William Shatner is 83. That is amazing to me. I hope I'm that with it and well put together if I make it to 83. I suppose being worth $100 million doesn't hurt, but it still gives me some hope.
George Takei is 77, clearly an old man, but no one seems surprised by how "with it", humorous, and interesting he is. Why does Shatner get a double-standard?
77 or 83 is longer than any male in my family has lived that I know of. It seems to me that a lot of Hollywood types are under a lot of pressure to stay thin, stay good looking, etc and often go to the gym religiously and eat healthily. I imagine if we followed that model we'd all be that sharp and good-looking at that age.
You may be correct regarding a Hollywood lifestyle, but I think there's a bit of confirmation bias here. There's only a relatively small number of elderly celebs who are still active in the public eye, and those actors who have suffered the typical problems of aging get little attention until the inevitable obituary.
Probably has more to do with wealthy access to the best medical care/prevention. As for being 'with it' I'm sure having a wife 27yrs younger helps. Plus he already had a handheld device in the 1960s so second nature to him :P
This is a broad social generalization so please take it with a grain of salt, but I do think there is an element of truth to the notion that Japanese people take good care of their elderly maintaining their dignity and keeping a healthy respect for their elders. The perception is that they age more gracefully. In western / european cultures, growing old is treated like a shameful disease. Hence the double standard.
Saw him on stage about a year ago and he was the most lucid and sensible person there (of the 5 other captains). Avery Brooks certainly was not with it at all.
Well I recall AB getting into some kind of self compelled nonsense and the only person to step up and start talking and change the subject was WS, everyone else was just sitting there gawping.
Because actors are famous for being "lucid and sensible"...?
(This is not a dig at Sir Stewart, I'm just pointing out that the two concepts "working actor" and "lucid/sensible person" are not necessarily linked -- as demonstrated by Brando, Depardieu etc.)
I think the point is simply that if using the title (which is purely optional) then it is standard to use the first name. So Sir Stewart would be somebody else.
I still can't get over the, "I need more face time!" Yea, another generation, but selfish, narcissism is never cool.
He does look good for his age though, but so do most leading men who didn't lose their hair?
I can't believe Facebook would force celebrities to follow other celebrities, It seems like their contempt for users is universal regardless of how important you may be.
Another way to put it is Facebook knows getting you to click a couple of buttons to "get started" is something a very very high percentage of people will do to interact with facebook, especially if they've already gone through the friction of downloading the app.
The level of technical understanding, including jargon (even trivial and casual to us, like "header image"), and familiarity with posting (custom screenshots, etc), is phenomenal for a celebrity, and at that age!
I saw his one-man show when it came to town about a year ago. After watching him alone on stage for 90 minutes, I have no doubt that he is still "with it" enough to not only comprehend modern tech (if that's what we're calling Facebook), but to provide this level of insight and understanding.
The Internet for television and film celebrities is a walled echo chamber by design. The tools written for them are probably not useful or necessary for anyone not interacting under the same volume conditions with the same level of technical proficiency.
I expect social apps for celebrities to interact with thier audience typically have: a simplified/focused interface, filters for negative comments and spam, filters to resort the most "pr friendly" content to the top, an enhanced search interface to quickly filter content according to their current promotional/contractual obligations (allow easily responding to a comment about new movie x, when most of the comments are about 20 year old movie y), ml tools to track diehard fans, some kind of secondary user interface for thier assistant or PR manager to play puppet master or perform additional filtering and prepping...
In the end, these entertainers are paying for their "enhanced access" and tools by using them to promote the services that are building tools for them. Hence, Cap'n TJ Hooker's tumblr post about a fb service.
That is just the difference between a producer and a consumer. These sites need content for the consumers so they provide services to the producers. It's completely uncontroversial if you ask me.
I wonder if the George Takei suggestion was intelligent situational awareness ... or if everyone has him as the first suggestion because he's basically the platonic form of a Facebook celebrity?
I didn't know that, so I dug around for the cause. From a recent NYP article:
Takei married his husband in 2008 and Shatner became enraged when
he claimed he wasn’t invited. He ranted against Takei in an
online interview. [...]
Shatner called Takei’s wedding a publicity stunt and hypothesized
that their feud stemmed from Takei’s unwillingness to playing
second fiddle to Shatner on “Star Trek.”
It seems to be mostly based on petty, even comical stuff like this. This may sound paradoxical, but as someone who always had a lot of respect for both of them, this is disappointing and a bit of a relief at the same time.
That wasn't the cause. According to Takei, they didn't get along even during Star Trek. "Petty, comical stuff" is what the media narrative consists of because they're two amusing personalities, and we want to be amused by them. Also they're two old men who wouldn't have spoken for the last 50 years if it weren't for an avalanche of fan-cash that has forced them into continued contact and some civility.
From what I can tell he's had a bad relationship with a number of the other cast members since the original series's filming, since they thought he was too self-centered and kept trying to minimize screentime given to the supporting cast. The feud became kind of well known among fans, because four of the actors (Walter Koenig, James Doohan, Nichelle Nicols, and Takei) often aired their dislike of Shatner at Star Trek conventions. Though for his part Shatner claims it was a one-sided feud he didn't even know about until 1993: he says he discovered the issue when he tried to interview a bunch of the old cast for his memoir, and several wouldn't talk to him, or did but had negative things to say.
