Two perspectives upon Facebook

Facebook is a pretty powerful application. What you probably don’t know is that there are more people that play Farmville through Facebook than there are Twitter accounts out there. Because it’s Saturday and my turn to rest, I’m offering below two wholly different perspectives upon the Facebook phenomenon.
The first is a quite tainted ironic cultural response, in the last episode of South Park. You can watch below as Kyle is being literally sucked into the world of Facebook.

The second perspective is that of the video game designer, that tries to analyze Facebook’s wide success with minigames. It’s a long watch, but it’s definitely worth it. If you feel lazy, here are some of the things discussed, in a nutshell:

- games are no longer all about fantasy, but are actually slipping into the real; not literally, as in the case of South Park, but to provide  authenticity to the human experience, that has kind of lost it’s veritable sense when the cut off from nature occurred; we need this autheniticty because we can no longer be self sufficient

- technology convergence is bullshit; with one exception, pocket gadgets like the iPhone which were designed to be modern Swiss Knives

- technology is slowly becoming disposable: one PC might have more technology than was necessary to send the man on the moon, but that will never keep us from throwing it away in favor for a better one

- a rather gloomy view upon a fully monitored future human life: sensors will record all our actions and turn life into a game with achievements to encourage or discourage our sense of awareness to some types of subjects; such games have already emerged, see GeoCaching.