Social Media and Games

Compare your experiences with a social network (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace) to the experiences of the characters in Feed. Consider the role of advertising, chat, and instantaneous feedback and gameplay.

The experiences in Feed are different because they talk in a different way and have more personal opions on some ideas. Facebook is wide open with there ideas because they no what to say to start a long conversation. I would also like to say that people on Facebook value more controversy in the media all of the time. On the other hand, Feed talks about certain topics in general like how games are presented in a casual way. People advertise on facebook buy showing art, campain ads, and pictures that came from TV. My own experience is that I used to advertise buy showing videos of World of War Craft and how that game has evolved over time.

The basic idea of Feed actually reminds me very much of the movie Gamer.  In it, people are able to interact with certain programs with their brains, which have been neurologically altered to act similar to radios.  I can't go into more detail as that would spoil some things.

The only that I could really compare Feed (what I've read at this point at least) to in my personal experience with social networks is when Skype went down a few months ago for an entire day worldwide.  For those of you who've never heard of it, Skype is an instant messaging program that lets you actually call other users and have a voice chat.  Back to topic, the people who run the servers for the program where making 'super servers' as quickly as they could so people could get back on the program.

Feed is probably the ultimate user interface. While things like Twitter and Facebook  only fail in comparison. The feed can  give you anything you want. give you advertisements on anything your thinking and can inform you immediately of events or locations in your general area. You have no laptop, you have no books,pens or papers,or need for translators, just the feed.

 That to me is straight up terrifying. if we have enough trouble keeping our information secret now, it must be impossible in the future. There would be no screen names, just peoples names, date of births, and their marital status. I'm actually beginning to see  a plot hole with this system. If every ones information is straightforward then how in the world did the corporations take over? Wouldn't people be able to see something like this from a mile away? They wouldn't be able to hide their mistakes, because the feed sees all and knows all. Unless the corporation has perfect control over the feed. That's even more scary.

Facebook  ,and Twitter both do similar things ( and i imagine their concept was added to the ideas of feed) but, their content is something that you provide and input. So at the end of the day its your own fault if things don't go as you originally planned. The feed on the other hand is listening in and making suggestions in real time and based off the years of listening is able to make a psych profile and then tell you other things it believes you like or just simply want. It even looks to be replacing people long term memory. That's something Facebook cant do.

Everything that happens via the feed seems to accurately describe what happens while I'm on facebook. The major difference is that there are somethings that can far more easily be ingored while using facebook than while using the feed. On facebook, ridiculous advertisments are everywhere – just like the feed – but fortunately on facebook, they're usually limited to a nice little sidebar which I can elect not to look at. There's also a chat and ways to instantly broadcast information to a wide variety of people, just like the feed. However, on facebook, I can always elect not to broadcast anything, and I can always hide chat windows. The biggest difference between the feed and facebook though, is that there's always that nice little x button on the corner of the window for facebook. I can turn facebook on and off at will – If I want to stop being connected I can. Perhaps the characters in the story have merely elected not to disconnect, but so far it seems like the only way to disconnect from the feed is to have it forcibly shut down.

My experience with Facebook has been quite similar to the Feed's experience, but of course not to the level where my life depends on Facebook and I will die if Facebook crashes or malfunctions unlike a certain character in Feed. Nevertheless, I find  that Facebook has been a vital part of daily life to the point where the majority of my communication is conducted there, more so than email or instant messaging, which my primary communication just a few years prior. 

Advertising in both realms are paramount due to the need to have money to back the whole operation of the Feed and Facebook, but I prefer to not have the ads thrown directly in my eyes and ears, just off to the side. Maybe the ads company pay more for ads forced down the customer's throat, but it seems that the ads would just cause anger. The chat feature between both the Feed and Facebook are a lot more similar than catches the eye, considering that the ability to talk to others through just thinking with the Feed is just like wireless telephones, but with the Facebook's ability to be somewhat private. Instantaneous feedback as an element of Facebook is something that the majority of internet users have come to expect anywhere, but to be to do things instant by just thinking like in Feed is unthinkable here in reality. Gameplay's role in Facebook has been evolving majorly in recent times to the point that Facebook users are trying the simple games and getting hook on gaming. It seems that gameplay on Feed is going a similar way in terms of coasting users into the easier games before getting addicted to the more complicated games. 
 

