The new social media

After several years of being glued to FB 24/7, partly a function of how great the platform is and partly a function of how much of my professional life centered around Facebook, I have moved slightly on.

I admire Facebook the company. They managed to figure out how to monetize human connections without selling cables.They enabled me to reconnect with friends and family that might otherwise have been utterly lost. They enabled the creation of gaming genres that the experts shat on and now make more money for game creators than ever before.

And I admire many many of the employees at Facebook that have done incredible things at an infrastructure level that are fundamentally disrupting how applications get built.

Facebook is a great company. And the Facebook product is a great product.

I also have to admit to myself that the Facebook platform is a media platform. Like any media platform it exploits human emotions to keep me connected. And the purveyors of content on the platform are keen to exploit human emotions to get me to click.

And the content provides are really good at it.

And I find myself, as I create content that I want to surface on FB, to be dragged into this war of emotions. Where everything has to become more and more sensationalized… Heck even this post is suffering from the same kind of sensationalized emotions that I accuse others of using.

And it doesn’t have to be that way. If I was smart enough to tell FB how to solve this I would, but I am not. And I expect that Facebook will figure out a solution to that problem. They are that smart.

But I, for my own reasons, need my emotional space. And that means dialing down my FB interactions just a little bit.

There is no way I am going off FB, that’s stupid. Facebook is the way I share information with many friends, where I learn about important life events and I sometimes connect with people I lost. And they are so important in that part of my life that I can’t imagine a post Facebook life.

And because of that I expect Facebook to remain an important part of the internet and the world and my weekly existence.

But that doesn’t mean I have to use Facebook 24×7.

It means I can use it less.

And I will 🙂

So what is the new social media? I have an email address, kostadis@gmail.com, feel free to use it. I have several blogs. feel free to comment and read. I use twitter for both sports and tech.  And you can still post on Facebook, I’ll still see your stuff just not as quickly.

 

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