Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Kthulhu5000

by R. Guyovich
I had a dream in which the devil told me to never use Facebook, and since the devil's pretty drat cool I did what he said. Life's never been better for me!

----------------
This thread brought to you by a tremendous dickhead!

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Kthulhu5000

by R. Guyovich

vanisher posted:

We just need to start a rival social media site that's marketed as super exclusive and watch the users roll in.

BYOBook

I think politics leads to a lot of strife and discourse, so there would have to be a "no politics" clause unless said content is just off-the-chain sweet and IN GOOD FUN.

like, presidential candidate A riding a jetski up a ramp and into the gaping maw of a squirrel with demonic red eyes, or the face of presidential candidate B on that one viral meme image from a few years back of the 80s mullet dude looking sideways and sticking his tongue at a crowd as he's catching air in those three wheel motortrikes that were banned, and his Speedo thong is so skinny and tight up his rear end that his testicles are splayed out from both sides of it.

basically, nearly perfect political images.

----------------
This thread brought to you by a tremendous dickhead!

Kthulhu5000

by R. Guyovich

BoldFrankensteinMir posted:

I have a theory- you guys ever heard of an "extinction burst"? Simply put it's a burst of energy (often frantic and distressed) you experience when a conditioned idea stops working. The classic example is in a broken elevator, you push a button but nothing happens. So you push it again, and still nothing happens. Then, as the idea of "push button to make elevator go" dies, your brain goes into extinction burst, as you mash the button a whole bunch of times and grunt like a psychotic monkey.

My theory is that social media, and specifically people using it without any sort of business purpose in mind, is the extinction burst of our social conditioning about fame. Not that long ago you had to be actually notable in some way for people around the world to be aware of you (with occasional exceptions that merely prompted people to note that fame was "fickle". Think the elevator that you only have to push the button twice sometimes). This meant there was an association, even a tenuous one, between fame and accomplishment.

But now literally anybody can plaster their face all over literally the entire planet, so the connection between fame and accomplishment is stressed to the point of breaking, and everybody is having a giant flurry of frantic panicky energy about it as they hoard friends/subscribers/followers and gnaw feebly on the long-stripped bones of fame. A whole generation grew up dreaming of being some kind of radio/TV/movie/rock/whatever star, a status symbol that is swiftly dying in a more connected world. That realization that the fame elevator doesn't work anymore makes for a lot of screaming monkey button-mashing.

TLDR

Couldn't it be the other way around, though? That the prevalence of mass exposure and ethereal nature of online attention is only proving that genuine fame does in fact require time and effort, and that just being out there only reduces your likelihood of being otherwise non-remarkable in the public's eye by 0.000001% (a benefit which everyone else gets, too)?

I bet that sort of realization does make for some pretty mad monkey men.

----------------
This thread brought to you by a tremendous dickhead!

Kthulhu5000

by R. Guyovich

Nosfereefer posted:

ive just spoken w/ mark zuckerberg, and as it turns out - no. we can't all just quit using facebook :(

people think Zuck has some big money-making world-domination type plan with Facebook, but really, he's just trying to collect a million friends so he can become a real human boy.

----------------
This thread brought to you by a tremendous dickhead!

  • Locked thread