i demand intuitive thinking

Gakked from sockkpuppett here, because for some reason it really hit me today while reading.

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others" -- Martha Graham

There is no law of conservation for creativity. It's not a use it or lose it kind of deal; don't use it and it's still waiting. So you know, do something with it.

Facebook Things

rivkat is talking here (briefly) about Facebook and the latest thing there on the brand new totally different filters and groups thing they introduced. And intuitive use.

At first, I was thinking it was because I was LJ/DW that Facebook was so weirdly counterintuitive and wrong for me; then a few months ago, I helped a former friend do his privacy settings (as at the time, I had been reading on nothing but privacy settings) and while he wasn't LJ/DW, or like, social networky much at all, he was a geek and a programmer and I was thrown a little by the fact that a guy who enjoys linux command line was thrown that much by the settings.

Contrast: my sisters came from MySpace to Facebook and had few transition issues. My mother was non-networky until Facebook and finds the entire thing a bastion of Spock's wisdom (disclosure: she paralled with GuildWars, but I'm almost sure Facebook came first). My son took to it like a duck to water, but let's be fair here, he's a fangirl geek's kid, so I have to measure him by other fangirl geek kids, and he's in the right age group to have friends doing it and so he must, too. He also was a user of online kids' MMORPGs and evony, so it's not like the brat was tabula rasa here.

While I get the first social networking site you use is often the one you bond with and becomes the measure by which all must be compared and everything, there's also Mr. Nearly Tabula Rasa Programmer up there who reacted to it just like I did even though he's not LJ/DW and that throws my curve. I'm not talking about those who are now comfortable with it after using Facebook for a bit, but that initial get to know you period--did it click and you got it, even if you didn't know it yet, or did you stare at it in horror and just fail to comprehend what the fresh hell was this?

With the exception of Scrapbook--which is an argument that no one should try to design things while high since I'm still way better at using it when I'm dosed with enough Vicodin to see energy trails and I am not saying brad was high, I'm just saying did no one check his pupils?--LJ and especially DW are very intuitive for me (DW even more so, but DW is a unique social networking site and I'm not sure fits on this curve at all due to both its history and its owners).

Thing is, usenet was intuitive, and so were mailing lists and interestingly enough, I went to read a post I did years ago on the transition to LJ from mailing lists through the lens of SV fandom and I'm kind of surprised to realize that all the differences are a lot more superficial in terms of how we structure interaction than I thought then. Not in like, structure, no, but in--I don't know if the word I'm looking for here is organization, but in how I think.

I'm kind of wondering, randomly, if someone from the blogosphere hitting Facebook and someone from the chans hitting Facebook to start an account the same day would have a similar reaction to it, because of their online social history. Okay, acafen, could someone thesis this already? Please? Because yes, my sampling size is small, but it's diverse enough that there has to be something I'm missing on why Facebook feels like a structureless hell of inanity before I actually have to look at my feed with a sense of growing horror.

Final Note

dreamatdrew sat up with me and kindly walked me through the first stages of installation of Ubuntu Server. Which means when I get home, welcome to command line hell. Where is my cheat sheet anyway? More adventures in what the hell will come later. Possibly with crying. When dreamatdrew won't see it.

Comments

[dreamatdrew]

Possibly with crying. When [personal profile] durandal won't see it.
But I will know.......

[seperis]

Lies.

[lferion]

I would read that article in a heartbeat! I *still* cannot make heads or tails of Facebook, and I've never been comfortable with it at all. I use it to the Very Limited extent that I have to (lots of family & school-acquaintances and so forth) but LJ/DW is home. Even Twitter makes more sense and is more happy-making for me.

Good luck with the command-line!

[seperis]

I think I linked to it during the privacy debate thing, then I downloaded a thing that automatically checks your facebook privacy settings. I'll post them when I find them, in case someone doesn't have it already.

[lferion]

I was actually thinking of the thesis/article you propose to the acafen as the article I would read instantly if it existed :-)

I have managed (I think) to set my facebook privacy settings as I want them (within the limits of what they let you actually _set_) and I do little enough there that I'm not actively worried about it. But the whole site still is just confusing & strange.

[princessofgeeks]

i love that graham quote. it's so comforting for me.

and i hated facebook so much i deleted mine. so i'm right with you there, i'm afraid.