@mswd  I thought exactly the same thing when reading feed. It reminded me a lot of the movie Gamer how people can control other people. It also made me think about the movie "Minority Report." In that movie people have their eyes scanned all of the time and it tries to sell them stuff. 
I can't really relate to feed very much because I don't use social networking much at all. I think it would be cool to have an encyclopedia in my head. I guess facebook could be similar if your friends were online and you could send chats back and forth. Or for those people who sit on a couch and watch a tv show, but still communicate with IMs.

There are certainly a few similarities between Facebook and the Feed; foremost being the constant updates of what your friends are doing along with the advertisements that are placed based on your browsing habits.  At least for now, however, we still get to opt-in to what gets shown on the feed.  I typically don't 'Like' any brands or musicians unless I have a lot of respect for them or if I interact with it a LOT.  Otherwise, I typically either hide all updates from that source, or just don't put it in my feed.  Facebook has supplanted my phone as the more reliable way to communicate with people I don't see on a regular basis, as they are more likely to check Facebook or be online than answer their phones or check their voicemails.

Twitter functions in much the same way for me, albeit in spontaneous bursts rather than in a continual flow.  I'm sure that as time goes on both of these things will just become more and more pervasive.

I don't use Twitter and I'm not on Facebook very much, but there are people who I'm connected with only on Facebook – it's the only way I stay in touch with them. It would feel very odd to lose that. Or even worse, to lose the connection to the internet. I think in a lot of ways I rely on the internet as much as the characters in Feed rely on the Feed. The aspect of advertising has never been prominent though. On the internet, for example, I use AdblockPlus, so that I don't even have to see ads. If I want to buy something, I will normally go to a physical store and look for what I need.

My experience with facebook is quite similar to labyrinth.  I have a handful of high school friends that I communicate with exclusively on facebook.  Especially after everyone went off to college and changed their e-mail addresses, Facebook became even more central to our communication.  I think where the biggest difference between the feed and my facebook usage is the constant press of advertisements.  I carry my smart phone with me all day, so I could potentially get social network updates on the fly.  However I'm not yet receiving location based advertisements.  I think I heard that there was a way to do that, so you could find interesting things around you, but it's not pushing it's way into my network.  

Currently Google monitors my gmail account and makes target ad recommendations.  Which I tolerate as low level big brother.  I certainly wouldn't want to experience the marketing / advertising push associated with the feed.  It's using the media to manipulate market trends not to just analyze consumer trends.  I think that's a big social boundary between where todays media is and the feed.

As I read the Feed, I inevitably start to think about Facebook.  The way it has become (for most of us) our main source of communication is very similar to how the characters in M.T. Anderson's book use the feed to "m-chat" with each other, even when  they are all in the same room together.  That's insane.  But we're starting to see that same thing today, with everyone having smart phones, pulling them out in the middle of a social situation instead of paying attention to all those around them.

The way facebook advertises is especially similar to the Feed.  I'm sure many of us have noticed that Facebook likes to use our profiles to "know" what it is we want, before we even know that we want it.  In fact, the narrator in the Feed descries advertisements in that exact manner.  Facebook will see use post something about a band or a game, even if it's just in a comment to another friend, and we're sure to see an ad about that band or that game in the right-hand side of the page.  It scares me sometimes just how accurate Facebook ads can be.

My experiences with facebook, twitter, myspace etc. are not all that different from the experiences of the characters in Feed.  The real main difference that I can see is, they have a more advanced, completely integrated, instant form of these sites and what we have is pretty much the archaic beginnings.  In the book they mention how people used to actually carry computers around in their hands and use their eyes.  While social networks give us pretty fast feedback, it is nowhere near as instantaneous as they have it in the feed.  However, it is not really all that far off from what we are starting to see today.
 
We constantly see advertising on almost any site we go to, videos that we want to watch online and we even have some products we view on certain sites follow us in ads as we surf around the net to other places.  Chat is also very similar; we have constant txt messages going on our phones, facebook, messengers on our computers etc.  From what I can gather thus far into the book, they really just have evolved forms of everything that we have now.

