Facebook Phony

I’m an unabashed facebook voyeur.

It follows that most likely I'm not a very good "friend." It's really hard to maintain a serious relationship with dozens and dozens of good friends with whom you keep in touch on an almost daily basis.

Like many out there (and I believe there are quite a few of us), I stand outside the “platform” and gaze on passively, but don’t participate or respond. It’s kind of like going to a place of worship but not saying the prayers, preferring instead to observe the passion of others, the more authentic devotees. 

It really is the ultimate form of social media voyeurism and imbues  the faint illusion of superiority, this very detachment one feels from not joining in or embracing the energetic, throwing and scattering of prosaic words and images that goes on hourly if not by the minute. You believe you are safely under the radar by staying out of it. But in truth, is the act of scanning the page any better than reading the "stories" on yahoo?? And whether or not you remain silent, just by being present you're making yourself vulnerable to the many sneaky advertising ploys. 

The hypocrisy of this passive activity of course is egregious, since I detest everything facebook stands for; and yet I am drawn into its overreaching web, like shopping on Amazon. 

I understand the need for self expression. How often are we made to hold the phone and our tongues for umpteen minutes while a robotic menu frustrates our every attempt to speak, attacks the very core of our individuality and eventually wears us down. . . . The soulless commands exhorting us to keep on pointlessly pressing  numbers on the dial pad so that we hang on indefinitely, or better yet hang up; and all the while the knowing that the question/comment/complaint/issue that prompted the call in the first place may never be resolved. I totally get it. We need to talk, and we need to be heard.

But nonetheless, what are these facebook posting maniacs getting so worked up about all the time? What is driving them to cool/moral/indignant/serene/caring/funny/angry/involved/ concerned/original public stances? Is it politics that form the raison d’etre of this ongoing soap box, a rock band of nostalgia from the past, a gathering, a world event, the mere illusion of those hundreds of meaningful connections one has accrued without having to interact inter-personally with such an invisible gaggle of bosom buddies? Just being heard?

Is it the hope that people will cling to your every inane posting? I read the entries and smirk at the “clever” ones with my own self perceived cleverness, bristle at the annoying ones, but am mostly bored. And then there are all the re-postings of other posts. I mean, do these folks have a life outside their screens? Do I?

On the other hand, you could say we silent observers are simply even more alienated than the hardcore users, looking as we are to hitch a free ride on the thoughts, impulses and emotions of these more connected participants in virtual reality.

Isn't this very blog in fact a kind of totally solipsistic and (barring the wrath of Father Google) mostly individually controlled facebook??? Even the terminology is misleading. It's media, yes, though not always so social.

We live in a world where the bottom seems to be falling out  and the facebook phenomenon (think twitter, youtube, instagram et al) seems to provide temporary housing, at least when not contributing to the dissolution. 

Seems to.

Oh, let's just face it; time to read a bookbook?

The Week That Was

Years ago when teaching a class of high school seniors, I came across a poem in the New Yorker that I believed I just had to share with them, these late adolescents on the cusp of serious adulthood. In my mind it may have had something essential to do with the stuff we were reading, like Hamlet, or maybe an Ionesco play, or maybe not. I was obsessed with existential lit.

The verse seemed a harbinger of something up the road that forced me to think about something I did not want to think about; and although the kids listened intently, they most probably did not get it. But it resonated with me, and they were polite. It was one of those lessons where the students looked at you quizzically but decided to indulge your eccentricities anyway because the class was going well.

The poem talked about things falling apart and whirling out of control in a quiet way, imparting the image of a silent though treacherous domino effect. It wasn't as brutal or intense as Yeats' "The Second Coming" and had no particular imagery of beasts, much less the kind you find slouching towards Bethlehem, but rather was more understated, almost insouciant in its nihilism. It spoke of forgetting to put a coin in the meter one day while sitting in the dentist's chair and other mischances of memory in a suddenly failed orderly existence, and things spiraling downward from there. 

And that's just the kind of week it was, even though the meters no longer simply accept coins but spit out out those slippery, tiny papers that fly off your dashboard when you slam the car door.

So for today it's just sayin' hi,  See you next week or thereabouts with a more orderly set of words.