About fifteen years ago I reluctantly opened a Facebook
account in order to know what some of my friends were up to. A close group of
us (5) regularly lunched together, but that became more and more difficult to
schedule. When we did meet, goings on that had been shared on FB were news to
me! So, reluctantly I signed up. (Critical note: having no children or
grandchildren to keep up with, FB was entirely optional for me.)
I rapidly became annoyed by the level of banal responses to
postings on postings on postings from friends of friends of strangers, yada
yada yada. Within this barrage of chafe there were a few seeds that were of
interest to me. But as I am a thorough-going minimalist in nearly every way, I
was unequal to maintaining my sanity in that storm.
In addition to the affront to my preference for curated
incoming data, was an instinct that FB was THE EVIL EMPIRE. I was not prescient enough to
know exactly how it was evil, but surely it WAS evil. And so it has proven to
be. It is a blight on our national conversation, and even worse than that in
countries where it’s the dominant access point to the internet. In addition, it
has proven to be a tremendous time suck and distraction generator for many
folks who choose to (or must) respond whenever it calls. I see all those bowed
heads, faces illuminated by flickering light “connecting” with someone via FB
while sitting across from a live person. Surely this in not an enhancement to
real connections with others.
I do not have a solution for more social folks than I
(nearly everyone, it seems), nor for folks with must-follow family and friends
who share their lives on this platform. But I am serenely and smugly satisfied
with the “just say no solution” for me.