My experiance with facebook and myspace and goign away from it is the exact opposite of all the characters. I enjoy the experiance and dread comign back to it. Quendy, link and titus all experianced a sort of social lag. A disconnection to the flwo of information and then were brain dead and speechless. I dont feel that. I feel more conencted to myself and others around me. I only use facebook because of my buisness and my old friends who refuse to use anything else. Facevook is a limiter of the imagination. I peref face to face contact. Once i started usign myspace and facebook i started to feel dumber.
I wish we didnt put so much emphasis on it. I wish we put more emphasis on persoanl human interaction

With facebook and twitter, I'm used to searching through feeds to see what's going on.  I only follow a handful of people on twitter so that feed is updated rarely through the week and facebook has gotten to a point where it only shows me the updates of people I interract with, which is fine with me because if I saw everyone's updates, I'd never see anything that I really cared about.  The Feed, however, is always updating and always there in the minds of the users and that, to me seems a little overwhelming.  I think it'd be cool to have neural implants to search through the web as soon as I feel like it but unless there was a way to shut it off or put it in some sort of dormant state so that it is still functioning but not bombarding my mind with constant updates, I think I'd pass on getting one.

Right now, I have an android phone and that's about as connected as I want to be with facebook and twitter.  If I'm in transit to school on the train, if I'm bored in class, if I'm watching a movie at home, I can easily pick up my phone, tap the app and then browse facebook, get notifications, talk to some people and then just as easily, set it back down and continue what I was doing.  So in a way, I already have a Feed, but it's in my pocket, not in my brain and that's sort of where I'd rather have it.  I don't need to know what Jesus M. Christ on twitter says the instant it happens, I can just look at it later or whenever I rememebr "oh yeah, I have a twitter."  The kids in the Feed have this sort of aloofness, I feel, because they don't really need to be interacting face to face at all.  Even Titus' dad walks u pto him and starts tryign to chat him, forgetting that Titus was disconnected from the feed.  I feel like in the Feed, the only reason they obstain sustanance and exercise is so they can keep their body alive so their conscious can exist on this higher realm of the Feed, connected to everything.  That just seems a little much, to me.

Compare your experiences with a social network (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace) to the experiences of the characters in Feed. Consider the role of advertising, chat, and instantaneous feedback and gameplay.

In terms of comparing my experience with Facebook to the characters in Feed, I'd have to opt for the option that I wouldn't go brain dead from shutting off my Facebook or deleting my Facebook account. I don't speak babble when not logged into Facebook, nor do I speak babble when in Facebook. 

Advertising will always be here, even in the future. They drive a capitalistic economy. However, my experience with Facebook differs than the characters in Feed. The characters suffer from an overexposure to advertisements, delivering a white noise effect, where advertisements are probably similar to listening to music. With music, it's easy to get lost in the sound. With advertisements and the Feed, it's easy to get lost in advertisements. That being said, advertisements are extremely annoying, yet are constant in the Feed. With Facebook, I have more control. Granted, the advertisements are displayed, but their location is out of the way. If Facebook is like Feed, pop-up ads would display every second during my Facebook experience.

Chatting is also alot different, although similar in nature. With Facebook, I can communicate with anyone currently online who is a friend of my network. However, with Feed, the characters seem to have access to anyone. Chatting becomes thought. Chatting is instantaneous.

Facebook is limited to a computer, a physical object. The Feed isn't limited to a computer. People think it and it happens. Having access to anything, such as games, would make gaming instantaneous. Both Facebook and Feed share social gaming in that players can communicate, while playing. But the characters in the Feed process chat and gaming so much faster. The Feed is similar to Facebook, but the Feed is so much more.

Consider how Facebook delivers instantaneous messaging and message updates from people in your social network. The Feed is also instantaneous, but it includes more than Facebook, so much more.

My issue with the Feed is that I can't block advertisements easily, my mind can get hacked, and if my personal information isn't safe, how can my thoughts be safe. I would hate to allow someone access to my thoughts.

The characters in the Feed experience too much information at once, whereas Facebook can be controlled. Although, it can be argued that Facebook can easily control people.