>Though for his part Shatner claims it was a one-sided feud he didn't even know about until 1993
Which, of course, humorously confirms all of the casts' characterizations of him as a selfish egomaniac in a wig and a girdle. I think that Shatner is aware of this (within the past 20 years, not at the time) and plays into it for the humor value and a media bump if he's currently selling something. He's always selling something.
The latter. George Takei makes Facebook money by making it more engaging. Facebook wants more celebrities to see what George Takei is doing so they do it too.
Sure this is good for facebook cause pageviews but all the Takei shares that show up on my feed are almost invariably reddit frontpage reposts. I guess he adds volume to facebook, but it's not very quality volume imo, if anyone else shared the stuff he did, it wouldn't collect thousands of upvotes/likes/etc.
Plus if he really has a staff doing it, then the whole "wow what a zany old man who is "relevant" and reads reddit/9gag/wherever people think the content comes from" thing kinda falls apart.
I remember back in 2005-6 when I thought that News Feed, Events and other stuff introduced to Facebook was a bunch of cluttered junk. If I could have seen into the future then... the horror, the horror!
Are new users joining Facebook? I hear from more and more people that either they have left or "wish [they] could", if it weren't for "everyone" with which they wish to stay in contact[1].
I myself deactivated my account 6 months ago. The only time I regret it is after I've been drinking and want to troll someone. So actually all around a good thing.
Are new people actually, really, honestly joining Facebook? I know the "delta new accounts" number is positive, but do they represent real people, rather than just spam bots?
I just have this feeling that, given a certain plateauing of new users, there comes an associated stagnation of follow-actions. No, I certainly don't have data to this issue, but I know that I personally only spend effort following people when A) I first join a site, or B) I think there is a good chance the person will follow me back[2]. So, for your everyday Joe-blow user who has is more than a month old, it seems like they are either already following William Shatner or never will.
My own observations in blogging have been that engagement with users is highly dependent on novelty. You either grind out finding new followers who haven't experienced your content yet, or you post radically new things all of the time--which could backfire and alienate your established followership, though honestly by that point they are probably ignoring your posts. Either way, you write off anyone who has been following you for more than 6 months. 90% of the time, that person is unretrievable.
I guess I just see followers as a limited, unsustainable resource, sort of akin to oil, except much easier to deplete. But it seems like Facebook, et. al., are banking on it being more like solar. IDK, I've seen reports saying FB has 1.3 billion users. There are only 7 billion people in the world. Do I really believe FB has almost 20% of the entire world's population? Do I really believe they could get more?
[1] Apparently "everyone" doesn't know how to use email or a telephone or text messaging.
[2] Incidentally, a policy that works for about 50% of cases. And for 90% of people, they will be unfollowed within a week, regardless of whether or not they follow me back. I don't need their crappy animated GIFs of Sherlock or Dr. Who clogging up my dashboard.
"I know the "delta new accounts" number is positive, but do they represent real people"
Recently my son became old enough to get a legal account, so he got one. Kids are famous for fad behavior, so FB is already dead for him and his friends, but for a couple months it was a big deal. His account dragged me back into creating an account and my friend-ing everyone I had back in 2010 plus some more. Its a wasteland compared to 2010, there's like two attention seeking women posting every couple hours just like half a decade ago, some folks doing the "post pix of kids" and thats it other than brand spam and other corporate spam. FB is like one of those giant D+D beasts where they're already dead but still thrashing around. Someday wall street will figure that out about FB and that will be amusing to watch. ("wait, you're telling me no one uses this service anymore other than attention seeking women who haven't found out about /r/gonewild somehow, the NSA, and bots... and its priced in the billions, up till now?")
> I guess I just see followers as a limited, unsustainable resource, sort of akin to oil, except much easier to deplete
New people are born every minute. Facebook has reached a massive scale, at which scale nearly everyone in the world has heard about it and will join at some point.
Also, FB really isn't built around following the way Twitter is. If all you did with Facebook was interact with your friends, that'd be just fine (since they can always inject business ads into that stream).
There are a lot of Facebook employees on HN, just like there are a lot of Google employees here. Those employees will do some level of astroturfing. Unless HN prevents us from voting on topics where there is a conflict of interest, it's hard to keep the bias out.
Facebook has made a lot of questionable or incite-ful moves lately (Fwd.us, Slingshot, many acquisitions without a coherent vision) while it's quality and usefulness to many has become of marginal importance.
This isn't 2009/2010, where Iranians and Tunisians were using FB to coordinate peaceful protests. Instead, fear of the encroaching security-industrial-complex revealed by Snowden has people concerned about posting stuff to FB.
Fwd.us is questionable? I'd like to know a solid reason other than "get foreign workers bs". Also note that fwd.us has nothing to do with Facebook. Its a personal initiative.
> I'd like to know a solid reason other than "get foreign workers bs".
The way companies use and abuse the H1B visa program and what that does to domestic wages is controversial. You can dismiss it but then don't demand more things to dismiss.
