This one's a beaut. A very typical example of the lack of communication on Facebook.



Three comments, and not one of them actually tells you diddly about the movie. Except the name of the director. Damning with faint praise? Or are people thinking "MY mere endorsement will send people running to find out more!" Or do they just plain have nothing to say? I just can't imagine loving something and having absolutely nothing to say about it.

The middle guy didn't love it, it seemed to leave him cold. But he had nothing to say about it either. Can you imagine if this was a debate??

Petrosianic, you need to start a blog where you can give detailed film reviews, analyses of politicians' speeches and so forth! Facebook just isn't suited for considered reflections and any short comment is going to boil down to 'I liked this and I think you might too', isn't it? So why not just say something like 'TREE OF LIFE!!!!!!!!!! YES! Best movie of the decade!!'

It's like complaining that no slogans on billboards ever present a detailed and rational argument, it seems to me.

Argument? I'd settle for a specific statement. You don't have to prove to me that Tree of Life is a good movie, just tell me why you think it is. (Good script? Good effects? Good performance? Your brother was the Best Boy?) Just tell me what you liked about it. Is that asking too much? You said something in a very short post, so it's obviously not impossible to do.

Your comparison of Facebook to billboards is interesting (even though billboards tend to say a little more). But that sounds like an argument to not use Facebook at all. (Who'd come home and go to a website where people read billboards for fun? Now, that's perverse.) If that's what you're saying, it's hard to disagree. Except to say that actual discussion does go on on Facebook in some of the groups. In a group devoted to discussing a TV show, people actually say things about that show. They don't write essays, granted, but it's more than nothing.

A lot of "small talk" would seem perfectly inane if it were written out. Oh, wait, that's what we are talking about here...a globalized medium where we exchange "hallway greetings" in written form to dozens or even hundreds of people simultaneously.

The movie "conversation" is exactly the type of "small talk" that might fill some space before a meeting or while pausing in a hallway. It would almost certainly be forgotten a few moments after taking place, but the social lubrication effect would remain.

Write it out where dozens, possibly hundreds, of non-participants can see it and you have....an idiotic facebook topic.

Anyway, that's my thought on the topic.

Yeah, but there would be more interaction in a face-to-face encounter. If those three people said the same things at the water cooler, then when the second person said that it wasn't his cup of tea, the other two would have reacted in some way (probably by asking what was wrong with it). So, it seems like doing it this way, we still have the small talk, without getting the social lubrication.

In fact, this exchange would almost seem rude in the face-to-face encounter. The one guy expressed an opinion contrary to the other two, and the other two just ignored it. In real life, that would come off as a snub.

I click very few links on Facebook, so I'm not surprised I haven't seen this before. But here is yet another reason why it's a good idea to develop your own communications skills, rather than letting links do your talking. I clicked one today and got this:



So, whatever this guy was trying to tell us didn't come through. Pity he didn't just tell us himself.

This one has nothing directly to do with Facebook, it just reminded me of Facebook. Well, not just Facebook, granted. Also Usenet, and the comments section of almost every online article.

UK lawmakers: Most radicalism linked to Internet

In one of the comments, some guy responded to the article by ignoring its points and claiming that lawmakers were afraid of the internet because it represented the last bastion of free speech, and intelligent discussion. No seriously, that's what he said. Maybe this was his first day online and he was guessing? That's all I can figure.

I can't quote him exactly because I came back a half hour later, and all the comments had been deleted. Draw your own conclusions.

Actually, Kevin's "tl;dr" idea is one of the better ideas that's come down the pike. I'm tempted to just post that in reply to people who make a habit of posting unexplained links (in fact, I wish I'd thought of that back in the days when I read Chess Fan's spam). But I dunno, I feel like people would get annoyed at being told that the article went unread, but wouldn't draw the correct conclusions (Maybe I should have given them some reason to read it).

Here's one I saw today that I liked, though. A friend spammed a link to an article called "Treating cancer with electric fields", and just wrote "A cure for cancer? Looks like." No other explanation, and certainly no reason for thinking that this was going to be the big breakthrough.

Someone wrote back "Sounds like hand-wavey magic to me." This is a delightfully dismissive answer, precisely because of its ambivalence. On the surface, he's disagreeing with the article. Or is he? Maybe he never read it at all, and is just reacting in a knee-jerk way to the whole idea of electric field treatments? In other words, he says he's disagreeing with the article, but there's no indication he even read it. Just like there's no indication that the original poster read it either. Without being critical of the first guy, the second guy has matched the vacuity of the original post. Pure poetry. I'm tempted to chime in with an equally empty comment, disagreeing with the article, but for no specific reason. Maybe we can start a whole thread of comments, none of which says anything.

It could be just like that Python sketch where they have a panel discussion to talk about whether there should be a BBC3. They had 4 people on the panel to discuss it, but they all had one-word opinions. "Yes." "No." "No." "Yes." "There you have it. Two say Yes, two say No. Next week, we'll be discussing..."

I wrote back "Yep, it'll never fly". I can't take credit for it though, I was just copying Earl's brilliance.

After all this time, I still don't get it. The guy who spammed this link is very intelligent. And if this treatment really were The Cure For Cancer it would be of monumental importance. How could anyone believe that it was, and still seem so uninterested?

Imagine if Facebook existed in the 1930's. Imagine you heard Orson Wells' War of the Worlds broadcast, believed it, and then went on Facebook and posted "Yep, looks like the aliens will be occupying Washington tomorrow." That's how the presentation of this cancer article comes across to me.

And in fact, that gives me an idea for something even more brilliant and more elaborate than Earl's hand-wavey comment. I don't think I should mention it here until and unless I do it. Someone might talk me out of it.

Didn't I post that on Facebook itself, meaning most CN readers won't know what you were referring to? And that 'hand-wavey magic' comment is a fine one; who knows whether the guy actually read the cancer cure article?