Re: Facebook is evil, why it must be eradicated [was: Wikileaks?]
Bruce Bostwick <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.culture.sf.killerbs |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Dec 7, 2010, at 4:25 PM, trent shipley wrote: >>> On Dec 7, 2010 3:15 PM, "Dan Minette" <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> >>> >Only a sociopath and pervert can think that >>> >breastfeeding is pornography. It's disrespectful >>> >to... >>> >>> Actually, it doesn't, Alberto. Facebook is free, last time I >>> looked. I can >>> choose to use it or not use it. If a network won't let me refer >>> to physics, >>> and takes all examples of QM off it, it's not criminalizing QM. >>> >>> Perhaps Facebook is making a business decision. Will disallowing >>> pictures >>> of breastfeeding on Facebook gain it more prudish members than >>> allowing it >>> would gain members interested in details of breastfeeding that can >>> best be >>> shown by pictures? >>> >>> Not allowing women to breastfeed in, say, Mall of the Americas is >>> one thing. >>> That severely curtails breastfeeding mom's ability to go there. >>> But, there >>> are other ways to communicate such info on the web, so not >>> allowing someone >>> to post it on one's Facebook account can be seen as a purely >>> business >>> decision. >>> >>> Dan M. >> >> A business decision that injures public health. Not directly. Indirectly, it reinforces prejudices against women and childrearing that require little if any persuasion to continue, and considerable effort to dispel. And playing to prejudices is irresponsible, at the very least. But very little of that is Facebook, which is simply doing its best to appeal to a paying audience and maximize its profit, and has done the math in terms of financial bottom-line impact of allowing vs. prohibiting such pictures and decided it can gain greater profits by doing the latter. They missed an opportunity to advance a more forward-thinking and tolerant attitude, is all, and as a corporate entity, did so purely on the basis of that profit/loss analysis. Facebook's customers and their cultural values are the driver behind that. If their target audience had different cultural values, they would play to those just as eagerly -- imagine an alternate-universe USA whose culture is clothing-optional and predominantly neo-Wiccan, in which an equally-profit-motivated "Facebook" system plays to those cultural values just as enthusiastically as Facebook does in this universe. They merely reflect the wider population's attitudes. And again, my opinion is that those attitudes themselves are the problem, in our universe .. The true paradox of democracy is that it is vulnerable to defeat from within -- Me