Facebook turns 'friends' into narcissists

ADAM ROBERTS

"Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life," the tagline reads, but that connection is superficial, full of drama, and exhausting, and those people bear very little resemblance with their offline selves.

I can't believe I'm agreeing with a bunch of teenagers. This is so embarrassing.

A recent joint study by the Pew Research Centre and the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society suggests teens in the United States have gone off Facebook.

Teens claim they are sick of the drama, sick of managing their reputation and dislike the increasing number of adults on the network.

If this is also true in New Zealand, then, given our reader demographics, there's a very real possibility you have personally caused a teenager to drop out of Facebook. Well done.

How to win friends and influence people online

ADAM ROBERTS

It's common knowledge that it's your responsibility to comment on every single thing you read online.

After all, if you don't, how will we know which stories made you "lol" or feel "mad"?

But sometimes it's hard to work out the particular feedback you're responsible for providing.

To make things easier, I've compiled a simple list of tips and tricks for getting the most out of your commenting experience.

Take everything really seriously.

Friday Favourites #6 - A different side of the Hulk

Hulk smashes. That much we can all agree on.

But once the incredible green superhero with the significant anger problem and thankfully very stretchy pants is done with the smashing for the day, what does he do? In the comics and films, he's a mild-mannered, understandably jumpy, scientist.

But what if he was a film critic? What if he was an economist?

On the internet, he is both, as well as a grammarian and a feminist.

Hundreds of parody Twitter accounts exist for virtually every fictional character ever conceived (characters from the West Wing regularly take to the platform to debate US politics), but for some reason those based on the Hulk have more appeal.

In order to win, you have to keep losing

ADAM ROBERTS

Iteration, repetition, perfection, these things can be soothing for us temporally challenged, error-stricken mortals.

'In Groundhog Day, arguably Bill Murray’s best film, he plays Phil Connors, a weatherman stuck in a time-loop which means he relives the same day over and over again, and he is the only one who retains any memory of the previous iterations.

He uses his seemingly godlike powers (or godforsaken curse, depending on your point of view) to womanise, rob banks, learn French, and, in a particularly dark segment, repeatedly commit suicide.

Director Harold Ramis has estimated Phil spends anywhere between 10 and 40 years in the time loop, which when you consider he becomes an expert at ice-sculpture and piano, and memorises full biographical details for seemingly every resident of the town, seems conservative.

In fact, Stephen Tobolowsky, who plays the annoying insurance salesman in the film, has said Ramis told him it was more like 10,000 years.

Friday Favourites #5 - Weird Twitter

For this week's Friday Favourites, I'm going with Weird Twitter.

Weird Twitter defies explanation, but it can be loosely summed up as a collection of Twitter accounts (who themselves reject the label) who have created a style of humour writing based on absurdity, a lax approach to spelling and grammar, and frequent jumps between characters.

Remember Marshall McLuhan's pronouncement that "the medium is the message"? Well he would probably approve of Weird Twitter, as a lot of the jokes are based on the 140 character restrictions of the social network.

Here are a few examples which may explain it better than those vague paragraphs above: