* * * * *
                                        
                        Facebook is not your social life
                                        
> I went down to my computers to start the day, opened up a tab on Facebook
> and Twitter, and was faced with pages and pages of wallowing in the horrors
> of current politics.
> 
> All of a sudden I was tremendously conscious of how I had been turning to
> Twitter and Facebook increasingly for these little bursts of validation, of
> interaction with other people, and how as social media has evolved to be
> passing around the same overly amplified horrible news stories, we've lost
> a lot of the personal connection that led to the friendships and amazing
> relationships that I have with people I've met online, from the BBS days,
> to Usenet, to early bloggers back in the late '90s. Friendships and
> relationships that continue today. My favorite social media these days is
> email and private slack channels and other side channels that involve those
> same people.
> 
> …
> 
> But as I gazed through Twitter and Facebook on Monday morning, what I saw
> was the same story repeated hundreds of time, the same people linking to
> different version of the stories, each of which was designed to create more
> and more anxiety in the reader, more and more clicks, more and more "oh my
> god, I have to read more".
> 

“Flutterby™! : Thoughts on social media and politics 2017-01-31
17:43:23.491303+00 [1]”

I feel like the rise of FaceGoogleMyBookPlusSpace is one of the reasons I no
longer blog as much as I used to. So much is now locked up in the
GoogleMyFacePlusSpaceBook silo, so many people think of
MyFaceGoogleSpaceBookPlus as the Internet, that it just seems … pointless …
to blog on my own little insignificant corner of it. Nearly everybody reads
everything on FaceGoogleMyPlusSpaceBook.

I have to shake that out of my system.

It's been in the last year or so that I've realized that some of my friends
use FaceGoogleMyBookPlusSpace to rant; to get it all out of their system; to
shout at the tide to stop coming in. I just wish others would realize the
same thing—that a lot of the craziness and anxiety and “news” being posted is
just letting off steam and it doesn't require a reply (not that I'm perfect
in this—I too succumb to the occasional craziness on
FaceGoogleMyPlusSpaceBook much to my dismay).

Bunny was right—she had a MyFaceGoogleBookPlusSpace account for all of six
hours before she realized the horror to come. And I keep having to remind
myself—the map is not the territory.

[1] https://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/23902.html

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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