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natasha nikulina

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Is Facebook an evil or a sign of everlasting evolution?

My son has 5000 friends in social network and nobody to talk to. Chatting and talking is not the same thing, not even close. How explane the vibe of real talk, sharing, the joy of being understood, can you teach how to sense a feedback? One may say that you can have both, but reality tells a different story. Actually, you can't, everything has it's price, may be people are getting corrupted by easy-click-no-commitments comunication and eventually are loosing natural skills and needs of ''see you'' magic?

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  • Cameron Donahue

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    Mar 2 2011: 10 million hours or so were spent gaming last year on FB --> Humankind could've resolved just about every one of its problems with that multiplicity of collaboration. Without FB, would these 10^7 hours have been spent otherwise? Or just gaming elsewhere? There seems to be an evil/narcissistic side that (like a greedy businessman) wants to take your time, getting you more and more inebriated with time spent online, without a single side-effect of relevant physical progression.
    i.e. Is it more likely that you invite someone (you used to interact with physically) to play an online game with you and slowly the relationship swings towards a purely online interaction, or are you more likely to have fun playing an online game with a mutual online connection and develop a physical (vs. virtual) relationship with that person? I'm willing to bet not a single one of the incentive-based games on FB progresses you towards physically interacting with people (more like I'm willing to bet that's against FB's rules -- how negligent would it be to encourage people to meet up in real life? As you mentioned; recording your dialogue (typing, writing, chat, vmail, email) and conveying it to a displaced someone isn't nearly the same as the real-time event that takes place when two humans interact physically, and I know no set of criteria - except perhaps a dating services' - that would suggest the latter based on enjoyability of the prior).
    More progressively, if the nature of FB inherently led towards developing a physical relationship with others in the world (yes I know it can be used for such a purpose, but I mean if this was THE driving idea behind FB) then FB's main purpose would be to get us OFF the internet and BACK INTO our PHYSICAL intimations, and the website would eventually see NO TRAFFIC. Thus, we can see what a profitable market FB has proven to be and deduce that it does not intend to dismantle or obsolete itself by means of encouraging healthy physical interaction
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      Anna Hoffmann

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      Mar 11 2011: I never game on Facebook. I have some hundred friends. They are all somehow connected to me from some meeting in real life in the past. I enjoy sharing their everyday stories and sometimes their causes, their music, their pictures; art, photos etc. They post events there, which sometimes means I go and meet them IRL. I stay in touch when I or my friends and family are traveling. So FB is a good thing for me.
      This website is much clumsier as website than FB. It needs improvement in this conversation part!
      What I wonder about is if somebody is collecting all that information and how that might be used in the future. But the joy of communicating in this way is greater than the fear of being exploited.
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        natasha nikulina 50+

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        Mar 12 2011: Hello, Anna! You are grown up, and for you FB is a convinient tool to support already existing reach, vibrant net of your real relationship, but it's different with our kids, who were seduced to drive a car whithout walking experience, sorry for this earthy metaphor, but that's how I see it. Thank you for sharing, nice to see you here:)

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