Facebook notification or ‘clamourfication’?

In the real world people get together and have no need of telling each other “what they are doing right now!” something facebook is designed to elicit. A face-to-face encounter always makes that question self evident . If they are organised friends and sometimes even if they are not, this same information has been ‘diarised’ a few days before and is, well… unremarkable and rarely revisited. “Meeting Jane for coffee” used to be confined to the pages of a filofax, now it is fodder for the facebooker.

Culture has taught us that advertisting need not be meaningful, it must just be pervasive and incessant,
and we have bought it. Bought what? Bought the air they sold to us, and after re-polluting it, resold it to whoever will believe our social networking proclamations.  Webster’s defines ‘clamour’ as ‘noisy shouting’.  Encarta describes it as ‘demanding noisily: to demand something noisily or desperately’. It is from here that I have made up the term ‘clamourfication’.

Are all notifications like this? No, but for the most part, they are noise. Plain and simple. Akin to the tiny or whining sound-bytes that assault you when you open a singing greeting card. It might be cute the first time, maybe the second time - but there is no third time.  Birthday or no, that sucker is going straight to the round file tomorrow, and maybe today if it keeps that whining up.

Babies cry because they know it will produce attention, and facebookers it seems are no different. Babies are distinct though, because they know whythey want attention and what it will get them. If they could articulate these concerns it might be something along the lines of ”Would you change this nappy already?” or “What’s a kid gotta do to get some SMA, ’round here? cry?”.  In other words their communication has meaning. Facebookers, though endowed with the gift of developed communication skills, don’t seem to know why anyone should pay attention. The “look Ma, no hands” sentiment of most messages is usually an invitation to be notified of… nothing.

Yes, that’s right, notifications are really notes to self - they are for the notifier and not the ‘notified’.  They fall into one or more of the following broad categories:

  1. Geographic - ‘In Tokyo’
  2. Physical - ‘is tired’
  3. Recreational - ‘is watching Ray Liotta on HBO’
  4. Triumphalist - “is tearing down strongholds and karate chopping demons!!”
  5. Grammatically suggestive - “is has”, suggesting that the writer is really not that concerned with communicating at all.
  6. Sermonizing/Moralizing - some pseudo-christo-robotic zeal, take your pick (see triumphalist)
  7. Boastful - nuff said.
  8. Testimonial - “blessed”
  9. In jokes - unintelligible to the rest of us. Only this time, in contrast with real life,  we - the uninformed, don’t care enough to dart our eyes between the privy parties and smile along like were ‘in the know’.

Apparently I have 254 friends, news to me, but hey I’m not complaining.  Of them, very few have ever
confessed to being bored. Now perhaps no-one out there is bored, and I’ve got this wrong, but I’d wager that what we have here is similar to the emperors new clothes. We emperors in our notification-sophistication, have become so sophisticated that the boredom that often makes our very commentary possible is the thing most commonly suppressed or even denied!

The only thing more annoying than being added as a friend for the sake of it, is for the ‘adder’ to then bombard his/her prey with incoherent babble.  Therein lies the venom that does violence to proper communication: How can we get a meaningful update on a state of being that we never knew existed? a state of being owned by someone who has never introduced themeselves?  Who told you to flee the wrath to come, you brood of adders! (just kidding).

I’m not against venting, this post is a case in point, but why not write intelligibly and persuasively. I too used to be into clamourfication, until I realised that the wisest/most productive people I know do not engage in it. Now I’m not saying your unwise if you notify often, just that the people I know who are wise either choose not to, don’t know what notifying is, or don’t have the time to notify - they are too busy doing things that are more important. When they’ve finished, then they tell somebody about it - there is something to report. They have a social/pro network that is real and that facebook sometimes assists, but is not the engine-room of their productivity, or, as is the case with some, their lives.

To be frank, from a personal-spiritual viewpoint I also realised that a lot of what I notified others of,  I should be taking to somebody who cares, yes I mean take it to the Lord in prayer. It’s not long before you realise that actually, this notification is not worthy of visiting a king with (what prayer should be btw), there are more important things to communicate/receive.

I think using scripture to admonish and edify is great; I hate to see it torn from it’s context and hoisted onto notification flags (see number 6), that to the rest of us just read, “aarghh, ahoy there look how spiritually weird I can be… aarghh”.

What am I saying? that we should stop notifying? Nah, just that we should do it meaningfully.

March 19, 2008 | Filed Under reflections

 

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