news

It’s definitely you and not me

Dear Facebook,

I am on the verge of breaking up with you.

You used to be fun. You used to be that extroverted friend I would check in with every day, more than once a day I might add. I used to be able to see my friends posts; what was going on in their lives, who was getting married, having a baby, other day-to-day life events that they chose to share. It was a social gathering place. It was one of the early, online social gathering places where friends from all over the world could connect or even reconnect after years apart.

But lately, you’ve changed. No longer is it “social”. Now my feed is full of pages sharing their latest post which usually is just click bait, followed by an ad, followed by maybe one of two friends statuses, and then more page posts and ads.

And before you give me all sorts of helpful information on how to “see this friends post first” or that I should unlike some of the pages, I have done this. I even created “lists” so I could easily see groups of friends and what they chose to share. But recently it seems that you don’t like that idea, so you’ve made it more difficult to access these shortcuts.

So you see, it’s not me. It’s definitely you.

Please, let’s bring back the social aspect of “social media” that you used to be and let me get my “media” from somewhere else more fitting to serve me the news, ads and other detritus.

 

Advertisement

Tone It Down

** Note – this is a raw post, unedited, other than to correct spelling errors. It is emotionally driven, but it’s something I felt I had to post. Regular Brain Drops will resume tomorrow.  **

Tone down the rhetoric. After the horrific happenings this past weekend in Tuscon, that’s one phrase I keep hearing. But it should start at the top. When the politicians are so busy sniping at each other, finger pointing, and name calling, it’s no wonder the rest of society acts the way it does. The media doesn’t help either. They give attention to those that really shouldn’t get it, which emboldens those spouting hate and divisiveness even more. I am all for free speech, especially as a writer. But common sense and courtsey has to have a place too. This church that protests funerals – really? The people there are grieving, probably having one of the worst days of their lives, and you want to add to the misery by spewing your “free speech”. I can’t even think straight to write this right now. I’m thinking about making this a blog post, but then again, I wonder if it’s best to just keep it in my private files and not add fuel to the fire. It’s one of those things that frustrates me. I want to change the world, to make it better, but then I see things like this and it just makes me so frustrated and mad. How can we as a society accept this? Have we gotten so lazy, so apathetic, that we just accept it and live in our own little world with our blinders on. Thinking, maybe, this won’t affect me or happen to me, so I won’t do anything to change it. I’ll just go about my life and do my thing and not bother anyone else. It’s no wonder we are falling behind in so many areas. It’s no wonder we’re in debt up to our eyeballs. No one wants to take responsibiity. Maybe I should post this just the way it is, unedited, for all to see. Maybe that’s what we need, a wake up call. Maybe I think too much of myself to think that my one little blog post could be that wake up call. Then again, there is the concept of the butterfly effect – one action, leads to another, to another… I suppose I will sit on this a few days, hopefully the news will tone it down a bit. A comment from a friend on facebook “so much of this is motivated by our manic greediness” really is true also. I look at the “stories” the news is reporting and I wonder why is some of this considered news? Do we really need to know every detail of everyones lives? Can we not allow some areas to be private in the lives of the famous and the not famous people that somehow wind up on the news anyway.

I don’t have any easy answers. In fact I don’t know that I have any answers as all. But I do feel a little better now that I have gotten this out of my head.