Overwhelmed by how much has already been written about the super-injunction – and that it’s almost all authored by people far more intelligent than myself – I thought best to steer clear.
I found this just as interesting though, if not more.
Making the most of the company subscription to The Times online, I was left bemused by an article on ‘My Farm.’ Drawing on the success of facebook app Farmville, Cambridgeshire’s Wimpole Farm now makes agricultural decisions based on the consensus of an online global community of 2,000. Photos of farm produce, cultivated as a result of tactics devised online, are posted to this National Trust initiative’s online forum.
It reminded me a little bit of something else I saw last year: a firm that prints and binds all posts on your facebook profile wall as a keepsake. I still think this is a great idea, but I’m less taken with ‘My Farm.’ I think, sadly, it’s down to my age.
Academics regularly discuss the growing division between Generation X – those still respond best to physical stimulus after being brought up with pen and paper – and computer savvy Generation Y, who first used a keyboard at 3 days old and can organise their mind like a Windows desktop.
To me, a facebookbook is almost a way of showing respect for your elders. It takes a language in which the younger generation are far more fluent and translates it for those older and wiser.
When something as organic as farming evolves into an online community to help Generation Y engage with it, I almost get a little bit angry. My first impulse is to tell teens to get out into their back garden and plant some ruddy seeds. Why not achieve your own turnips, rather than covet a JPEG of some in Cambridgeshire? Am I being unreasonable? Or, worse yet, old fashioned?
Filed under: Facebook, Generations, Online networks
