I swore, up and down, right and left, that I'd never - ever! - open a Facebook account.
I opened a Facebook account.
My bad; way bad.
The second mistake I made was trying to pick a few people from my email file to tell about my FB site. I thought I would be able to open my email list and click on the two or three names I wanted. But, no-o-o! FB doesn't work like that. Quicker than I can think, my entire address book was uploaded onto FB. Even faster than that, any of those people who also had FB accounts suddenly appeared on my screen, under the heading People You Might Know.
Okay; at first. I had forgotten I had some of these folks in my address book, but they are friends, so it was okay. Surely I had some control over the selection of email addresses...right?
I'll never know, because faster than a speeding bullet or a bolt of lightning, or ice melting in the Mojave,
The images became a blur, a morphing confusion of features I almost recognized, moving too fast for my aging brain to register clearly. I was getting seasick, despite sitting still in front of the monitor.
Then they started slowing down. One group looked as if they’d fallen into a blender, all the bits and pieces mashed together into an amoebic blob.
I had a sense of dread come over me by the time the reel of faces faded to black. If these unknown faces are polluting my Facebook account, is mine now embedded in theirs? Am I going to have to hurt their feelings by denying their Friend requests? Am I now responsible for remembering strangers’ birthdays, anniversaries? Sending graduation gifts to their offspring? Sending greeting cards at the appropriate occasions? Will I be asked to sit their houses, children or iguanas while they vacation in the Bahamas, or Paris or Spain? Or to lend them money? Give them an extra body part? (Actually, that might not be so bad, provided all they want is some body fat. I have lots of that to spare.)
All this angst because I needed a Facebook account just to enter a contest sponsored by a television show I’ve become addicted to watching.
Will it never end?
(Edited 6-18-13)
12 comments:
Don't friend anyone you don't really want, for a start.
And there is a way to delete the account completely. Worked a treat. I got a pile of spam right after my fecesbook experiment, but it stopped a couple of weeks after I deleted.
You're braver than me. I just can't bring myself to fall through the FB hole.
Good luck, jj
"Will it never end?" I certainly hope so for your sake.
I feel your pain. I tried facebook over a year ago, lasted nearly a month. The only interesting thing that happened was I was 'found' by a kid I'd gone to eighth grade with...
And, my two girls are on FB, and it turned out that none of us were comfortable with me seeing their posts.
I've been on Facebook for a couple of years with no major problems, except one -- I look at it far too much. For the value received the time expended is way disproportionate. Along the way I have "friended" people who then caused blood pressure problems with their comments. But, I found the settings that let me keep their viewpoints off my screen, and for the one or two that I want to keep seeing most of the time despite everything, I learned quickly to hit the Hide button. I do find Facebook valuable for local news and announcements.
You have my sympathy and bucket loads of empathy after my similar problems with Picasa and Google+
I have lost over a thousand photos on my blog, and Google+ wants to show the world all the photos on my computer.
It must have been six years ago that I signed on to FB after being invited by a blogger friend. Things were much slower then but the friend requests from strangers still scared me enough that I deleted what little information I'd given them and never returned.
Good luck however you decide to play it in future.
Once blogging seemed such a simple activity; one wrote, one commented, one received comments. You could more or less say: "I am what I write." Good or bad.
Now, compared with these other games in which once bounces around like the victim of a pinball machine, it's a genuine meritocracy. Write badly, uninterestingly, infrequently and you lose your audience.
Consider this: some low-grade mind-duller came up with BTW as an abbreviation for "by the way". Look again and in 999 cases out of 1000 the phrase is unnecessary. Abbreviating an unnecessary phrase is the work of someone who isn't in tune with English at its best.
Get out of being Hoovered up, Crow. You're needed here in the front line.
Re RR's comment: I sometimes don't understand what my autodidactic brother is saying, but this time It so clear, strong and true, and I wish I had written those words myself.
My rule with FB is that I do absolutely nothing that requires me giving facebook access to anything. I don't accept requests to do anything, I don't "like" pages, I don't do the games, and so on.
I got on FB one evening around 8:00 and the next morning I heard from my next-door neighbor from fifty years ago. That was startling. It's freaky and then you get used to it. This is probably not a good thing, but I like to be calm, even if it kills me.
Best advice I got right off the bat was: "if anyone gets offended by anything you do, don't do, or ignore on FB, they're an idiot."
Thank you, all, for your advice and good wishes.
It took less than a week for me to reach the point of exhaustion with Facebook and close the account.
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