spelt
comments. :)

------
tomrod
There is a way to fix this madness

<http://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674>

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jrabone
Nope. I treat Facebook as a 12 month delay line - any content older than that
gets "deleted" (I maybe archive messages). I actually hate the whole idea and
would have deleted my account a long time ago, but it's the only medium by
which I'll get to see photos of my nephew until I build something simpler for
our extended family to use.

~~~
uiri
I do the same thing but with 6 months instead of 12. I think the absolute
limit is somewhere between 6 months and 3 months. Most stuff which is at least
3 months old is stuff whose only value is for reminiscing about later. On the
other hand, sometimes I don't want to delete something at the 6 month mark
because I find it to be still relevant or it is a cover/profile picture and I
don't want to replace it. I've tried going without Facebook for a while, but I
find that my peers use it a lot for communication. They tend not to like email
which is unfortunate because email will outlive Facebook and the immediate
successor to Facebook.

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ElongatedTowel
I must be the only one who finds that a bit... scary. But I don't keep old
photo albums either.

Maybe it needs some kind of hate for your younger self to cut ties, cut hair,
throw away old stuff and start a new life somewhere else, never looking back,
while others reminisce.

~~~
NeilRShah
Unrelated: what does your username mean? I'm hoping it's totally random.

~~~
ElongatedTowel
It sure is.

------
michaelochurch
I think of Facebook as being like 1950s TV. Peoples' pictures show the
atypical moments of their lives that they _wish_ were typical: vacations,
parties and weddings. No one posts pictures of their damn cubicles or dirty
laundry.

A typical person who mistook those photos to reflect how peoples' lives
_actually_ are, and not rare moments out of years, would become envious and
miserable.

As with the 1950s, which were nothing like what TV portrays the era as being,
I worry that future generations will see these 2012-era photos and ask if our
lives really were this glamorous, with average people constantly taking
vacations. Well, no. That was not reality.

