10.50 and the shameless slacker hasn't arrived yet
been doing a lot of work on facebook these days, trying to build a good balanced database of news sources - i use it as a newsfeed
I am trying to get contacts as diverse as possible, and at the same time as intelligent and communicative/informative as possible
for example, i put in my subscriptions/contacts the white house but also those saying that the white house is a bunch of reptilians, then I added the catholic, but also the rabbi, I still have a long way to go
at the start I only had 911 truthers, and the messages were always the same: conspiracies everywhere, evil everywhere....
then i got tired of hearing the same things over and over again - it was like hearing the "sheeple" but reversed: instead of hearing "the government loves you" (mainstream media) you heard "the government is plotting against you" (alternative media), which is almost as false.
Especially I noticed the stupidity of some of these contacts and themes when it came to israel. They divided israel into jews and zionists. The jews were ok, in some rare cases, only when they were against the "zionists", who were those in power. The jews who were quiet were automatically considered "zionists". The jews who had money also were automatically "zionists". Alex Jones was considered a "zionist shill" because his wife is jewish and his advertisers are, too.
Too superficial. And there's a great risk of some real racism hidden in there. Imagine if I said that in the US there's just assassins/criminals (the government), those complicit (all those quiet), and those fighting the government. This would clearly be unfair, wouldn't it? How about all the sheeple? If we agree that there's a large majority of the population made of sheeple, who don't follow issues, neither fight nor support the government, then we also have to agree that there's sheeple in Israel. If we don't, then it means we're blinded by racism/stupidity. And there's a lot of stupidity in the truther community, too.
So I started adding, next to the pro-palestinians, some pro-israel. Then I added the neo-nazis... then I tried to add some geographical diversity.
It's going to be a lot of work, but ultimately I want to have about 200 contacts representing all humans, culturally, geographically, sex, age...
I've got a feminists, gays, anti-gays, christians, atheists, all of it.
11.15 and roommate still AWOL.
Shameless dishonest despicable slacker.
My goal on facebook is not to hang out with people feeding me the same propaganda that I like, such as "Death to bush and to the new world order". My goal is to simply find out, leaving emotions aside, where the world is going. I can't influence it much anyway, and at any rate I've already done my share. At this point I don't want to focus on spreading my ideas anymore but simply studying where the world is and where it's going.
For example, with this in mind, today my task, once I get home, will be to add about 10 chinese contacts, representing the whole spectrum of opinions. Of course I can't add all the people from all the countries, so I am going to focus on the biggest nations. I don't have to get the point of view of 10 people in Luxembourg for example. It's going to be hard but it's fascinating and I'll figure out a way.
All this is related to the concept of "news aggregator":
News aggregator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Other good link/concept:
Using Facebook As A News Aggregator In Two Simple Steps