Can we please ban these ridiculous emotional outpourings every time an actor dies?  And why do people connect so deeply with actors?  You're connecting with THE ACTING of that person, not the actual person!

 

You seem to be getting a little emotional yourself.

 

Well I came home from work and it appears that we're now 24 hours into Robin Williams mania.  The posts just keeping coming, like 1 out of 3 posts have something to do with this guy. 

 

A lot of people spend way more time "with" actors than friends, family and co-workers or engaging in personal development.

Yeah Warhol honed in on the rise of celebrity culture as something that was challenging and would eventually unseat religion.  The moving picture -- both movies and television -- for some reason gives massive credibility to whatever is being portrayed to the viewer. 

 

I've been thinking about this a lot recently -- religious power, political power, and celebrity status were historically one in the same. As time goes on, they continue to split into three separate things, although they are still very closely linked. (Most people still care about the religious views of their politicians, and many political and religious leaders are celebrities.)

 

I'm certainly not the first person to make this observation, and I bet there is even a name for this phenomenon.

Warhol was really the first to recognize it and do something with it, but 50 years on people still don't really understand his message.  Some of his artwork was not so good, but the stuff that is good is outstanding and still speaks loudly, if you can hear it.  But now Facebook and the phones are totally exposing everything he was getting at in a way that is totally undeniable for those that understood his artwork in the pre-Facebook epoch.  I think that statement from the linked article about everyone's acting the same even though we don't have government control is absolutely spot-on.  Look at the way that Facebook self-regulates -- you can get on there and say whatever you want, but there's so much chatter, nobody pays attention. And if you say something really stupid, people unfriend you. 

 

A B- quality Iggy Pop song from around 1990 addresses this issue in the third verse (starts at 4:02):

 

You can get a weird prize for being adored

You can join the "in crowd" for being a whore

Although you are lonely you wish for a fence

America takes drugs in psychic defense

You can say what you want but nobody's there

Have you got any money?

Are you anybody?

 

I find myself having transitioned since the 1990s from being upset by advertising and advertising campaigns -- why fads disappeared as quickly as they appeared, why certain things got popular but not others, etc. -- to being still viscerally upset by selfies and excessive smart phone use.  I get on Facebook once or twice a day and just roll my eyes at all of the insecurity on display. 

 

 

And actually I just thought of this -- the reason why TV news is so dangerous is because it dictates what the appropriate emotional response is for different types of stories.  But Facebook is doing the same thing...and we're doing it as a group.  There is no FCC censoring content or some Unamerican Activities commission going after commies.  It's instead the threat of being unfriended -- possibly by the one or two girls from college or high school who you are still keeping an eye on!

 

On that topic, of course there is an outstanding piece of rock & roll addressing this topic (skip ahead to 4:55):

 

It's just like the show before

The news is

Just another show

With sex and violence...

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVGINIsLnqU

 

Freedom of choice

Is what you got

Freedom from choice

Is what you want

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVGINIsLnqU

 

Freedom of choice

Is what you got

Freedom from choice

Is what you want

 

One of the first videos I ever recorded -- on Beta and in 1983.

 

Its message still rings true today. If you don't like it, turn it off. If you can't, blame yourself.

I find myself having transitioned since the 1990s from being upset by advertising and advertising campaigns -- why fads disappeared as quickly as they appeared, why certain things got popular but not others, etc. -- to being still viscerally upset by selfies and excessive smart phone use.  I get on Facebook once or twice a day and just roll my eyes at all of the insecurity on display. 

