Information junkies and Facebook
 

I would like to put forth the idea that contemporary youth and young professionals are addicted to information. Early in my generation, when Al Gore invented the internet haha, people were absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of information they were presented. i'm not going to say that some of us had Fetal Information Syndrome, but honestly, how many people do you know would be dysfunctional and useless if they didn't have the internet. how many people do you know have no idea how to address a letter?

Take facebook for example. There's no doubting that Facebook has become the new MySpace in the sense that all the newest and hippest companies are advertising there, friends, relationships, and even marriages are announced on Facebook.

I would like to know what TFP thinks. Are we addicted to information? If we are, is it bad? if it is, what can we do to reduce the addiction without substantially degrading our ability to communicate with one another?

EDIT: sorry i thought i was in general discussion when i made this, could i please have it moved to General Discussion?

I don't think being addicted to information is anything new for me, to be honest. I love learning, I love knowing about things, and the Internet certainly facilitates me there. I'm a curious person, and I like having the answers at my fingertips.

I think what's concerning is the kind of information we're addicted to--there's a difference between learning all of the elements of the periodic table and obsessing over celebrity gossip. Personally, I trend more towards the former than the latter, and I suppose we can't all be meditating on serious concepts all of the time. I do enjoy Facebook.

Whether we think about it or not, every time we communicate with someone else--be it in real life or online, we are communicating information. So while I do think the Internet gives us unprecedented access to information, I'm not sure it's entirely to blame for information overload, or our inability to communicate with one another. Information overload could easily happen in a college lecture, for example. The kind of inability to communicate you mention could also happen to someone immersed in too many books.

Truly, if you think about it, we've always been addicted to information; we've always wanted to know the news, what was going on. The Internet is just our latest tool to do that with, and it is a very good tool. I think sometimes we do need the space to consider how good of a tool it is for that, and understand how it can be overwhelming and time-consuming.

I think the problem for many—well, for me at least—is that it's a situation of too much information. A distinction should be made between information and knowledge/wisdom. A distinction should be made between useless/trivial information and interesting/discovery-based information.

I think it's a situation of too much information. We can only process it so fast, and we often gloss over and filter out information before we can do anything meaningful with it because we move on to something else. There is always more information to be had. There is always more information that we can ever take in. It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet and we're never sated.

I regret not spending more valuable time with something as powerful yet unwieldy as the Internet. For example, I wish I would spend much more time at places such as UbUWeb than I do at places like Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia.

I've fallen into a rut on the Internet, where I spend 99% of my time here at TFP and at Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia. I need to branch out to something more diverse and valuable—more knowledge/wisdom, less information.

I'm not sure I can summarize my attraction to information any more succinctly than this. Fuck. I have nothing left to post!

Quantity seems to usually compromise quality. I'm sure many of us have noticed that with the huge explosion of information so easily available now, a "lot" of it is poor quality information. Same with "news" from all sources. I recall this being mentioned in other threads here...how to find accurate information. In some cases it's a difference of opinion, in others it could be the perspective of the writer and what axe they have to grind. In some cases it's factual and not a matter of opinion.

As far as Facebook being a place where "...the newest and hippest companies are advertising there..." I think it depends on the market for the company's products/services. For example, nobody in upper levels of engineering, purchasing, or operations in the rail transportation industry is looking for General Electric's Facebook page, nor would they really even have time or reason to visit there. Same goes for many industrial companies I work with every day. To me this industrial Facebook thing seems to fit better to household consumers. I do see that GE has a Facebook page, as do other companies where to me it makes no sense, but I think they're doing it because they see others doing it and they're too scared not to jump on the bandwagon for fear of missing something. I think if they knew better and were more secure in their knowledge, they wouldn't bother with Facebook.

As far as friends and family, Facebook seems to fit a need there. Though again, in my opinion the excessive quantity of information compromises the qualilty. I just don't want or need to know when one of my relatives farts or has a bad hair day. It's a shame they even have the time to post about that. I think something's wrong there.

Facebook is where I met CD. Yes, believe it or not. We were both amazed at posts the other made in regard to a cat shelter that was under attack.

HUH? Intelligent life out there?

