Posted on 09/01/2009 9:49:54 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.
The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing — some of them ostentatiously.
Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea, and sells T-shirts with the words “Shut Your Facebook.” What especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life. As Facebook endeavors to be the Web’s headquarters — to compete with Google, in other words, and to make money from the information it gathers — it’s inevitable that some people would come to view it as Big Brother.
“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Farmtown and Farmville are like crack. People I know are addicted to it, and spend HOUR AFTER HOUR on it.
Heh, I just harvested my watermelon patch on Farmville.
I’ve heard my niece talk about Farmville. What the heck is it?
I just harvested my first eggplants. :-)
A moose once bit my sister in Farmville. The welt was hugh.
Seriesly?
“Farmtown and Farmville are like crack. People I know are addicted to it, and spend HOUR AFTER HOUR on it.’
Sad to say, my girlfriend and her friends are addicted to the farm.
She gets up in the middle of the night to play on it.
It is a “cute” site, but I just do not get it.
You really need to take a shower and have some cafe~
I’m more addicted to Castle Age. I pretty much have my farmville farm where I can go and pet it twice a day...but Castle Age, now that’s truly addicting...
Most of my church is on FB. What a great way to keep up with everyone.
ping
His mom must be Kathy Bates.
I’ve never gotten the appeal of facebook. All of the people I know that I still want to hang with, all those people have my number and/or my email address. If there are people out there that know me... if I wanted to continue a relationship with them, I would already be doing so. If they know me and don’t know how to contact me... chances are better than average that I don’t want them to know how to find me.
??? IS it some virtual world thing online where you farm???
Facebook is really lame. I was in a restaurant tonight with internet and some anoying guy was surfing on his laptop. He would get up every few minutes for a smoke.
He was surfing Tagged.com. I had never heard of it. I checked it out and it is like Facebook and a pick up site plus Match.com. It looked really stupid.
I enjoy Facebook. I have nieces and nephews in other towns, and we send messages to each other. Other assorted friends. I ran up on a girl I knew in HS (platonic) and she’s living in Indiana now.
I guess facebook isn’t cool for liberals anymore now that Sarah took it over :)
My niece spoke about Farmville like she was addicted to it. Not good to be that consumed by anything...IMHO. Unless it's FR! :)
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