Will Facebook Go Away?

Looking through my Friend list on Facebook, I saw three people I would say exhibit definite narcissistic behavior as this article describes it. There may be a couple more who lean in that direction. But, by far, the rest are using Facebook to stay in touch with family and friends. They offer support and share things of interest to other people a lot and seldom virtually shout,"Look at me! Look at me!"
I do not dispute that social networks attract narcissists but your suggestion that everyone who is on Facebook is a narcissist. Of course, now I will be paying closer to attention to the nature of everyone´s posts (including my own) in light of this discussion.   

Maybe I'm missing the entire point of Facebook, but I stay in touch with my family and actual, rather than virtual, friends by emailing back and forth.  Before the digital age, we telephoned and wrote each other on paper.

What, exactly, am I missing about the value of FaceBook, which sells your personal information for profit and where "privacy" doesn't really exist. 

Most of my family and a lot of my friends do not have the time for individual emails and sending pictures. Before I got on Facebook, I very seldom saw pictures (even of my grandchildren) because no one took the time to individually mail (or even e-mail) them. Also, on Facebook I can follow the highlights of people´s lives I would not be emailing on a regular basis but still care about. We share little bits of information no one would take the time to email but allow you to know how someone is doing. Because that connection is maintained, sometimes I will receive an email or PM about something very meaningful to the person I have been chatting with. Without that regular contact they would not have emailed me with something deeper.
My Facebook profile contains nothing about me but the few things you use to create an account. Yes, Facebook can mine what I like or share, but that does not seem to be helping them. Recently, I took the time to look at the ads to the right of my Newsfeed. Not one of them was anything remotely of interest to me and had nothing to do with my life. Facebook has not figured me out.
But, really, what I have explained is Facebook´s value to me. I do not expect that everyone values it in the same way--or at all. How you communicate with your family and friends works for you. It did not work for me.

Well put Lady O.
With the users approaching the 2 billion mark, some are certainly finding the value and not missing the point.
The point?...like porno, you'll know it when you see it.

I think you hit the nail on the head LadyO. One of my childrens friends has two children of her own now and I love to watch them growing up through Facebook.
Otherwise I would know very little about their childhood.
And that is just one example of Facebook's value   

How often do we see using Facebook as a justification since communicating with friends, relatives, kids and grand kids is so limited due to their busy schedules?

How much time are they spending texting or talking on cell phones?  The following chart seems to reflect where their priorities are:

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http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/direct/18-24-year-old-smartphone-owners-send-and-receive-almost-4k-texts-per-month-27993/

slainte39 wrote:Well put Lady O.
With the users approaching the 2 billion mark, some are certainly finding the value and not missing the point.
The point?...like porno, you'll know it when you see it.

I don't think the parallel works well there, and the fact that 2 billion people are doing something doesn't mean they are doing something of any value.  More than 2 billion are probably eating junk food, too.  So?  Follow the biggest crowd of lemmings make sense ?  

Consider how many texts per day the average teen makes.  Supposedly, around 125.  Seriously, anyone think they have that much worth saying?

"Dear Family Members and Friends,
I know you post the latest stuff in your life on Facebook. But, I do not want to be on Facebook. So, from now on, please email or text me all your information. Oh, and attach those pictures you share too. I know how much time you spend on your cell phone talking and texting, so do not give me that "no time" lame-ass excuse."

Yep. that ought to work.   

I do not think I know so much that I can decide 2 billion people are wasting their time on an activity. Honestly, I have a difficult enough time figuring out if what I do is "right" for me. Deciding it for 2 billion people is just too much.

Lady Otter Latté wrote:"Dear Family Members and Friends,
I know you post the latest stuff in your life on Facebook. But, I do not want to be on Facebook. So, from now on, please email or text me all your information. Oh, and attach those pictures you share too. I know how much time you spend on your cell phone talking and texting, so do not give me that "no time" lame-ass excuse."

Yep. that ought to work.   

Don't think so, if you expect to hear from any of them again. 

Hey, if you like it, enjoy it. I'm just looking at the other side of the coin.

Facebook and those to come are here to stay. IMO, it's either get on board or eventually lose touch with anyone under the current age of 50 if you live long distance. For me to send e-mails etc. to everyone I stay in touch with would be extremely time consuming. Besides most of them don't even regularly read their e-mail anymore however they look at their Facebook everyday.

Lady Otter Latté wrote:I do not think I know so much that I can decide 2 billion people are wasting their time on an activity.  Honestly, I have a difficult enough time figuring out if what I do is "right" for me. Deciding it for 2 billion people is just too much.

I'll bet you're a junk food eating lemming too.    
Mil perdones, si estoy equivocado.      ..... Yo soy un  

Sí. Entiendo. Ustedes no son incorrecta.   

