On Facebook, then and now

People are digging up old LJ posts to look back at their first thoughts about DW, but I was posting about Hetalia or something that day, and don't remember if I ever mentioned it there. But in the last few months of my old LJ, I found a good bit of shallow commentary on the status of social media eight years ago, and that's interesting from the historical perspective, if nothing else. Here's from some post about Facebook and how I just don't understand what people do there:

6. In the end, it's probably that fandom had me being social on the internet five years before "social media" existed. It still feels like some weird kind of vouyerism to have a feed with updates on the daily lives of other people. I never could get used to LJ that way, but LJ at least has some kind of relevance to me. FB is 80% quizzes and game requests and 19% updates that are either a) utterly trivial, or b) things I already knew. I'm still not comprehending how that is the quintessense of the communication revoltion.

(Of course, I have anger at texting, too, and am an old lady by definition.)

 

I've gotten over my annoyance at texting, and instead grown to want to shake people who won't answer their phones because god forbid they have to talk to people with words that are instant and put them at risk at saying something dumb. But to that: I think the great change in social media from then and to now is the extent to which it's taken over communication. People don't use facebook for sharing holiday pictures, people use facebook for selling stuff, for sharing news, for verbally abusing others. Messenger and Snapchat and Whatsapp are filed under the "social media" umbrella, but what's the difference in usage between them and the text message, barring that they've all got group chats as a basic function?

My annoyance with Facebookd these days is its business model and its interest in taking over the internet and robbing us all of our privacy, secondarily that I have to be there because I'm in an amateur ensemble whose communication all happens there. It's hard to take an ideological stance when you'd have to explain to fourty grown-up people why they'd have to text and e-mail you extra for everything they just throw out there!

In a completely unrelated throwback to 2002 yesterday, I spent maybe an hour squinting at the soruce code of my new tumblr layout because I wanted to figure out how I could make the posts be on a semi-translucent background the way the info column was. But, well, html has moved on since I was making websites, and I was not devoted enough to actually get into how CSS classes work so that I could know what I was doing, rather than copying the relevant lines from the "column" class to the "post" one and hope it would work (which it didn't, though the error message that refused to let me save the changes had nothing to do with the code itself so it might have worked and we'll just never know).