[akacat]

I migrated from BBSes to Usenet to email lists to yahoo groups, with a brief stop at MUDDs along the way, before I got to LJ. LJ was very mildly confounding due to the freedom it gave, but with the exception of markup code I never really needed to read the instructions.

Since then I've been on forums, pretty much every LJ clone in the English-speaking world, and Twitter. Still no problems.

Bu FaceBook was a nightmare, and that was before I was on FB under my real name. Now it's twice the nightmare! But connecting to relatives who think FB is the entire internet is the only reason I'm on there at all, so. I try to hide my resentment at having to use such a bizarrely constructed system from them.

[niqaeli]

I hate Facebook. It is an unintuitive MESS. I know full well how to go about digging out the information I want, it just aggravates me to have to do so.

I mean, this is why I came to loathe being on LJ even before the policies made the place uninhabitable, actually. I could never FIND anything without hunting. It got so much more noticeable after I moved to Dreamwidth, of course, because i COULD find everything on Dreamwidth without any trouble whatsoever.

Weirdly, Twitter used to aggravate me similarly but after using it for a bit, it started making sense in a way Facebook STILL doesn't. God, I hate looking at my feed some days. It's just -- gah, CHAOS. Mind Twitter is, like, that chaos, only, without any attempt to PRETEND that there's order. I think that might be Facebook's problem: they pretend that there's a semblance of order but really it's an undifferentiated mess. And that pretense is more annoying than the chaos is.

I don't know why it works so well for so many people, but I'm going to guess that your options are a) not being technically minded and expecting there to BE a legitimate sense of order if you're claiming there is one or b) exposure at a young enough age for the brain to melt appropriately into being able to process.

Or I could be making shit up entirely. But there's SOMETHING about the chaos of Facebook that's at play in particular people's hatred of the interface.

ETA: Also, Brad's brain did not work like other people's. I'm not sure high was necessary because, seriously, rabid weasel on crack. ...I say that with all love and affection but jesusfuck, Scrapbook was only the most EGREGIOUS poor design, but far from the only only poor design.

[seperis]

Scrapbook is the hardest for me to deal with because it is its own module in LJ and yet isn't structured like the rest of LJ. God.

[lydiabell]

My initial response to Facebook was, "What is this for?" Everything seemed so shallow and transitory there. Where were the posts? Where were the communities? How did you use this to actually find people who share your interests and have real conversations with them? No, really, where were the posts?

I've adjusted to that and started to find ways to use it, but I can't imagine it ever replacing LJ/DW for me. Or at least, I can't imagine wanting to go that way.

[pixel]

Ditto.

I had one for a while. I discovered that while LJ has it's share of 'pretty mundane, trivial or otherwise uninteresting' content, that's ALL Facebook is. Like, the only legitimate use I could find was sharing pictures, and I already have a (marginally) functional solution with photobucket.

About the time all this really sunk in, they faffed around with the privacy settings and I realized that I could not make the time it would take to get that right match up with my actual desire to use the site. So I deleted it.

Since then, even LJ has been tossed in favor of Dreamwidth. Tho I think that has more to do with realizing how much better LJ could be.

[mecurtin]

I have a FB account, but I only access it in Google Chrome, a browser I use for nothing else -- I call it "Facebook's playpen". I loathe it, but it seems necessary these days.

[fyrdrakken]

There is no law of conservation for creativity. It's not a use it or lose it kind of deal; don't use it and it's still waiting. So you know, do something with it.

I argue with this premise, because I and some others have found sort of the opposite. It may not be an upper limit on creativity so much as the finite nature of time, energy and focus -- but there's quite simply only so much you can do, and only so many projects you can really progress on at the same time. (The flip side of course is that creativity dammed up in one area does overflow in other directions -- I've found myself suddenly dipping back into ficcing when I got stuck on all the knitting I was currently doing, for example. Neil Gaiman and Jhonen Vasquez have both done plots along the lines of where creative energy can find itself diverted to.)

That being said, I'm in full agreement with letting creativity flow somewhere rather than going entirely to waste, and not second-guessing oneself as to the directions in which it's being expressed, and just kind of generally going with it to keep one's chops up and one's skills honed.

