nofuncity.com

Every Saturday night during the fall and spring semesters, a crowd gathers to hear a lecture in the Woodward Instructional Resources Centre at UBC. The lectures are open to the public and are free of admission charges. This has been going on since 1916, yet most Vancouverites seem quite unaware of it, unless connected with UBC in some way.

This, it seems, is the age of social media. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, they're all there, helping us to be social. But are they succeeding?

Well, they're certainly succeeding at something, but many of us are uncertain of what that is, except for the certainties that they're gathering lots of cultural intelligence, of a sort, and making a pile of dough doing it. Participating in this sort of social media sometimes seems like being a volunteer labourer for capitalism. We spend no small amounts of time providing Facebook with remarkable details about our private lives (of the type that, a decade ago, we'd have been screaming murder if a corporate entity tried to collect) so that they can use it to make money. In return they give us... what? Farmville? An accumulation of status updates as a substitute for real communication? Gee, thanks.