Having read TFA as well, seemingly almost nothing. The most highly-rated comment on the article is a good critique of the title.
> I know what capgras/prosopagnosia is, what I wanted to read about was how this relates to Facebook. Not only does it have nothing to do with Facebook (it talks about social media in general), but also does not even begin to tackle the interesting part hinted at by the title. I'm not against two pages of refresher on the psychological or neurological concepts that are going to be used in the rest of a paper, they're even welcome, but if your title is "to understand X understand Y", then I expect at very least two more pages about the relation between X and Y. Or else simply title your article "A historical account of Y".
> Through history, Capgras syndrome has been a cultural mirror of a dissociative mind, where thoughts of recognition and feelings of intimacy have been sundered. It is still that mirror. Today we think that what is false and artificial in the world around us is substantive and meaningful. It’s not that loved ones and friends are mistaken for simulations, but that simulations are mistaken for them.
The second last para is more pertinent. He's saying Facebook et al contribute to the reverse of Capgras; we trust people we probably shouldn't:
> This withering of primate familiarity in the face of technology prompts us to mistake an acquaintance for a friend, just because the two of you have a Snapchat streak for the last umpteen days, or because you both like all the same Facebook pages. It allows us to become intimate with people whose familiarity then proves false. After all, we can now fall in love with people online whose hair we have never smelled.
It's the same thing that happens to actors when people are fans of the characters they play. They forget that the actor in real life isn't the person they know everything about from watching them on TV or whatever.
I also can’t find any complete thought about social media in the article, so I’ll submit my own instead. I can’t recognize the Facebook versions of people I know very well in real life, and I have no desire to interact with these imposters. My closest friends IRL are interesting, sensitive, insightful, and driven. The Facebook versions of these same people are bland, banal, safe, and parrot standard middle-of-the road opinions and sentiments. I don’t know who those people are, but I wouldn’t be friends with them if they were like that IRL.
Our brains have evolved. At one point we recognized everthing in our field of vision as "here", and everyone else was further "away."
Now we have lots more of even NPC (Non-Playing Characters), closer to our inner fields. Facebook friends really are your friends. As if they were standing right in front of you.