As for Facebook, I keep coming back to the problem that it's set up to allow you to be "friended" by family and people you work(ed) with and went to school with and knew IRL but lost contact with years ago: Which is to say, people you find yourself associated with that you might not have chosen to affiliate yourself with had you been given free choice, and with whom you may have nothing in common, no shared interests or topics of conversation. It's set up to encourage inanity, the small talk of people who don't know each other well enough to have anything serious or interesting to say to each other, or who don't want to say it because they know it won't set well with part of their audience. Whereas LJ/DW are based around shared interests and mutual friends (to say nothing of friends-locking and carefully constructed filters), which encourage the exact opposite.

[terrio]

Hypothesis: Facebook is to LJ/DW as AOL is to an actual e-mail program and/or web browser.

[hilarytamar]

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.

God, that's always so ridiculously nice to hear. Trying to make myself believe I'm a special snowflake with unique shiny wonderfulness whose work is sublime would I but embrace the true beauty of my soul – I find that a little distracting, when all I really want to do is get some goddamned work done. *cough* Anyway.

I set up a Facebook account a while ago for the purposes of name-squatting, and did you stare at it in horror and just fail to comprehend what the fresh hell was this? describes my reaction entirely. I back-buttoned as fast as I could and never went back. I have no idea how to access content; I certainly have no idea how it's structured or how to navigate it. People I respect use it, though, and I keep telling myself I should try, but inertia and (I'll be honest) a certain snobbish preference for prose written in connected paragraphs keep me firmly on DW/LJ instead. I'm sure there's an appeal to it, but nobody's been able to explain it to me in a way I can grok.

[elucreh.livejournal.com]

You know what I wonder all the time is whether the people who picked Blackboard as the optimal web-schooling platform were A) high or B) on Facebook already.

[stripedpetunia.livejournal.com]

This. Fucking Blackboard.

[kkpixie.livejournal.com]

My loathing for blackboard will known no bounds. That site is a worthless rotting carcass and using it is like choking of the fumes rising from its decay as I am forced to carry it on my back, crawling across a desert of broken glass.

[stripedpetunia.livejournal.com]

I got on facebook... five years ago now oh my god. At the time, it was sleek and low on features, and it clicked for me really quickly. Now I barely can keep up with the sneaky fucking updates they fling at me. They've changed the filters? See, I didn't know this. I should just delete facebook and marry Twitter.

Twitter, I also got immediately. There's not much ABOUT Twitter to get, which is the nice part.

[clari-clyde.livejournal.com]

To throw another variable to muck up your stats: I notice that intent also makes a difference between who gets it and who doesn’t. On LJ, I notice that people who care very much about privacy tend to put more time into understanding how the privacy features work than people who arrive here and just want to get their squee on. “Filters? Comment screening? Adult content setting?” These features can seem daunting for this group of users to think about.

I am figuring out that on LJ, we would say “filter,” whereas on FB, we would say, “list.” And I guess then “comms” and “groups” would be the closest analogies.

Both do make sense to me but then I’ve always been a bit of a social butterfly in that in high school, I was the girl who spent every day with a different clique. I spend a lot of time thinking about where a group of people have been to try to get a sense of what they want in the present and future.

Once I got that LJ was where people wanted to participate under pseudonyms, every positive/negative reaction to interface changes made sense. (Though, I still like to play devil’s advocate.) Ditto once I realized that FB is where people want to present themselves, full name and all, but without getting stalked. (And MySpace was the place for people to be themselves until they realized they didn’t want to do that so openly and went to CraigsList to do so anonymously. )

[vickita.livejournal.com]

I got my Facebook account back in the days when you still had to have a .edu email address to sign up for it. I did it because someone was linking to my photos from there, and I wanted to see what they were saying/doing with them. I didn't use it for ages; The Piper and some of his friends friended me there, but I didn't use it. And yeah, my initial reaction was WTF? Why would anyone want to use this?

Even further back, I had a Myspace account, which I got back when it was still being sold as a place for indie musicians. I got heavily into using that when I first really started trying to sell my photography to musicians, make contact with them, etc. I used Myspace *exclusively* for business and never particularly cared for it as a social thing, but it was very useful for me at that time for the musician-networking thing. *Very* useful.

