WhatsApp co-founder, who sold to Facebook, says #DeleteFacebookBrian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp and sold it to Facebook for $19 billion, sent out a short tweet in which he said, "It is time."
IN 2017, KEY FACEBOOK BUILDERS DISOWNED THEIR CREATION
"We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works."
Yeah, my grandfather Viktor knew the feeling. That was back when the family still spelled it "Frankenstein."
ReplyDeleteI had a Facebook account only briefly. It was useful for getting back in touch with childhood friends. I deleted it when I started getting friend requests from students. Since an important part of what we do is judging students, in the form of grades, we need to be absolutely fair. It therefore isn't appropriate to get too friendly with students: you need to keep them at least at arm's length.
I've never had a Twitter account. I need to spend my time thinking thoughts that take more than 140 or 280 characters to express.
Nevertheless, I recently did get a LinkedIn page, and I find it useful, especially for checking up on old students. It's great: lots of them are gainfully employed engineers and scientists---and good heavens, many of them appear to be doing the world some good, working on renewable energy and fresh water. So it hasn't all been a load of useless drudgery, even though it has been punctuated by the occasional student fucking a sheep.
Commenting on blogs is about as close as I get to Facebook, Twitter and the like.
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, it means I lose out on a certain amount of news from the family as it happens, and maybe some old friends I could look up (or who might even look me up), but on the other, there's crossover between my batshit employer and batshit relatives.
Several family members regularly get into politics and other issues on Facebook, and I'm not 100% comfortable with students being able to identify my relatives through platforms like this.
TLDR: I'm a Luddite.