This post will only obliquely be about basketball
An interesting take on facebook by Mark Cuban. The article hints at some of the issues underlying my decision to opt out of facebook. Foremost, any commoditization of personal information makes me uncomfortable, I don’t think facebook has sinister aims, but they are certainly treading on a very slippery slope. It’s crazy how much personal information people will cede in exchange for whatever convenience, organization and maybe sense of community facebook provides. Ten years ago, if someone would have posted their wedding photos, business contacts and top ten favorite movies on a public bulletin board, you would have questioned their sanity., now it’s common place and the bulletin board is one million times more accessible and corporately owned and controlled. Maybe I’m being an alarmist, but it seems to me that in the rush toward social networking we were quick to overlook the potential consequences.
Secondly, it seems to me that many advancements of the past few years have been about consumption and not creation. With the Kindle, the iPad, etc, what we get is a more efficient way to consume things which already exist, which is fine, just not when the counterbalancing creative outlets are shut down. Add in facebook’s binary like/dislike system and fan pages for everything from Sun Chips to comedians and it’s to start to see the beginning of the move away from individualism and toward contextualized consumption. Again, I doubt the aims are sinister, but, at least to me, it’s easy to extropolate a very bleak future from just these data points.
Third, progress is anything that removes from my life the ironic/non-ironic racist comments from my high school hoi polloi.
To prove that I’m not too far gone in my blissful Ludditism, here is a video of some talented dudes and ladies for you to contextually consume:
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