 

Facebook is bad, but I can't quit since I use it to keep in touch with friends and family thousands of miles away from me and I do care what some of them are doing. I'm just annoyed by all the wedding and baby posting. It's like Facebook has just become a public wedding album. I don't care about that stuff so it annoys me...but not to the point of unfriending anyone. I rarely unfriend people, but I also rarely friend people anymore. I guess I've just really cut back on social media in general. I've got to up my game. I remember job interviews years ago in San Francisco asking how many Facebook friends and Twitter followers I had (I didn't even have Twitter so I knew I was screwed). Your worth is defined by this stuff at some tech companies. You need this insane number of Twitter and Instagram followers. You need to be a social media "influencer." I think that's why I just never had this strong desire to work in social media. I'm much happier in my current career. I could probably have retired by now had I gone the start-up route, but I don't regret it since I feel you should work in something you enjoy. Still, some of my Facebook and other tech friends who are retired are living the young American's dream. The freedom they enjoy in their late 20's and early 30's is remarkable. And their wealth keeps growing since they invested in San Francisco housing or have rent control and are making money off new tenants. I'm envious of that financial security. They can take just these huge risks in their lives now. Financially, working at Facebook and getting equity was the smartest decision any young American could have made.

 

I find the current Facebook advertising model very annoying (ditto with all internet ads), but it's working. Facebook is viable and they are making way more money than Twitter.

 

I actually loved old television ads. There was so much art and creativity in the advertising campaigns of the past. Many DP's got their start in television ads and I always had a great deal of respect for them. The cinematography in those ad campaigns was excellent and the fast-paced editing influenced production to this day. The 30-second-spot was a work of commercial art, and with the demise of traditional television, I fear advertising quality is declining. I hope I'm proven wrong.

C-Dawg, I have never had a facebook account, but my wife does.  She really only checks it about once a week as she has never been into the whole social media thing.  As far as FB becoming a wedding album as you said, it probably moreso due to youre age, and friends ages.  I can't say I have noticed one wedding photo on my wifes page, probably because all our friends are married, and have been for a while.  If you were in your sixties, you would probably notice alot of retirement photos.  In your 40's, you would probably notice alot of graduation photos of friends kids.  It's what facebook is, and will continue to be. 

I actually loved old television ads. There was so much art and creativity in the advertising campaigns of the past. Many DP's got their start in television ads and I always had a great deal of respect for them. The cinematography in those ad campaigns was excellent and the fast-paced editing influenced production to this day. The 30-second-spot was a work of commercial art, and with the demise of traditional television, I fear advertising quality is declining. I hope I'm proven wrong.

 

How interesting can or should an ad about power wheelchairs, catheters and class-action lawsuits be? So much of it is the product. You can make a sexy banana commercial:

 

 

but there's no real way to sell diabetes testing supplies besides just the facts. Also I think "clean design" ruined TV advertising as well by filling people's living rooms with white or some other monochrome rather than putting effort into the cinematography of them to make ads compelling.

Can we please ban these ridiculous emotional outpourings every time an actor dies?  And why do people connect so deeply with actors?  You're connecting with THE ACTING of that person, not the actual person!

 

You seem to be getting a little emotional yourself.

 

Well I came home from work and it appears that we're now 24 hours into Robin Williams mania.  The posts just keeping coming, like 1 out of 3 posts have something to do with this guy. 

 

As of this morning, my wall was still at around 25% Robin Williams posts, with a small but seemingly growing number of quasi-feminist posts taking advantage of the death of Lauren Bacall. I finally discovered that you can stop seeing posts about "trending topics," and did so.

UO is a lot like Facebook!  People talking like they know what they are talking about!  Maybe they just like to hear themselves, or it makes them feel important.

Funniest thing I've seen/heard in a long time!

 

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=735467283177908

I have to admit - I finally "liked" a page that posts cute kitty pics.

It's a Snow Leopard group if that counts for anything...

Do people realize that you can "unfollow" people on Facebook without "unfriending" them? Just click on the down arrow next to their post in your news feed... then click "Unfollow (Person)" or "I don't want to see this". And that person will be none the wiser.

they are not alerted when you unfriend them, I believe.

Unless they don't have anything better to do and are montoring their friend list for unfriending activity.

I noticed that companies are now setting up phony facebook groups that you are suggested to join.  Specifically one called "Travling Single" popped up today, which has various single 40-50 year-olds claiming to be planning trips.  These profiles look a little fake to me, aside from the fact that they're always pointing people toward cruises and packaged tours. 

