Alexander's blog

I'm Alexander Trafford, and I blog here. I have a website at alexander.io and post titbits at traff.me.

May 17th 2010

I want Facebook to be useful again

5 notes

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I have recently become increasingly disillusioned with Facebook.

Why Facebook is becoming useless for me

There are two key factors behind the decreasing value which I can find in Facebook. Firstly - and much more easily solved - is the seemingly endless barrage of pointless information from various applications on the Facebook ‘platform’. These - despite my best effort to prevent them - alert me to every detail of various people’s fictional farms, zoos, lemonade stand, and racist views.

Secondly, and potentially more troublingly, is the sheer amount of total idiocy that Facebook shows me on a daily basis. Its’ the misspellings, thoughtless comments, the aforementioned bigoted and moronic views, and awful photographs of various horrific escapades.

I believe this itself is down to two factors. Firstly, people believe that they needn’t be careful about what they write - or how they write it - because “it’s a website”, and it isn’t thought to matter. I disagree, but this isn’t an important point, for now at least.

Secondly; in general, people tend to take the view that Facebook is ‘private’. I want address this in another post, but in short: due to their expectation of privacy, people feel as if they aren’t really “publishing” any more than sharing with a select group of ‘friends’.

Are the people the problem?

However, whatever reasoning may lie behind this kind of behaviour, it certainly isn’t everybody. As I said, the solution to this kind of content problem on Facebook isn’t as easy as blanket-blocking particular applications - but it’s similar.

I’ve always had a fairly modest ‘friend count’ on Facebook, my most ever hovering around 330 or so, and I imagine this solution would be less tenable for those with much larger numbers of contacts. But for me, the solution I tried was to delete a fair number of my own contacts - about 70 in all - based on a short list of practical criteria. One of these criterion: do they frequently post things of the nature which I’ve described above?

The result

This method - although perhaps not ideal for everybody - has certainly proved effective for me. Of course it hasn’t eliminated every stupid post that crops up on Facebook, but it has meant that I can actually use my newsfeed again, and not feel irritated and upset with people in general every time I use Facebook.

Posted at 7:51pm and tagged with: one column, writing, 427 words,.

April 21st 2010

Reflecting on my own impact

Over the past few days, I’ve become increasingly upset with things which I’ve seen on the internet, and particularly on Facebook. I very much dislike some of the ways in which I perceive some people to be acting, or representing themselves online.

Reflecting on this, however, brought me to consider my own impact. Whilst I try very hard (and often succeed) at being measured, considerate and thought-out in my writing online, I am often absolutely not. This, I believe, is almost entirely (if not completely) in tweets: 140 characters of expression, which rarely allows for a balanced approach to issues.

In Facebook comments, my longer articles on issues which interest me, blog posts such as I have begun writing here, and even simply my more discursive uses of twitter, I believe I can be successful in reaching these aims of moderation and balance. Far more reasonable than I sometimes let myself be on twitter, at least.

As much as I might still believe in the point, then, I will aim from today to stop posting reactionary, inflammatory tweets about things which make me angry. Instead? Maybe I’ll take notes for a calmer, more thought out blog post or article later.

My friend Grace once said that I sometimes fail in allowing my anger to ‘dwarf my opinions’, and I think that puts it perfectly. I do believe that I can be successful in giving an impact - both to those who know me well, and strangers who may come to know me through online media - of myself which is very positive. I think I’ve done this several times, and I place great value in the relationships I’ve formed and new people I’ve managed to meet through twitter. I’m finally taking the lesson that this positive point can so easily be damaged by explosive attacks, compressed and concentrated into a tiny 140 characters.

There’s also another reason to try and change this about myself: anger is easy. Being angry, and more importantly; being critical, is effortless. That’s why so many inches of opinion columns by regular writers are filled simply with complaints. I don’t wish to dismiss these types of article, but what I do want to do is encourage myself to be thoughful and interesting, rather than merely angry and emptily provocative.

Posted at 11:52pm and tagged with: one column, writing,.

April 21st 2010

To all those who say “fuck the police”

I honestly do not know or understand why people would ever say “fuck the police”. I don’t pretend that my ignorance of this fact alone means that people who say this are ‘wrong’, nor that everyone ought to adopt my personal view of the [British] police.

Personally? I have a great deal of respect for the police, and I think that they are all too often limited in what they are able to do in certain situations.

If I was trying to empathise? I suppose I could posit two theories.

1) The police are seen as nothing more than a force to disrupt their fun, by enforcing laws on marijuana, drinking, or - because this can be what is considered ‘fun’ - other far more serious situations.

2) These people feel unfairly targetted by the police. Perhaps I like the police because it’s very easy for me to. Perhaps some of these people actually are unfairly included in groups of those who are fairly treated to an increased level of attention from the police. Although, to be fair, this is almost certainly a necessary inconvenience, rather than a significant problem.

You don’t even mean it

However - whether or not I agree or can even properly empathise with an anti-police stance - I fundamentally object to anybody shouting, writing or even casually saying “fuck the police”. For many reasons.

One of the most basic and significant, however, is that I simply don’t believe that anybody who says it truly believes in it. On a macro scale, I can’t imagine that anybody honestly believes that the police (or a police-like presence, from a principle point of view) to be useless, or not worth having in a civilised nation. But we needn’t even enter into a complex political discussion about these issues.

Why? Because if these people’s mother’s house was burgled, or their father was attacked, what would they do? Unless I significantly misunderstand this situation: they’d call the police.

Posted at 12:27am and tagged with: one column, writing,.