Tuesday, September 16, 2014 at 9:02 AM

The frenzy of online

It's all become way too frenetic. Too much noise. Everything is an ad. No one reads anything. It's just a segue, a cue. Cut to commercial. I'm here! Listen! Hear me!

The other night I was drinking beers, watching the Niners lose to the Bears, in a Mets-like way, when all of a sudden I was deluged under a wave of Scoble on Facebook. I had expressed a few ideas during the day that Scoble apparently was offended by, even though imho he misunderstood the point of each of them. Take one example. I pointed to a Seth Godin piece that I loved that said if you give up your keyboard you give up your power. He wasn't saying that virtual keyboards are no good. Though that's how Scoble (and honestly quite a few others) responded. He was saying (to me) let's not turn the Internet into another television. Not that TV doesn't have its place. I like a football game on a Sunday evening. Especially at a new stadium in my former hometown. And the Niners, the only football team I love. Even though Bill Walsh, Jerry Rice and Joe Montana are long-gone from the franchise.

Anyway, I didn't acquiesce to Scoble's viewpoint. I didn't really argue either. I'm coming to see Facebook as a reincarnation of the bulletin-board culture I was part of in the early 80s. I don't really care for online arguments. I'm always hoping to find someone with a lantern, to show me the way to something delicious or interesting. Someone who misunderstands the premise of an interesting post is not itself interesting to me.

I just wanted to kibitz a little on Twitter and Facebook while slowly getting drunk watching the Niners debacle, when I got hit by the flood of Scoble. I don't know exactly what he did, but I didn't want it. So I blocked him. This is what I do on Twitter when people act like dicks. It worked. The Scoble flood stopped. But that wasn't the end of it.

Whatever. I've unfollowed a number of people on Facebook who are real-life friends who I'd rather not have unfollowed, but I had become part of some weird pseudo business model of theirs. Getting tagged in messages only to find out there was nothing there for me or about me. Someone saying "I wonder what my friend Dave Winer thinks about this." Oh geez. So I unfollow them and try to remember to enter their name in the search box. And if it persists, I block them. I've set my tolerance level relatively low on this kind of bullshit.

This isn't communication, or sharing. It's growing more and more frenetic every day, it seems. And more pointless. I want a network that sheds light on things, not calls attention to nothing.


Last built: Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 5:50 PM

By Dave Winer, Tuesday, September 16, 2014 at 9:02 AM. Yeah well, that's just, you know, like, your opinion, man.