Sense and Nonsense

Break the Facebook Addiction

    What a colossal waste of time Facebook is!  Pity the addled masses.  Kudos to those who try to wean themselves from the habit.  

Here is a good description of the problem that plagues many American students: they are unfocused and lazy.  Not all of them, of course.  But all too many.  They should get off Facebook and do some work. 

Zits 

Clean Up Your Act

All you Facebook fanatics (you know who you are), listen up!

The New York Times today reports on a new app that will help you scrub those regrettable photos from Facebook.  You know the ones. 

The Internet Wasteland

Longtime readers (viewers? habitués?) of this blog know that I have a special fondness for the various parodies that have appeared on the Web using Hitler's meltdown scene from the film "Downfall."  Here is another one.  In this version, Adolf disintegrates over the ubiquity of Web parodies of his meltdown. He's told that it has become a "meme." Wonderful. For some reason, I can't get enough of this scene in all its glorious incarnations. I may have to do my own some day.

What does Hitler think of the Downfall meme? - watch more funny videos

Sneering at Twitter and Twitterers

Well, once again, somebody is making use of that great scene from the movie "Downfall," showing Hitler having a meltdown.  You may recall this version (Hitler as Hillary Clinton, raging after yet another primary loss to Obama), posted here a couple of times in recent months. Priceless. 

Well, the latest isn't bad, either.  In this one, Hitler, an ardent Twitterer, turns apoplectic when he learns that Twitter's servers are down and he can't share his sadness about the death of his dog.  (Incidentally, here is today's Doonesbury comic strip -- a funny swipe at Twitter and Twitterers!  Click to enlarge.)

I don't use Twitter and I don't care about it, nor do I have any brief against Twitter or Twitterers.  But this video is very funny.  Not as good as the one noted above, but still hilarious.

Saving the Newsrooms

Earlier I noted my sadness over the news that some newspapers are shutting down their Washington bureaus in an effort to trim costs.  I hate to think of newspapers dying out.

Jeff Jarvis has a great post on HuffPo today that lays out some innovative ideas for how America's newspapers might survive -- and thrive.  His suggestions are sobering to those of us who love newsprint, but they're worth thinking about.

Corporate Responsiveness

Today's New York TImes carries an interesting article about Brandon Dilbeck, a blogger who used his internet megaphone to complain the way Comcast posts ads in its on-screen program guide.

He soon got an e-mail from Frank Eliason, a "digital care manager" at Comcast, whose job is to "monitor public comments on blogs, message boards and social networks for any mention of Comcast, the nation's largest cable company.  When he sees a complaint like Mr. Dilbeck's, he contacts the source to try to defuse the problem."

The Times reports that Dilbeck found Comcast's email response "a bit creepy," as if "Big Brother" were watching him.

While I stand second to none in my suspicion and distrust of corporate America, this strikes me as a smart and innocuous strategy on Comcast's part.  In their understandable desire to defuse criticism, they are reaching out to be responsive to particular complaints.  And it's not as if they've infringed on Dilbeck's privacy: he put his complaint out there on the Internet.

Hide from Your "Friends"

Verlyn Klinkenborg comments on social networking.

I get wind of a new site, pay it a visit and discover that it already has a population four times the size of some midsized countries — everyone speaking the local dialect, taboos and kinship patterns well worked out, a robust economy and brisk trading with other social-networking sites. I have begun to fear the result if one site declared war on another. What if Bebo fired upon fubar? What if LinkedIn threatened to blockade imeem?
. . .
One effect of so much social networking — so many overlapping communities of interlinked individuals — is that the language of actual human interaction begins to feel degraded. What can the word “friend” mean after Facebook, where it is really a synonym for “coincidence”? How subtle can the emotions be in a TiVo-ish world like iLike, where it’s thumbs up or thumbs down? There’s no room even for the hand-wiggle that means “meh.”
. . .
I hope there will be room soon for some anti-social Web sites — places on the Web where you can go to be alone, to hide from your “friends.” Perhaps that is what real life is for.

MySpace or Facebook?

My guess is that most of the people who check in with this site from time to time are younger than I, but not by decades, and thus probably are not people who use MySpace or Facebook as means of maintaining a social network.  But many of you are young enough that you probably DO use one or both of those sites.

So, my question is:  which is better?  are there different dimensions on which each is preferable?  what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Are there other sites altogether -- Twitter, for example -- that are preferable? 

Weigh in here, friends.  Help me [us] out.