ADIOS FACEBOOK AND ALL OF MY DREAMS OF SOCIALIZING

Yesterday evening I made a decision that has been coming for a long, long time. I removed, deleted, canned and vaporized my Facebook account. It is my humble opinion that it was doing me no good and that I can live without it. I joined FB many years ago at the urging of my offspring. It was like, “Dad you are so outta touch, old-fashioned, behind the times and low tech”. “Get with it, catch up to the world”. At that point, I had no idea what it was even about. Let alone understanding the concept of “social networking”, geezus!

These young whipper-snappers don’t remember that I bought them their first computer. At a time, when they could barely speak English. And it was old dad that had to show them, even how to turn it on. Yeah, who was low tech then? Anyway they explained the concept. Which, as I understood it, was to be able to stay in touch with family, friends, acquaintances, associates and colleagues (and their family, friends, etc if you wanted). Ok I thought let’s give this a try.

Early on, I think I did enjoy the platform quite a bit. I was somewhat able, to keep up with friends. Learn about their evolving life and new family arrivals. And indeed, I did use it to display some of our travel photos from various of our journeys around the world. I might even say that at the outset, I thought it was great! However, as more and more of our lives unfolded in print. And more and more people had access to it. I find there was really less and less happening with everyone.

For example after not being in touch with one group of friends for years. I found out that our first chance to get together was full of news. It contained happenings, birth’s, death’s and all sorts of good stuff. I guess that is what I was expecting from Facebook. And I guess that up to the point where everyone knew about everyone, that they cared about, then there became less and less, of interest, to be able to post each day. I then began to visit it once every week or so, hoping that something had happened to someone, so that I had something to read about and discuss.

At that point, I had pretty much reached the end of my time on Facebook. As less and less of a personal nature was happening, I found that many had now resorted to searching the internet to find snippets of articles that they found interesting to “cut” and the “paste” back on their FB site. Another large group resorted to using FB as their political forum and from there launched vicious attacks on anyone or anything they don’t or didn’t like or agree with.

Less and less I found anything interesting to read about and more and more found myself questioning why I would like to read someone’s “pasty” that they and their search engine had uncovered that day. In almost all cases, if I had wanted to read what someone else had said or did, I could have just as easily joined their FB page and got the info first hand. However, I never did find anything that I wanted to read secondhand in there. As far as political views, I tried to keep my views out of there, because I know that my stance is not everyones’, and no matter what I would have said, it was only going to be acceptable to 1/2 of the people. I found that so different from people I thought I knew. You only had to see the vitriol in some after losing an election, to make you wonder if you ever really knew them in the first place. In any event FB held and holds little for me now.

Therefore I put a bullet in it and am of the opinion that my life will be better without it. If anyone wants to find out how I am, I still have a phone, mailbox, email box, and this blog.