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nafex - Re: [nafex] NAFEX on Facebook

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  • From: sherwin <sherwindu@att.net>
  • To: mailing list at ibiblio - Northamerican Allied Fruit Experimenters <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [nafex] NAFEX on Facebook
  • Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:32:59 -0500

On 9/23/2014 3:50 PM, Andre Pierre wrote:
Hi,

I'm a very new member of NAFEX (a few months only) and am very happy that
this listserv exists together with the web forum and the Pomona PDFs.

When I'm not growing fruit in my backyard, I work as a Systems Administrator,
and as such have to be at least somewhat receptive to new technologies.

Everywhere I go I see organizations wringing their hands about whether to
diversify beyond their existing websites and forums, and embrace social media
channels, and in the end they almost always do.

Usually the main reason for this is the fact that social media sites have huge memberships, and
nobody in the organization (leadership) wants to be responsible for "turning their
back" on such a large number of potential customers/friends/contributors. Also, the
peer-pressure to join is tremendous from every direction, and if you resist you often get branded
as being "behind the times", old, or not tech-savvy. Who wants that.
Finally, the organization may already have a presence on Facebook (or other
social media site) thanks to proactive individuals who personally like the
social platform in question.
I concur with Andre with the following:
There is a price to pay to take in all these facebooker's. Some of them have no knowledge of growing fruit and ask a
lot of stupid questions. I have always admired the level of expertise on the Ibiblio Nafex forum and have tried to
emulate this high standard as administrator of the Midfex Ibiblio forum. I have noticed that most chat sites like
facebook tend to downgrade the quality of discussion, with people going off on tangents not even related to the
prime identity of the particular forum. Although membership in Nafex is not a prerequisite, my impression is that
most of the participants in the Ibiblio forum do belong to it. In the Midfex forum, our club has decided to only
allow people to participate if they are members of Midfex. There are questions of security and pertinence of postings
from people outside our growing area. I would not like to see a bunch of people from facebook migrate over to the
Ibiblio Nafex forum, which I consider a better site than the 'official' Nafex site. I belong to Nafex, but I seldom go over
to the site to check the discussions there. The same people that clambered for a web based forum will probably go
for a Facebook chat line, as well. These 'progressive' minded people can do more damage for Nafex than any possible
loss of membership.

Sherwin Dubren
So the point of "officially" publishing content via Social Media is often
moot, and folks then feel that one might as well go along with it.


To me such reasons always seem wrong-headed, however..
Sites like Facebook and Google are not *just* convenient tools. They are big
corporations that often (usually?) have questionable patterns of behavior.
To use them, and to actively encourage others to use them, is to endorse such
behaviors, or at best to turn a blind eye to them.

For Facebook the list is pretty extensive and in my view damning:
https://stallman.org/facebook.html.

Of course every individual can choose for themselves, but organizations (like
NAFEX) which have diverse memberships should in my opinion endorse only those
technologies and systems that don't require entanglements with badly behaved
third-parties.


Thus, for the above reasons, if there is NAFEX content on Facebook and Google
I for one will be happy to do without it.

Best regards,

:-)

Andre Pierre


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