CanuckBob wrote:Facebook and those to come are here to stay. IMO, it's either get on board or eventually lose touch with anyone under the current age of 50 if you live long distance. For me to send e-mails etc. to everyone I stay in touch with would be extremely time consuming. Besides most of them don't even regularly read their e-mail anymore however they look at their Facebook everyday.

Exactly. .

I dunno.

ALL I know is that it is increasingly difficult to enjoy myself there - there HAS TO be an alternative. I mean - posts of what people are about to eat? (Hey, if you didn't COOK it - I don't wanna see it) Pics of injuries (Jeebuz, I endured an endless onslaught of pics of someone's infected ingrown hair!)

Maybe it's just the people I've ended up "friends" with but I am beginning to think of facebook as solely a means of self-promotion and NOTHING else.

There MUST be an alternative.

Well when you send emails to your friends telling them what you are doing and adding a picture or two what's the difference? Self promotion either way.....no? With Facebook you can simply tell them all at once. I, in fact, hate all those posts with tips, tricks, stupid quotes, all the friggin causes and political BS. I just want to see what my friends are up to. That is what Facebook was originally intended for.

Tune in to the news feeds. As in suggested likes. You can hide them if you don't like it, or unsubscribe.

I think you need a better class of "Friends." Mine are way more interesting than that--most of them anyway. The ones who consistantly are boring or offensive, I hide from my Newsfeed. I can go to their Timeline every now and then to see if they are okay but I am not subjected to their posts on a regular basis. For the occasional offender, I just hide the individual post I do not wish to see.
I am waiting for an alternative to Facebook. But, no matter the format, you still have human nature to deal with. So that brings us back to getting a better class of friends.

Out of curiosity, a question for all of you Facebook participants: how many of the photos you see posted have nothing to do with the person with the Facebook account's activities? I am talking selfies or posing for photos taken by someone else? In others words - me me photos.

It varies from person to person. But, mostly my friends post a small percentage of pictures of themselves. Maybe age has something to do with that. I have a couple of younger friends who post a lot of pictures of them with other people because they are socially very active and share that. I do have one friend who posts like 75% Me-Me photos. No matter what the occasion, event or activity she finds a way to have the picture be of her or prominately featuring her. She also can twist any post to justify another Me-Me photo. But, she is the only person I know on Facebook who posts so many pictures of herself. Again though, I think it is different among younger users who still think everyone finds them as endlessly fascinating as they find themselves.

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Prevalence and Age and Gender Features

According to the DSM IV-TR, between 2% and 16% of the population in clinical settings (between 0.5-1% of the general population) are diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Most narcissists (50-75%), according to the DSM-IV-TR) are men.

Why wouldn't they be when women have been beating them up their entire lives? There has to be some method for rebuilding their self esteem!

Lady Otter Latté wrote:I think you need a better class of "Friends." Mine are way more interesting than that--most of them anyway.

You're undoubtedly right; in which case I must shoulder a significant amount of the responsibility.

But I do think there is an inherent "quality" about facebook that draws out the narcissist in its users. My thoughts on this are just coming together so may not be clear but let me give you an example.

I am a long-standing member of a forum (not entirely unlike this one) that is made up of users of a particular audio software program. It had been a lively, fun, interesting forum for many years. Then someone got the idea of creating a user-group on facebook. Virtually all activity on that forum moved over to facebook and now you can almost see tumbleweeds blowing across the original forum - it is become a ghost town.

So what? The people who used to post there are now posting on facebook - the same people, the same discussions, right?

No. It's the same people (for the most part) but the discussions have all become "me-based" whereas previously they were "topic-based". The forum (again, not unlike this one) had a list of topics, you picked what interested you and joined in - people asked for help with technical problems, help was given. Things rarely got nasty, not even in the off-topic area. (In fact, "nastiness" really only ever occurred after that area became moderated - which I found most interesting.)

Clearly, the "solution" isn't a return to the forum format - it's still there and could be used if people wished to do so and they don't so evidentally they don't want to.

I don't know what the "solution" is, or if a solution is really required but something has been lost.

You raise an interesting point. It seems clear that Facebook offers narcissists a playground and thus attracts them. What is not so clear is whether Facebook use increases narcissistic tendencies in all users. Articles about that are not easily found. Also, articles about young Facebook users focus on the narcissism question. But if you add “older adult” to the search the articles go to cognitive improvement and creation of the idealized self. That was just doing a quick Google search. I am sure more information is there to be found. I just didn’t have time to spend on it.
Perhaps social media corrupts us all. As the character Rust Cohle said on True Detective (one of his many fascinating rambles). “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody.”
So Facebook enables a group of 2 billion nobodies to add to their illusion that they are somebodies?

Trying to get your head around that post early in the morning LOL, is a real challenge.