FRED OWENS writes:

The dominant media is not CNN, The New York Times, or The Washington Post. It’s not FoxNews either. It’s Facebook. That’s where the nation and the world meets, connects, and relates.

Facebook is the triumph of subjectivity, a feminist dream come to reality. Social media are where the personal is political. It’s all about how much we like each other, or not.

Rational discourse is not forbidden on Facebook, because rational discourse is impossible in that format. I know, I’ve tried it. I have attempted more than once to stir up a debate on Facebook, and it will simply die from lack of interest unless I make it personal.

I am on Facebook every day, because that’s where the world is talking now. Do you go there? I’m going to guess you don’t find it useful.

Please respond to the larger question, is Facebook a part of the process you so consistently oppose on your blog?

Laura writes:

I am not a frequent visitor. I have a visceral aversion to the counting up of “friends.” That’s not an ideological stance, it’s just a gut reaction. I think it has its limited role as a virtual bulletin board.

— Comments —

John E. writes:

It’s great fun to hyperliteralize the words our tech-savvy society has found useful to describe our pastimes. For instance, is a vir-tual bulletin board a bulletin board that exudes manliness? Is it more manly to face vir-tual reality than real reality?

Buck O. writes:

Facebook, my gut tells me, will soon come to some kind of a reckoning. I don’t know how it will play out, but there will be a day in which even the young and “open” will regret what they’ve done. 

I joined to communicate with my 22-year-old son, who was getting increasingly slow at replying to my emails. I learned that, for his generation, e-mail is passé, that messaging within Facebook and texting via cell phones is how they communicate. (Oddly enough, I get e-mails notifying me that there is a waiting message on Facebook?) I signed up and was barraged with hundreds of possible “friends” – connections made to me by Facebook’s magic algorithms. I “friended” four that first day, then caught myself. What was I doing? I stopped at five. 

Facebook asked me for the password to my e-mail account, so that they link into all my interests and friends. Hell no! that was out of the question. But, you know what? They got into my account anyway, just by having my e-mail address. The list of possible friends were all related to that particular e-mail address. Creepy. 

I mentioned to a group of new friends that I had five friends on facebook. I was interrupted from finishing what I was going to say. The reaction was of a kind of pity and ridicule. (only!) five friends? I didn’t react to this, since it didn’t matter. But, that was telling. As you said, the “counting of ‘friends'” is a sign of something desperate. I was a real looser. 

I read what I could quickly find about Facebook and came to the conclusion that they are headed for trouble. The continuing security and privacy issues are going to get them into difficulty. Adults may think that they know how to overcome the negatives, but it’s revealed regularly how insidious and invasive Facebook is. 

For instance, after I signed up, I noticed that there would be a Facebook link at the end of the article that I was reading. It was there to ask me if I wanted to “like” it and to post it on facebook, and to let everyone know what I was reading. I quickly learned to “log out” from my Facebook page every time I left it. It’s hidden, the “log out” process. They don’t want you to. After “logging out,” the links stop following me everywhere that I went. Or at least, I thought. Just yesterday I read that “logging out” doesn’t stop them. They are now in every computer. You need to delete all of the cookies. 

This will only get worse, before we all begin to understand exactly what is happening and what to do about it. Social media is perhaps the creepiest thing that modern technology has come up with. And, most of us are well behind the curve in understanding it.

Laura writes:

You remind me of another reason I was put off. Facebook asks for more information than I want to give.

As Neil Postman said, every new form of communication gives something and takes something away. I don’t want what Facebook gives enough to overlook what it takes away.

KB writes:

Writer Mark Bauerlein tackled the facebook/twitter/texting problem in his book The Dumbest Generation. Basically, when kids are connected to their friends 24/7 through these portals, they have NO incentive to ever converse with an adult and perhaps be forced to adopt a different worldview than that of a child. As someone who grew up in an Anglo-Indian middle class household (no divorce, no drinking or cursing) I can tell you that my “trifling” behavior was never accepted outside the playground. For all my personal rebellions, that “grounding” of adult interaction gave me a common sense I do not find in most people of my age. I have a sister who is one year younger. She is still prone to child-like behavior, most probably because she still remains in touch with friends from high school through Facebook.

Greg Jinkerson writes:

I used to spend far too much time browsing Facebook, but eventually the utter impossibility of finding meaningful conversation there, as mentioned by Fred Owens, led me to deactivate my page. As I have written at length about Facebook on my blog here, its popularity as a form of communication is easy to understand. After all, FB appeals to several of the most powerful drives in human nature: voyeurism; exhibitionism through images and words; self-promotion of one’s activities and thoughtfulness (or lack thereof); conspicuous but passive expressions of personality; and the potential to grab the attention of unknown and unknowable others, usually by very superficial or even destructive means.

Laura writes:

That reminds me. I heard an interview on the radio once with a woman harpist. She made some interesting statements and I wanted to find out more about her so I looked her up on Facebook. Though she works for a major orchestra, she was pictured in the clothes of a nineteenth century whore – I think there were red ankle-high lace-up boots – and she was in various weird poses with her harp. It was creepy.

Mr. Owens writes:

Pre-Facebook and pre-Internet, going back decades to another time, we had a daily newspaper delivered to our door (actually two papers, the Chicago Tribune in the morning and the Chicago Daily News in the afternoon). In those good old days, the paper was divided into sections. The front part held the important news, the hard news, of war, crime, politics, and accidents. This was the masculine part. On the inside, in a sheltered position, was the women’s section with soft news — weddings, births, cooking, art, music, literature, health concerns, and gossip.

MarkMark writes:

While I have an account on Facebook, I don’t log in very often; if I’m on it once every week or so, that’s a lot. Also,all my ‘friends’ are either people I know, or people I’ve known in the past; in other words, I’ve known these people in real life. I can’t see the point of having ‘virtual friends.’

But when the upheavals of the sixties came along, the women’s pages were changed into the Lifestyle section, and academic assault on objectivity began to gain traction. The distinctions between personal and political, between private and public, between home and the street — all these differences were just so many barriers for sixties radicals to overcome.

Now the soft news is dominant tone, conveyed to us by “soft” ware, which seems like more than a coincidence.

Facebook is the culmination of this trend. Does it invade your privacy? You silly people, privacy no longer exists. Instead we are to confess or boast of every trivial pursuit in our lives — there being only a small difference between a confession and a boast, because there can be no judgment of right and wrong, no distinction, and no thought.

Facebook is about how you feel and who you like, and this kind of talk is who we have become.

I don’t say this in anger or from any sense of defeat, but we ought to face it squarely today and we might come up with a plan — rational, thoughtful and good — to replace Facebook with a better way to connect and communicate.

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