Social Media

A look at social media and the issues surrounding this technology.

How to Do Nothing author Jenny Odell on resisting the pull of Instagram – Vox

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How to Do Nothing author Jenny Odell on resisting the pull of Instagram – Vox

Odell’s proposed course of action doesn’t have much use for the now-trendy “Time Well Spent” movement (which relies on more tech to solve the problem of too much tech) or apps that inform you when you’ve wasted too much of your day on social media, or any solution proposed by the same Silicon Valley wunderkinds who profited from getting us into this mess. The goal of those projects, she argues, is to guide you into repurposing your time in a way that’s productive. They’re purportedly about wellness, but they’re tinged with the stink of capitalist always-on hustle culture. She doesn’t even want to get rid of social media, just redo it. Just get us all some peace.

Finding the Right Balance with Social Media.

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I continue to work to fine the right balance between social media and my personal life. I no longer look at social media while I am home or at work, and only check it once a day or less, mostly to keep up with what my clients are posting on their accounts. I’ve decided to continue to occasionally update my Facebook Page, but that’s no longer a top priority of mine — I update things on an ad-hoc basis. I do continue working on my blog, but that’s more of a personal space that I control not full of flashy headlines, click bait, and overly ideological media.

NPR

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Passwords From Millions Of Facebook Users Were Stored Insecurely : NPR

"Unknown to hundreds of millions of Facebook users, their passwords were sitting in plain text inside the company's data storage, leaving them vulnerable to potential employee misuse and cyberattack for years."

I can't believe that they couldn't be bothered to use at least MD5 hashes for the passwords. It's not like MD5 hashes are particularly CPU or memory intensive to implement.

More on Continuing to Pull Back from Social Media

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I continue to pull back from social media, deleting old posts and removing automatic posting from my blog to social media sites. Why?

1) Social media sites are very constraining on layout and design. With paid hosting that I use, I have almost complete freedom in content and design.

2) Social media sites have become swamps of nasty comments and dens of angry people. The nature of easy commenting, makes it easy for people to “flame” and tell you why you are wrong or your ideas lack merit.

3) Facebook is becoming an increasingly closed and proprietary platform. Not only are they very aggressive with censorship, they have all but eliminated the largest developers from using their API. They want users to create “custom content” exclusively for their platform, and not be sharing it from other sites.

4) Facebook not only requires extensive vetting to use their application programming interface, they constantly break their API, requiring countless hours and updates to make your software keep working for them. My Twitter and Instagram code haven’t been updated in years, and they keep plugging along, but Facebook keeps breaking.

Simply said, I like doing my own thing. I don’t want to spend countless hours updating a Facebook page or being limited by a design set out by major corporation. I may lose followers, but I’d rather work on my own blog.

Ice Covered Lake