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Facebook Morals

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Ever since I wrote the article comparing technology to heroin, I've been been thinking about mind and body-altering things and how morals, standards, and mores build up around them to contain the damage and maximize the benefits to society. As we get more and more integrated with technology, I'm waiting for some new standards to emerge about what is acceptable or not -- I think this is a vital next step to maintain some kind of vigor in the species.

Since nobody else is doing anything else along these lines that I can see, I thought I'd create a few standards or morals for myself. A "standard" is just a better way of doing things: standards change over time. A "moral" is something that I personally do not do because I find it harms myself or others. You create standards and you discover morals. I apply the simple rule of discovering morals by asking "If I made this moral a universal law, would more people be helped than harmed by it?"

So let's get with it.

  • I'm a Facebook slut - Facebook is my place to let my hair down. While I would never do something that would come back to bite me on the net (hopefully!) Facebook is like hanging out in my backyard. Hey if you want to be my friend on Facebook, I'll be your friend. If you take some kind of silly test that says embarrassing things about you, well, these things happen among neighbors.


    I'm not much of a backyard guy. Maybe get out there once a week.

  • Real-time video chat instead of the pub - If I'm looking to let my hair down, I'll sign-on to one of those real-time video chatrooms under an assumed name and goof off. It serves the same purpose as hanging out at the pub, I imagine: over time you get to know people and you can play stupid games.


    I do this a couple times a month. Probably too much, but to me it's safer and more fun than actually going to a real pub. (Perhaps this says something about me)

  • Wear your suit to LinkedIn - I've been on LinkedIn since the first year it came out, and it's been interesting to watch it grow. I'll never forget the time when an editor of a tech rag asked me to be his friend on LinkedIn. I was very flattered. But cnce I clicked yes, I found out the guy had over a thousand such "friends"! At this point I decided that unless I know you for over a year, we're not going to be friends on LinkedIn. Sorry, but I've got Facebook for the zillion-contacts-from-my-life thing. Don't need a second place for that. On LinkedIn I try to share things of a professional nature, like where I'm speaking or what's going on in my business. I don't participate in the groups because, well, all of those add-ons for social sites are just geared towards sucking you in further, and those places are addictive enough already.
  • HackerNews is my water-cooler - When I'm busy coding, creating training material, marketing, or any other kind of business-related work, it's good to take a break now and then to hang out at the water-cooler with like-minded folks. On HN I can find folks who are techies, folks who are startup types, and folks who have incredibly sharp minds. It's also a no-frills kind of place: just technology and startup stuff (and peripherally things of interest to technology and startup folks, but this guideline seems easier on paper than in practice) It's not Digg, and it's not Reddit. On a good day I learn something about what's happening with real small teams under the gun, how to integrate technology and business, and what the prevailing opinion on various implementation options. On a bad day it's just non-trivial cool stuff.


    I hang out there way too much, unfortunately, most days visiting several times a day. But so far I think more good than bad comes of it, so it's still okay.