I don't remember exactly what it was that got me to actually *using* FB; I'm sure it was something to do with some musician. It's only been, I dunno, maybe a year and a half? But in that time, my use of Myspace has gone away completely (also true for most of my musicians), and FB has become a real social network for me. I've got so many friends there, and it's a place where we all conduct business -- someone gets a new gig or releases a CD or a video or wants to remind everyone that they're playing at Foo Bar this weekend, that's where it happens -- but also where we just hang out and chat. I'm actually there more than I'm here these days. I still love LJ, and there are conversations here that aren't even remotely possible over there -- nobody talks in this much length or depth over there -- but I find myself looking for the "like" button over here on LJ. *g*

[wivern.livejournal.com]

I've not used Facebook and the very idea of it makes my hair stand on end. And everything I read about it reinforces my dislike and distrust of the thing.

It's kind of sad because there is a friend from Uni that I lost touch with a few years ago and I was told recently that she was on FB. But even the strong desire to get in touch with her hasn't overcome my issues. *g*

[http://users.livejournal.com/_whiskers/]

For context: I'm a silicon valley geek with a degree in computer science.

That said, I didn't find the facebook privacy settings page confusing. If your geek friend knows his way around virtual machines, it's certainly no more confusing than VM settings.

What I found incredibly obtuse was facebook *privacy.* Even after I'd set all my settings, when confronted with the actual UI, I felt frozen with paranoia that I really didn't know what was the visibility of anything I was seeing or doing - either for my own post, or someone else's post (say, if I were going to comment). Eventually I learned to use facebook filters (which are really just like LJ filters, except FB annoyingly makes you work a lot harder to attach them to a post). However, according to Facebook, <5% of their users ever used them. I wonder how many LJ users actually use LJ filters and how much we're the minority power users?

In this respect, I think this week's change is a big improvement, because of one change that's not getting a lot of notice: now, when I go to post an update, it clearly says "Share X with" and then a drop-down menu with a list of choices (friends, friends of friends, everyone, and importantly, all my groups). I still wish it showed the visibility of my friends' posts, but I'm a lot happier with how much easier it's gotten to specify (and be sure of) who's going to see a post I make.

I'm not sure I buy Rivka's skepticism about other people adding her to groups. That seems like kneejerk facebook paranoia to me. The only people who can add her are her friends - and it's not like her LJ friends can't add her to their LJ filters. The difference here is that she can decide to use those groups as filters too, if she wants - which might be the only thing that gives a prayer of pushing usage up beyond 5%. (I also read somewhere that if you leave a group, the friend that added you loses the ability to add you to other groups).

[http://users.livejournal.com/_whiskers/]

Oh, I was also going to say, this makes for another confounding factor. If you don't care much about privacy, facebook's interface pretty much hides it from you, making it perhaps an "easier" learning curve than an interface that makes you think about it. Whereas if you *do* care about privacy, facebook's invisibility is the confounding part.

So, is it possible that the difference in your samples is how much they care about protecting their privacy, rather than background or technical ability?

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Yes, but to me, background is an inherent part of that personal policy on privacy. IE Mr. Tabula Rasa wasn't LJ/DW, but he was WoW and online (potentially, he might have been at the chans, but personalitywise it would be for mocking them), so his internet culture was mixed--his guild and those on his LAN may know his identity (local) but not all of the universe of WoW. Whereas my mother and sisters, who weren't into it until later, entered through the MySpace/Facebook custom, which has no, or very little, emphasis on either personal privacy or a strong tradition of hiding it beneath pseudonym.

So yeah, for some of the settings, the privacy issue is huge, but the way they structure everything, to me, is a problem, because just looking at teh interaction of feeds, comments, walls, and games is a Venn Diagram. I understand it because I learned it (I hae to review myself every few months) but it doesn't, to me, make sense in terms of the logical build of infrastructure for a site. To me, it's like a really bad case of organic planning--not that they didn't think ahead, but they didn't think ahead far enough when putting features together and grouping them.

I hate facebook...

[kityye.livejournal.com]

I have one (it took my friends 2 years to talk me into it) but I hate it. I never know who can see what - if I post it on my wall, then everyone can see it, but if I comment back, how does anybody know? And where do I go to find comments? And why do my games keep dissapearing? There used to be links in the upper right hand corner, then the bottom right hand corner, and now they're on the upper left side... I can't find anything and I don't think the system is intuitive. Mostly, I scroll down posts on the page that comes up when I first login and play Bejweled on facebook, when I bother to login.