Cathy Classics by Cathy Guisewite for August 06, 2009

YUCK

I’m trying to decide if I want to join Facebook or not, and these comics are pushing me toward “no way.”

Facebook is a great way to reconnect with people you’ve lost touch with, or to share pictures with friends/relatives. It doesn’t have to be an addiction. (although there are some games on there that are easy to get hooked on!) Unfortunately none of the characters in this strip have any sense of impulse control, so I can see them all having a problem with it.

I only spend a few minutes a day there. I check on what my friends are doing and maybe take a quiz or two. Some of them are doing a farm thing or a yo-ville thing which look interesting but I don’t want to start anything like that because I have enough to do already.

lighten up - don’t do it! I spend a couple HOURS a day using “apps” on Facebook, visiting “groups”, “pages”, and stalk… I mean, viewing, peoples photos day after day.

Ugh, the parade of fake made up photos is nauseating. You can be on facebook and exercise some self control with the time on it. But it easy to let it be a time waster.

I don’t use apps, I don’t use most of the stuff on Le Livre des Visages. It’s useful for sending a message when I don’t know where else someone is.

The whole point of the internet is decentralization. Everything facebook does has already been available in decentralized applications. People are supposed to use email, have their own web page/blog (but most people have forgotten how and have to use some corporation’s), use IM (decentralized protocols like IRC or Jabber, not AIM or MSN), etc.

Facebook makes you socially dependent on a single corporation with a centralized server farm.