On Facebook

"Being added as a friend has always meant very little. Being deleted however seems to mean a lot - why would you delete someone from your facebook unless you truly disliked them? We seem to have come to the conclusion that adding someone is such a casual and disinterested action that to delete someone must suggest some kind of abnormal dislike." - CC

This post is in response to a recent blog post by CC. In it, she speaks of Facebook within the context of the internet deadening our connectedness with the real world, be it socially with other people, or in a more physical sense wanting to explore the world outside and experience real things. It is a thoughtful post, and you should read it - it'll put this post into somewhat better context.

In order to contextualise my own viewpoint on this matter, though, I will start with something of a personal anecdote. 

The internet was not a friendly place in high school. I had started a blog and participated in a forum here or there because, for the same reason I started this blog, it seemed like harmless fun. What I didn't count on, though, was two things: one - how brutal people (particularly teenagers) can criticise each other out of either spite or their own need to feel superior or dominant in some way; and two - how tender I was to this kind of criticism, being a teenager myself. 

I was hurt, more than I should have been, and I retracted myself from the interwebs. For a very long time I refused to put any of my personal input into the internet.

My addendum to CC's thesis on the effects of connectivity is that both benefits and detriments of this phenomenon are strongly affected by the way in which we, the user, choose to receive them. This is not to say, though, that the responsibility of all the rage and emotive content that is inspired the internet lies solely on the reader. 'Social Enabling' tools and particularly Facebook have evolved to a point where we are being unintentionally drawn toward certain things in ways which we can't resist because of how subtle they are. 

Inevitably, the more 'user friendly' or 'easy' posting your thoughts on the internet become, the more what you do and read is manipulated by social trends. The solution to handling this is to maintain an awareness of what is going on and then by your own judgement choose how to receive information. I hope that this blog post will raise that awareness, if only by a little.

Over time, the successive developments of Usenet, Blogs, Micro-Blogs and finally Facebook have each successively been touted as the downfall of thoughtfulness in print. 

Usenet and the start of the internet were (admittedly very mildly) seen as opportunity for uncensored, unedited and unthoughtful content to be published. This occurred to the ire of those who believed in the robustness of hard print. The ease with which Usenet allowed for people to 'post' their thoughts into a widely proliferated medium lacked the editorial processes that hard print used to filter out the crap. The logic was that the hard work you put into trying to get something printed in a book or in a newspaper meant that not only was your work reviewed (and therefore worthy of being distributed), but that you earned it. No wonder then, that people in the early 80s would view this as a sad descent into anarchy with the masses being given an accessible tool to proliferate their unfettered thoughts and opinions.

The rebuttal to this argument, however, is a phrase (that may or may not be stolen) that I often utter to my friends in this situations: "there have been long haired youths since the beginning of time". The point being that however debaucherous higher ups view whatever is happening now in society, once upon a time they were in that situation with their progenitors, and in about 10 years time something will come along that will make this all seem civilized in comparison anyway.

For the most part this has rung true as 'opinion proliferating' has become easier and easier with the invention of more enabling media. Once Blogging became a thing, blogs then became the target of this level of criticism. Where Usenet, forums and website-making required some foreknowledge of how and where to write things down, Blogging meant that any person with a web browser could write basically anything.  Then, micro-blogging in the form of Twitter made this even easier - 'thoughtful' sentences with a click of a button and hundreds, even thousands of followers instantly read and digest. 

Twitter - short and apparently significant ramblings

But so far, this is (relatively) okay. Control for us users remains clear because we can identify what content is genuinely intellectual and what isn't particularly thoughtful. It's still relatively clear on what level we can choose to react to these things by judging their form or theme. This selectivity, however, has become infinitely less clear with the union of social networking and micro-blogging that is Facebook. 

Facebook is a complex beast. The concept of 'social networking' by itself was a complicated enough process without the internet stepping in and shoving in our faces things that we might not otherwise see. As CC points out, most of the content is made up of in-jokes that can fly over our heads, the 'friend-defriend' dynamic becomes randomly complex and we become depressed when our witty remarks don't garner attention from our supposed 'friends'.

The shiny 'f' that makes Facebooking so easy

A particularly interesting point comes from the fact that a lot of these Facebook emotional by-products come as a result of what Zuckerberg and others in the Facebook think-tank are doing to prevent it. Although much of Facebook's success can be attributed to the nature of the user interface and (supposed) accessibility much of the website's sticking power comes from the metric that governs what gets put into the top of your 'feed'. The website has evolved to the point where it employs complex but rather effective algorithms that essentially deem what has happened in your 'social network' that should be most important to you.

Facebook distinguishes between what is a 'top story', and everything else

The critical mistake with this is that in order to invoke an 'effective' algorithm, you need to generalise the emotional response of very individual human beings. The result? For a lot of users, fun, meeting people and starting conversation - as the website makers intended. But for others (who make up a significant portion of Facebook) alienation, sadness and ennui for a number of different reasons. As sophisticated as the Facebook programming can be, it will not be able to predict exactly what will make us feel better in moments of non-typical emotion. And sometimes it can step badly wrong.

I am not arguing that Facebook will be 'the downfall of this generation' as some older stuffier schoolteachers (who are now on Facebook) have preached to me in the past. At the end of the day I have gotten a great deal out of Facebook - some of my greatest friendships were initiated by 'friending' them after meeting them casually (an exercise without which I possibly would not have continued further contact). I was connected to my ex-girlfriend via a mutual acquaintance through Facebook - what turned out to be a happy and long relationship.

