facebook

[totient]

A while ago I gave up on the idea that I needed to follow a news source in order to find out about important bits of news. Everything that had actually mattered in the previous few months had been mentioned on my LJ flist anyway, so I could reduce newspapers and the like to more of an entertainment/procrastination role rather than counting on them to keep me informed of important goings-on. I still read news sources, but I do so in much the same way that I read, say, IMDB or Wikipedia: it's fun and informative without having a goal of seeking out any particular information.

Yesterday, for the first time, one of those important bits of news came to me through facebook rather than LJ. Huh! I wasn't expecting useful information to come from that direction. I might have to actually start reading my facebook flist a little more regularly.

Comments

[cos]

I am surprised that you are surprised by that. I find that general news comes to me via Facebook significantly more than via LiveJournal. There's a lot more issue advocacy, political organization, and news-spreading happening explicitly on Facebook than on LJ - it's one of the main feeders of people and activity into Facebook.

[skreeky]

Signal/noise ratio is so poor with the new interface, I haven't even been able to reliably get my social news there this week. A friend lost his job, and it was so buried in BeJeweled scores and personality quizzes and Superpoke Noogies, I didn't notice it.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

There's plenty of issue advocacy and political organization, and the issue advocates post a lot of alarmist crap that's made to look like news. I'm talking about actual news, as in "this thing happened in the world that no one was expecting".

[cos]

But that's just the thing: That activity tends to get a lot of news (links to articles, etc.) circulating around Facebook, more so than around LiveJournal.

[tcb.livejournal.com]

I hate the new interface, but I'm committed (resigned?) to it as a valid means of both incoming and outgoing information. It will be a presence that I maintain. What I appreciate about FB is its diversity, and it really is what you make of it. The more you engage with the people in the FB universe, the richer the experience.

(Sydney harbour?)

[skreeky]

Unlike most people, I really don't care one way or the other about the layout. I really miss being able to filter out the noise by noise *type* rather than having to remove whole people from my news feed. There are friends I simply don't hear from at all because they play BeJeweled and I had to nuke their whole input because of it.

[skreeky]

Oh, and yes, Sydney Harbor, on a balmy winter's night last August. =)

[billmarrs.livejournal.com]

I've seen people change their status from "married" to "it's complicated" or "single" on facebook. And, in both cases, it turned out to truly be a marriage breaking up.

It was an odd experience. Impersonal and tragic, bad, and an icky way to find out about it, it seemed. Though, I suppose there's no good way. But, facebook seemed less good to me each time it happened.