Show HN: A high-schoolish "Oh Right." moment comments on Facebook

1 points by wittysense ↗ HN
So many of us are thrillfully justifying our existence by diving into the explanation as to why we use Facebook, or shouldn't. I'm noticing a bit of maturity to the arguments now. It seems a rather curious philosophical statement exists, and is namely the thing I wish to Show HN; namely:

    "I use Facebook because everybody else uses Facebook."
What should we do with it? What can we do with it? For instance, one procedure to this statement might be that:

    "I use Facebook to stay current with my closed family and friends. My grandmother is quite old."
Or:

    "I use Facebook sparingly to keep minimal communications on a widely used platform."
Or:

    "I use Facebook because my company has no minimal messaging portal."
Or:

    "I use Facebook because my type of work is in the business of social networking, and Andressen tells us it's all about computers."
Or:

    "I do not use Facebook."
Now this one is curious, since it does not immediately suggest that Facebook is even used in a sense of "mention" à la Korzybskian (Alfred Korzybski) sentences. You could call them Gödel statements, Repeatability statements, explosive statements perchance. But the statement does not merely contingently re-use Facebook in a dual sense, but necessarily so, in the following way:

    "I might not have ever used Facebook."
Here we find that "Facebook" is used in only one sense, a material one which merely refers to it, namely "Facebook."

It's quite simple. You use Facebook because everybody else uses Facebook. Whence cometh autonomy ? It seems at the end of the historical use of terms like Facebook; it seems to matter what we call things.

Someone call Mr. Fry.

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