So how are we to treat Facebook then? We treat it like how we have treated micro-blogging, blogging, the internet, newsprint and television - with necessary and selective detachment. As self-serving as it may seem, I emotionally connect with Facebook when it makes me happy, but as soon as something that provokes an unsavoury emotion from me crops up, I remind myself that it's 'just Facebook'. It's harmless to use these things to amuse ourselves day to day, but we should leave serious discussion and the confrontation of our own emotions to more severe forms of communication.

Those who are happiest using something like Facebook will by and large have healthy lives off the internet and with real people. At the end of the day Facebook should be treated like any other media which is slightly mindless - as harmless entertainment. Nothing more.

Take Facebook with a grain of salt.

Operating Systems: haters gotta hate

The first time I showed my MacApple obsessed friend the fresh install of Windows 7 on my computer, he may have fallen over when he saw how much the new taskbar looked like the iconic Mac OS dock.

Compare the Pair

At the time I was a fierce Mac objector - even in the face of what a steaming pile of fail Windows Vista was. In fact, the whole issue that I personally had with Vista was that it seemed like, somewhere along the way, Windows tried too hard to be Mac OS X and had ended up being like something akin to a Vegas Cher lookalike. It was inefficient, frustrating, and in a word my colleague coined specifically for these situations, "terribad".

Three years and several OS-related programming experiences later, what I slowly came to realise is that, after all, Macs aren't an evil hipster plague upon the technological universe - they're actually pretty damn impressive pieces of engineering. It just so happens that their intended use doesn't intersect with mine.

What I wanted to do in this post is have a stab at trying to pin down the mechanics of the standoff between Mac users and Windows fanboys and try to bridge the gap between them.

The main criticism that anti-mac users will have for Mac OS is how inflexible it is. Everything about the Macbook, from the Touchpad to the way 'Finder' looks almost exactly like iTunes seem like they dictate exactly how you're going to experience your shiny new machine.

That doesn't strike me as being a necessarily bad thing.

In the same way that good level design in a game intuitively and unobtrusively leads a player to the next waypoint or objective, the Mac interface is designed to tell the user how they're supposed to get onto the internet, or play songs, or make home movies, or a host of other things that, lets face it, 70 percent of the population wealthy enough to afford a computer will ever do.

The Macbook Touchpad - By far the best Touchpad in the market today

Apple knows this. And when Microsoft ported over Microsoft Office to the Mac OS, there's little denying the enabling power that a Macbook can bring to someone who wouldn't otherwise care about computer resource management or hardcore software development interfaces.


It's little wonder, then, that Windows tried so hard to tap into that intuitive interface market. Once upon a time, the set of killer apps for Windows were business, word processing and application compatibility - none of which are issues for Macs today. Quite a few Windows vs Mac OS arguments that I've witnessed in the past few months have basically consisted of the Mac user replying "Macs can do that too".

One would logically think then, given all this information (and that Windows at least seems to be following Apple's lead) that Windows is starting to trail behind in the consumer OS war, right?

Wrong - Windows currently runs on 82 percent of all internet access clients (see Wikipedia's article on OS usage share). That is, based upon data that your internet browser surreptitiously sends to magic databases, the 82 percent of all machines that access today the internet are running Windows.

OS Usage share. Note the Windows domination (From Wikipedia)

So, why? It's rather complicated (and possibly beyond my understanding) but I will try to distill it down to three things in decreasing levels of simplicity in explanation - Games, Working Flexibility and User Interface.

First, Gaming. Yes, I know that both Blizzard and Steam develop and enable games for Mac. But at the end of the day the Gaming community, (one that makes up a sizeable chunk of the consumer computing market) wants their Windows and wants their DirectX enabled graphics. Macs still have a long way to go to try to grab that market share.

The amount of noob pwnage that occured when Mac users entered Team Fortress 2 servers would only be topped when TF2 became free to download

Second, Flexibility - I talked before about how much effort has been placed into Macs' intuitive user interface. The problem with so much design going into intuition is that you leave little room for flexibility. That is to say, Macs are beautiful machines to use so long as you don't stray outside the bounds of what the Mac OS X developers had in mind. Again, I'm not denying that Mac is capable of many things. Graphics design, music production and even architectural software are all beautifully executed within the Mac OS framework.

The problems come when you get into the niche yet computer dominating markets - namely, engineering, software development and high end business. With the exception of some Unix distributions, Windows has the ability to integrate some of the most profoundly useful and elegant programming environments to work in (cf. Microsoft Visual Studio).

And the knock-on effect of this integration is that the software developers who make engineering software like Altium, AutoCAD and Matlab know that their chief users are going to use their products on Windows machines. Add onto this that Microsoft offers the best support for large corporations supporting massive networks of Windows machines and you have a business industry full of market sustaining Windows users.
 
And finally, where this post all started - User Interface. This is tricky. I complained before that Windows Vista was a pale imitator of Mac OS X. Windows 7 pushed that even further. But by fixing all the places where Vista went horribly wrong, 7 actually is a very nice and, dare I say, intuitive operating system to use.

Such is the success of Windows 7 that Microsoft have finally decided to retire the behemoth that was Windows XP (still, by the way, the most popular OS). And with the Windows 8 open beta out and receiving some very positive reviews, it seems like Microsoft are pushing in the right direction with user interface. It's not a Mac, but still nice to use.

The Windows 8 'Metro' UI is more touchscreen friendly than ever

Final anecdote - a rather persistent shop assistant  tried to justify the extra cost of a Macbook to me by saying that I was paying "for all the extra software features that make Macbooks easy to use". I stopped short of pointing out to him the conclusion to this post:

"You have no idea how I use my computer, and I don't care if your OS works better for you."

Hi. I'm a PC, and my best friend is about to become a Mac.





Post Scriptum:
Yes, I have seen the pictures of Henry Cavill in the new Superman suit. Its awful. But I will refrain from telling you all exactly why until I dilute the amount of Superman in my blog.