  • No video games - Successful video games are, by definition, highly addictive. So I don't play them. When folks ask me if I've tried such-and-such, I take this very much as if somebody is asking me if I've tried some new designer drug. i'm sure it's awesome, but my life is too precious and I will only live so long. I'd rather fill it up with people, books, and song than staring at a screen. I do enough of that already.
  • Try new things, but be constantly introspective - I'm on the Twitter bandwagon now (Twitter: danielbmarkham), but I'm watching it closely to monitor my usage of it. So far it's fine. I just bought a Kindle two weeks ago, and while it's consuming an enormous amount of my time, it's all about reading books and learning new things, so it's an enormous plus. I'm never afraid to try something if it appears to have some value, but I'm always weighing the perceived value to me with the value to me as observed by an outsider. Playing WoW for 35 hours a week, as the average player does, might seem fun as hell, but from the outside it doesn't look like your life is going anywhere. This ability to step back and look at yourself dispassionately is the toughest part about morals and standards, but it's also the most critical
  • Emphasize people and ideas over emotion and entertainment - Also a tough thing to do. But I've noticed that some technology helps you be more of a human, it enhances your social understanding of new peer groups and makes your mind grow. Some technology is simply there to amuse and entertain you. Facebook is a great example of something that looks social but is not -- it's more about entertaining you using your friends as bait than it is actually making you a better person. Once again, life is short, do things to keep getting better, don't just stand around entertaining yourself.
  • Do things where I can control the duration and intensity - TV is out: it's video stimulus controlled by somebody else. Movies are in: I can pick and choose which stories to watch and they're over inside of two hours, so the investment is low. MP3 players are in: I choose the playlist and control the tone of the day. Radio is out: somebody else is trying to program me (much like TV) which a pre-chosen selection of input. Even when I hang out in chatrooms, it's done on a specific schedule and for a limited period of time. I don't think you can stop being a stimulus-driven mammal, but you can and should do your best to control it.
  • Watch out for ruts - I'm very susceptible to getting in a rut: I pick the same combination of technology and venues and just keep doing that over and over again. This is not a good thing: it prevents me from trying new things. I struggle with it a lot. Right now I've got a Nikon D-80 DSLR camera sitting on the shelf that I love to play with. Photography is a wonderful artistic way to spend your time. But I've haven't done much with it because other things have pushed it out of my life. Now I know it might be tempting to think those other things are better because I'm spending more time with them and less with the camera, but that misses the point. when you're walking around in your normal life, kind of sleepwalking through the motions, is the worse time in the world to pick up things. The best things in life are those things that have some initial effort required to them: sometimes a lot of effort. I could read space opera and pulp fiction all the time and enjoy it, especially since reading something like Tolstoy or Kierkegaard is such a tough haul. But I've found that once you get into the groove of reading a tough author, you get receive much more in return. Same goes for the camera. It's tough to pick it up, find a subject, try to compose a picture, and then spend time in post-processing. And it's a lot of work. And sometimes you don't get anything good.

    But those other times?
    Worth every minute of it.
  • Separate device functions - Everybody wants to sell you the device that does it all: plays music, calls people, plays video games, let's you network with friends. But such devices are counter-productive. If the device itself is taking too much time, it becomes very difficult to separate the various functions and control them. For instance, I have an mp3 player to play mp3s. I don't play video games on it. I have a cell phone to place calls: that's all i use it for. I even have an X-box to play the occasional video game with people who drop by.


    By separating function by device, I have much more control over how much time I allocate that activity. That's the huge problem with the generic PC: it does everything. So when I'm programming a new webapp it only takes a second to flip over to HackerNews and chat with the peeps. This is exactly the opposite from an optimal situation. ideally you'd like some kind of transition time: for playing tunes you go over and pick the player up, find your earphones, think about what you're doing. When you don't have that cognitive pause, you're just stumbling along from one stimulus-behavior reaction to another. This means that vendors will constantly be looking to "bundle" more addictive things with things you already use. As a consumer you need to constantly be looking for simple things in discrete packages that do one thing at a time. Context-switching is a critical part of any feature-set.

These are just the ramblings of an old nerd who found his 12-year-old asleep at his computer this morning where he'd been playing Runescape last night until he fell asleep (and saw a lot of himself in that behavior). Technology is addictive: every day there are tens of thousands of developers out there doing there best to steal your time and money on new stuff. But it's a great thing too: we're doing some awesome things with the internet and now is the best time ever to be alive. It's just finding the balance -- figuring out what's right or wrong for you personally -- that's the critical next job for all of us.

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on August 19, 2009 5:19 PM.

DGE Review 3: Atheist Delusions, by David Bentley Hart was the previous entry in this blog.

DGE Review 4: Jesus, Interrupted, by Bart D. Ehrman is the next entry in this blog.

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Recently I created a list of books that hackers recommend to each other -- what are the books super hackers use to help guide them form their own startups and make millions? hn-books might be a site you'd like to check out.
On the low-end of the spectrum, I realized that a lot of people have problems logging into Facebook, of all things. So I created a micro-site to help folks learn how to log-in correctly, and to share various funny pictures and such that folks might like to share with their friends. It's called (appropriately enough) facebook login help