 

It's amazing how in 10 years Facebook has gone from 99% "real" to 99% "fake".  It turned into TV. 

The Enquirer started up a bunch of neighborhood-specific Facebook groups, such as the one for Downtown and OTR Residents. I think the reason they did this is because of how Facebook has been messing with how Pages work. If you follow a Page, you do not necessarily see every single post made by that Page in your news feed. Facebook recently changed this so that companies have to pay to "promote" their posts. The Enquirer are getting around this by creating a Group instead. Posts from a Group are much more likely to show up in the news feed of people that belong to that group.

Just deactivated facebook. It feels wonderful!

None of this is all that surprising.  I use facebook to keep up with friends and family but don't really "like" hardly any corporate pages.  When facebook had its stock offering the whole question was how it was going to create more revenue from advertisers.  Sounds like they are finding ways to do just that

So I just saw that in Facebook's daily birthday reminders that they prioritized a "friend" who I have never spoken to in real life or on Facebook or ever "liked" anything she posted to...my dad.  Why would they prioritize people who you have had no online activity to someone with your same family name?  Do they assume that you remember the birthdays of relatives?

A German tabloid posts nude paintings to protest Facebook’s hate speech policy http://t.co/bqrhf9XJjr

The Facebook group "old photos of Cincinnati" prompts comments from a lot of old folks with a weird mix of nostalgia and hate. Like they used to go to albee's but hate everything about fountain square now. They admire the busy sidewalks in the photos but are dead set against trying to recreate that now, it will never happen again because of bulls**t reasons like if you go downtown you get shot, people like to drive to malls, etc. To them the subway proves rail in Cincinnati is a failure but it is still somehow better than the current streetcar, etc. (even though the subway never laid track!)

 

Fundamentally It's like they admire a vibrant city, but they have no idea what made our city vibrant and are outright hostile to the things that did (walkable places, transit etc)

I'm certain that they're unaware that it was government policy that destroyed that vibrancy.

I left that group months ago because I couldn't stand the idiocy of it all.

 

In fact, my new years resolution was to leave every single Cincinnati group (except one) because I was so sick of being angered by all the bulls**t that finds its way into literally anything and everything related to Cincinnati.

 

Oh, you posted a cool old photo of a building Downtown?

 

*scolls to comments section*

 

"Stupid libtards think that people are going to ride the toy train that takes them through the ghetto no wonder this city is the next Detroit"

 

Day ruined.

^ You just summarized the reason that I basically just don't ever log into Facebook.

I've been facebook free for nearly a month now.  Best move one could make!!

Facebook free since last April. It's been bliss.

I have seen people elsewhere complain about "Old Photos of Cincinnati".  Somehow all of the worst people alive found that group and turned it into the most insane local discussion group.  There are at least 25 regular posters on that group who are completely insane.   

 

We see over and over again that the downfall of Facebook as a social venue that middle-class and above college-educated people (the original people who signed on back in 2004 and 2005) was the eventual appearance of the low-class people who dominated MySpace and then the depressed, uneducated middle-class whites aged 50-80 who were never on MySpace or anywhere else on the internet other than email chains.  These people as a group somehow had "successful" careers despite being total dolts. 

 

 

 

It is also possible to block those losers when you see their ridiculous posts.  You'll never see their nonsense again and if there are only a handful of them then you've solved the problem.  That being said, I totally understand giving up Facebook as it is quite the time suck.

It just amazes me that that group always, without fault, turns into a hate fest about everything current happening in Cincinnati regardless of what the photo was even of.

 

Either that or it turns into a bunch of people going, "I graduated 2 miles from here in 1963, does anyone remember Patty Cornwell? She used to love going to the corner store that was a block from where this photo was taken. If anyone is wondering her daughter just opened her own shop down the street from me. You should go check it out. They sell the best pet blankets."

 

Finding the actual useful information just became too much of a task.

Just look at the images and ignore the comments, unless you need to know more about something. There is a lot of insight into some of the photos that reading the comments provides. But if it isn't something you need to know more about, just look at the images and move on.

