globalgrlI have always had a love/hate relationship with FB. Mainly because of boundaries or lack thereof. I originally joined to keep up with my nieces and nephews and now like most kids, they have moved on. I also liked keeping up with friends overseas but the rest has been a bittersweet paradox, touching and intimate, annoying and irritating, oxymorons ad infinitum. While I think the ‘roles of our lives’ are, of course, intertwined, I definitely see a problem with FB and the complete overlap, blending and immersion of roles. Seriously– wives, mothers, lovers, friends, daughters, employees, bosses—we can be all and more but not at the same time and not with FB as a Narrator and Videographer. At best it is the equivalent of your Mom reading your diary, at worst it is like running around naked.
Compartmentalizing is good, folks!! I might just be an old fogey because I confess that I am totally bewildered by this. My nieces watch Reality TV and YouTube videos that are average people living very ordinary lives. Even boring, dare I say? My niece was just showing me one of these YouTube ‘stars’ last week and the setting for these reality stars was their house. I said ‘wow, that is a nice house’. They were young so I was assuming they lived with parents but she said it was their home and they make 8 million per year. Well, color me interested so I quizzed her on all this. Near as I could gather they get income from YouTube ads, the number of people who watch their videos. So I tried to watch a few and my niece picked out some ‘really good ones’. In one they picked up dog poo from their Mother’s yard as a Mother’s Day gift, in another they had a giggly friend over and made cookies from a box and in another they did a Lush Haul. This is where you go to the Lush store and buy lots of very expensive crap like bath bombs then you come home and do a YouTube video of yourself unpacking your bag. I don’t know if this is a step up or step down from the Kardashians but another niece showed me that one years ago and I didn’t have a clue then either. Yet another niece has watched Big Brother for years. I saw a clip of that recently because it was on World News. So Omarosa got fired by Trump and now she went on Big Brother and she was whispering to someone about the White House gossip. I called up my niece to ask how she could be whispering this info when she knows she is being filmed. Seriously, what am I missing? Is this the new purpose driven life? They are taking self-validation to a whole new level. Are they doing it for the money because I might be persuaded to make a video of me cooking or gardening with cats. Or just plain old chatting with my cats as I do this anyway several times per day. I would have to work to master the 8 million dollar giggling bit but I could do it.
When I was a teenager we ‘dragged main’ which just meant we went ‘riding around’ in our cars and oftentimes pulled over at the Chicken Hut or bank to talk to friends. These conversations were private or semi-private and I can’t imagine having them with my parents or teachers, this is what I mean about boundaries. We have multifarious roles in life and there is a time and place for each and never the twain shall meet. As an example, if someone we knew went to what we considered a weird church and we discussed it at the Chicken Hut and then that person pulled over to talk to us we certainly would not bring it up. That is ‘polite company’, an anachronism in today’s world.
It is not that I think bullying did not exist when I was a teen, I know it did but now I think Social Media has emboldened kids in a way that is toxic and so scary. I tried to think of FB as today’s generation of ‘running the streets’ but I just could not make the pieces fit.
Secondly, the politics have always driven me nuts. At first I was truly baffled, especially by people of my generation whom, as I said, I know were raised to never discuss politics and religion in polite company. I don’t really expect the younger generation to understand that old axiom as much, nevertheless it makes me so crazy. Then I guess I reached a point of ‘if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em’ but that still left me stewing in a cauldron of rage over the sheer lunacy. And all that was BEFORE TRUMP!
For the past couple of years, I thought I was fighting against fake news and brainwashed, angry people who lap up Fox news like a sugar addict working in a donut store. People who believe Breitbart and Info Wars conspiracies and gleefully post and repost ugly narratives and divisive rumors without ever checking the source. People who seem to enjoy creating turmoil and strife. We truly seem to have lost all civil discourse.
But I had no idea I was fighting FB and Cambridge Analytica– stealing my data, targeting, manipulating and fueling my proclivities!!
And so, I have discovered Twitter. I love that it is content driven, not social. Anonymity of a crowd which seems to suit me better. Fake news does not seem to fly as well on Twitter. People are called out immediately and there is a ton of support, not just from your sisters or best friend since first grade. Conservative religious hypocrisy is the focus of a lot of tweets and it is never allowed to stand and the comments are smart and witty. Also delicious schadenfreude if you enjoy seeing bigots and quacks get their due! Reminds me of one of my favorite bumper stickers from 1981—THE MORAL MAJORITY IS NEITHER. Someone stole it off my car, I kid you not.
But I digress, I know why the #deletefacebook is trending and I want to join them. The more time I spend on Twitter the less time I spend on FB but I am not sure if cold turkey is the right course for this flaming co-dependent. However that pendulum has started its swing.