05.19.12
Facebook makes crazy
I’m rescuing this from the comments section of my last Facebook post. It’s worth wider dissemination and it’s from the Los Angeles Times’ morning edition on Friday, written the preceding evening before the start of the Facebook IPO.
The answer can be found partly in the experience of people such as DeAnna Stephens of Charlotte, N.C. The 36-year-old video producer quit using Facebook in December, deciding she was frittering away too much time reading about what her friends were eating for lunch. Then she realized that she had lost touch with 900 people.
“I couldn’t believe how out of the loop I was on things in life,??? Stephens said. Tired of being the last to hear about new jobs, new boyfriends and new babies, she signed up again …
I’m sorry, you can’t follow 900 friends in your Facebook feed. Whatever this woman may have believed when the reporter talked to her, it has no basis in reality.
In fact, I find the entire idea of 900 Facebook friends utterly stupefying. But I’ve also found those numbers, as on Twitter, not uncommon.
So rather than such things being a meaningful metric concerning the power of social networking, my hunch is they’re more a measure of the human capacity for self-delusion, of the desire in people to believe stuff that’s imaginary in terms of worth because lots of others believe the same thing. In other words, the Cardiff giant thing, the worth of a delusion being determined by how big a majority cleaves to it.
At this time I’m also a bit tickled that, other than the people who vested because they held large amounts of Facebook stock prior to the IPO, most didn’t make any gain on investment yesterday despite the volume of trading.