The problem is that it's often hard to do that. If there was an option to never display any comments unless you expand the comments section then it would be one thing but you can gather a lot of negativity just by scrolling from one photo to the next. And if you're like me your curiosity gets the better of you and you've wound up spending 15 minutes reading every comment.

It's like a car accident for me. Though, the recent Elvis concert posts may have pushed me over the edge.

Remember that willful ignorance was considered a virtue by many before the internet.

I have seen people elsewhere complain about "Old Photos of Cincinnati".  Somehow all of the worst people alive found that group and turned it into the most insane local discussion group.  There are at least 25 regular posters on that group who are completely insane.   

 

We see over and over again that the downfall of Facebook as a social venue that middle-class and above college-educated people (the original people who signed on back in 2004 and 2005) was the eventual appearance of the low-class people who dominated MySpace and then the depressed, uneducated middle-class whites aged 50-80 who were never on MySpace or anywhere else on the internet other than email chains.  These people as a group somehow had "successful" careers despite being total dolts. 

 

 

 

 

Aggression is rewarded very highly in American and especially Midwestern culture. These people were probably very aggressive in all aspects of life in order to make up for their terrible personality. Then the rewards eventually came due to their aggression.

Moderation is the key to the character of a Facebook group/page.

 

We have over 4,000 in the "from Maple Heights group", both current and former residents and we've walked a fine line with the latter.  It's fine to bemoan what's happened to the town, not fine to generalize about people.  It's worked reasonably well.  We also mostly banned local politics.  :)

Former Facebook workers say that they were told to artificially "trend" left-leaning news stories and suppress conservative ones:

http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006

Hopefully this news will result in our conservative relatives and co-workers boycotting Facebook. It might actually make the experience of using Facebook enjoyable again.

Is it too late to join facebook?  Has the time passed?

How interested are you in silly memes and youth sports achievements?  That's 90% of it.  But it's still useful for keeping in touch with your broader network.  People will move and change phone numbers but keep the same Facebook account.  It's also like a high school (and college) yearbook that updates in real time, for what that's worth.  If you've never used it before, there's a nice early period of reconnecting with long lost pals.  It's also good for sending event invites... so commonly now that friends without Facebook accounts often get left out.

I still engage with it regularly.  The Faustian bargain you make is that the more you let the site know about yourself, the more relevant it generally gets.  I see many fewer funny but pointless meme photos than many do simply because I spent a few weeks constantly using the option to hide those posts, and Facebook's algorithms eventually got the point that I have no interest in those.

 

And 327 is spot-on about events.  The Events feature is fantastic for both public and private events and I would not be at all surprised if that was one of the main features used by adult users.  My evidence that Facebook knows that people are very actively using this feature is that it gets reasonably frequent and user-friendly updates (compare, e.g., the obscure Notes feature).  It's one of the main reasons I use Meetup.com much less frequently than I used to; most of the public events I'm most interested in now have events on Facebook, and Meetup fell asleep at the switch in terms of the features that would have made it more user-friendly (e.g., cross-posting events to multiple groups).

That's my motivation.  I feel that I am out of the loop.  For years, I had no desire to be in the 'facebook' loop, but now I just feel like an oddball.

 

My wife has been on facebook for years and she is actually friends with several of my old friends she has never met.

My wife is friends with some of my old friends that she's never met, too.  And I'm friends with some of her friends that I never met until our wedding and haven't met since.  Being "friends" on Facebook isn't what it used to be.

 

That's actually been an evolving issue for lawyers and ethics.  It used to be that you had to be really careful if you were an attorney and were Facebook friends with another attorney who went on to be a judge, for example, because Facebook friendships used to imply very close real-world friendships that might send an improper signal of bias, influence, or other impropriety.  It's now pretty much common knowledge that just because you're Facebook friends with someone doesn't mean squat in terms of having undue influence or bias.  Some judges are still very cautious and conservative and will deactivate Facebook profiles or go through and unfriend all their attorney friends when they go onto the bench, but the trend has been away from that.