I know my neck damn near broke off when I twisted it around to take a second look at this written wit...

so now we play hanky panky on FB nightly if we arent together. No, not cyber sex. Frolicky playful ..yeah..blow that out the door too. Imagine what I do to him...and increase it threefold. Yep. Thats it.

FB just makes it easy of us to dialogue. I HATE phones. GOD I hate phones. He forces me to talk on them every once in while. I love his voice...gives me some shivers...so I dont grumble too much but I use FB for interacting with him.

As for it being used for information? I just want family/friend nonsense. I keep track of everybody thru FB. I use the rest of the internet for real info.

"Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what's worth reading."

There's so much information out there, it's hard to figure out what we need to know and what's more optional. It's up to each person to decide what they think is worth the effort to learn about and harvest information from, but a good portion of people these days choose wrong unfortunatly. They choose bad information (wrong, influenced info), celebrity gossip, "OMG-she-is-dating-him? updates, and other pointless shit.

The Internet is what you make of it. If I want to fill my brain with the same thing that the mindless masses do, I can do so very easily. However, I choose not to. I'd rather learn about the world, meet new people, explore new opinions, and discover new ways of living. Of course that's not all I use the Internet for: Youtube videos, sports and world news, Plan9's hilarious comedy, and other fast and fun time killers all get their fair share of my time.

The Internet is a weapon. You can use it to kill off your brain cells or you can use it to destroy the enemy: stupidity.

I admit to swallowing many capsuled factoids & almost overdosing.
So far, my capacity for storing them keeps growing.

At night while I'm asleep, I shuffle the factoids into a flower arrangement.

I think it's FECAL Information Syndrome, because so much of it is useless crap...:orly:

I find this annoying, that Facebook is turning into another major channel for advertising. Don't we already have plenty of venues for advertising? And BTW, that's one of the great things about TFP: No ads.

At work I couldn't function without the internet. I work with financial information, and a lot of what I need isn't even available anywhere else. Even some limited distribution subscription material that used to be available on paper or CD/DVD is now online only.
Once the pace of the input surpasses the ability to process, we are in information overload trouble. This doesn't necessarily have to be a huge amount of info, it just has to outpace understanding. A couple of years ago I had a minor fender bender because I couldn't quickly process a four word traffic sign at a roundabout in Bulgaria. A four word information overload -- and crash!

Yeah, sometimes I find myself spending a lot of time here at TFP and doing junk reading. It's escapist, and usually means that I'm avoiding doing something more important that needs to be done.:shakehead:

Also, +1 and thumbs up:thumbsup: to everything snowy said in Post #2

Lindy

Just a thought, but I have trouble relating the title of the thread to the original post. What am I missing?

Yeah, I didn't quite get it either, and was wondering about that as well! :)

originally it was going to be a thread about why people are so obsessed with facebook but as i wrote it, i realized that the scope of how much people take in on a daily basis encompassed more than just facebook. i accidentally changed the topic without changing the title

Maybe you could ask a mod or admin to change the title to to reflect the thread. I almost passed by this thread by because I thought it was about some kind of gaming.

Lindy

I don't really understand the correlation between being addicted to information and Facebook. Facebook is whiny trash.

I do very much enjoy being able to find out anything I want to know, ever. I love telling my family that you CAN put a baby bird back in its nest when it falls out, and a dog year isn't 7 years, it's based on the size of the dog.

I also in ways hate the information available to us now. Shopping is ruined by the Internet. There is no more shopping for me. I buy clothes in a store, and food, and nothing else. I can't go to Best Buy and just enjoy buying a product because I know I can find a cheaper price through the mystical interwebs.

I have more to say but I'm finding it difficult to put into words. Something about how information has made our lives better, but at the same time it's taken a toll on my enjoyment of discovery.

Eloquent, man. I'm with ya.

I like the Idea of FB. I love knowing my extended family can stay in touch. I just don't like that they keep in touch with me so much.

I really don't want to know about my cousin playing Mafia or my Niece is having the Best hair day Efar . Stop spamming my page with how much you love you BF. And in no way am I going to accept that lost sheep~ Stop it. :D

I don't know if I'd call it information but it's out there.... I'll get to it when I have some of that "extra" time.

*If FB has change since the last time I was there- maybe a year ago- more power to them.