No it is not. Facebook is a way to quickly call all my classmates when Ed died - I never was friends with Ed but I knew him and it was important to find out. Facebook ensures that the grandparents see pictures of the grand kids sure I could mail them, but hitting "upload to facebook" on my camera (read phone) is vastly more convenient and cheaper so it gets done.
Did you not the convenient word there? That is the key, nothing else is as convenient as facebook, so much as I don't like facebook I remain.
Perhaps we are realizing that both those use cases are not really solving anything real though.
The people that knew Ed well enough to care will find out. And the grandparents would probably prefer an extra visit a month than a never ending photo reel.
It appears convenient but adds nothing of substance to our lives.
I think you may be misapprehending the argument. The value propositions that people cite when talking about why they use Facebook are certainly understandable. However, there is a cost incurred here (ex. questionable usage of private data, externalities imposed on elections, loss of understanding and control over what shows up in your feed, etc.)
So yes, there is certainly value there. And it's made even more attractive by the fact that the actual cost is effectively hidden to users since they aren't actually the customers. The argument here is more about whether the cost incurred is actually worth the minor convenience.
Tangentially, I've often thought that the added convenience necessarily cheapens the interactions. Things like the automatic birthday reminders have basically outmoded the old "it's the thought that counts" adage.
I'm not. You're arguing about whether or not the losses of using Facebook are worth the gains. The other comment wasn't, it was asserting that Facebook is not worth it under any circumstance.
They are both depriving the user of freedom to choose to compromise their privacy for convenience and asserting that the user is inherently flawed because they even thought they had such a choice. They aren't just arguing that the individual should reconsider their decision to use Facebook, they're arguing that they need to reevaluate their life.
Conveniently everyone will be and is subjected to a corporation. Nothing new. Every single human on this planet is controlled and owned. We are just waiting for the next command. The more we discuss, comment, tweet, post and share the less we know how utterly entangled and imprisoned we are.
Facebook's biggest strength for me was in navigating the first couple months of a new acquaintance becoming a friend. Sharing numbers and managing all that is cumbersome. Adding someone on Facebook was easy and if the relationship didn't pan out, it was painless to keep the contact or purge them later. To me and a lot of people I know, texting is an intimate thing whereas Facebook was not.
Note, I left Facebook some year ago, and my mental health is better for it.