 

The Volokh conspiracy had an interesting blog post on that several years ago:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/01/30/the-law-of-friending/

 

Upshot: There was a 2012 case in which a judge-attorney Facebook friendship was held improper enough to give rise to a perception of bias (and perception alone can be enough for disqualification if it's enough to create doubt on the impartiality of proceedings, even if one could somehow prove no actual bias); in 2014, another court strongly disagreed with the 2012 case, noting that a Facebook friend could be a "virtual stranger."

 

I'm going to be a long-term user of Facebook simply because it was there in the right place at the right time for me.  I'm old in Facebook terms; I date back to the day when you still had to sign up with a .edu e-mail address (which is why Facebook is one of the only three companies that knows my personal e-mail address, and I'm actually impressed at how well they've kept it private, judging by the lack of junk mail that has accumulated there despite having the same e-mail address for 16 years).  But the Events feature is the highlight for me now.  I wish the Photos feature were more user-friendly, and if they made some changes to that, I'd put it up there with Events, but it's still a bit clunky in terms of organization, which I think is a missed opportunity for them because Facebook spent a lot to acquire Instagram, and yet there are some things that Facebook Photos could do that would complement rather than compete with Instagram, especially in terms of organizing photos.

There was a Wal-Mart story in my news feed today, so there you go conservatives -- a story about something you actually like.

 

;)

Yeah, but it was a story about Wal-Mart suing the little guy.  Some guy named Visa.

I don't like him. He takes 1% of my income.

That's my motivation.  I feel that I am out of the loop.  For years, I had no desire to be in the 'facebook' loop, but now I just feel like an oddball.

 

My wife has been on facebook for years and she is actually friends with several of my old friends she has never met.

 

It's kind of amusing to see my old girlfriends and women I liked WBITD clicking the like on my daughter's pics, especially when I return the favor with their grandkids.  :)

 

Holly (Ardyn's mom) is friends with a lot of my old friends too, some of whom I knew before she was born.

My wife is friends with some of my old friends that she's never met, too.  And I'm friends with some of her friends that I never met until our wedding and haven't met since.  Being "friends" on Facebook isn't what it used to be.

 

That's actually been an evolving issue for lawyers and ethics.  It used to be that you had to be really careful if you were an attorney and were Facebook friends with another attorney who went on to be a judge, for example, because Facebook friendships used to imply very close real-world friendships that might send an improper signal of bias, influence, or other impropriety.  It's now pretty much common knowledge that just because you're Facebook friends with someone doesn't mean squat in terms of having undue influence or bias.  Some judges are still very cautious and conservative and will deactivate Facebook profiles or go through and unfriend all their attorney friends when they go onto the bench, but the trend has been away from that.

 

The Volokh conspiracy had an interesting blog post on that several years ago:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/01/30/the-law-of-friending/

 

Upshot: There was a 2012 case in which a judge-attorney Facebook friendship was held improper enough to give rise to a perception of bias (and perception alone can be enough for disqualification if it's enough to create doubt on the impartiality of proceedings, even if one could somehow prove no actual bias); in 2014, another court strongly disagreed with the 2012 case, noting that a Facebook friend could be a "virtual stranger."

 

I'm going to be a long-term user of Facebook simply because it was there in the right place at the right time for me.  I'm old in Facebook terms; I date back to the day when you still had to sign up with a .edu e-mail address (which is why Facebook is one of the only three companies that knows my personal e-mail address, and I'm actually impressed at how well they've kept it private, judging by the lack of junk mail that has accumulated there despite having the same e-mail address for 16 years).  But the Events feature is the highlight for me now.  I wish the Photos feature were more user-friendly, and if they made some changes to that, I'd put it up there with Events, but it's still a bit clunky in terms of organization, which I think is a missed opportunity for them because Facebook spent a lot to acquire Instagram, and yet there are some things that Facebook Photos could do that would complement rather than compete with Instagram, especially in terms of organizing photos.

 

I'm kind of into the "memories" feature these days in fact I log into my old profile just to check that .