Facebook Monster Eats Time Goddess
April 3rd, 2009
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Get ready, since I’m only going to say this once.
Due to circumstances that cannot be explained, I took the techno-leap of starting a Facebook page last night.
Judging by my dreams, which I cannot remember, I knew I would wake up regretting it. And that turned out to be the case.
As if life was not frantic enough, with enough Web sites to maintain already, not to mention dealing with blog spam and e-mail comments and everything else one has to do to keep life churning forward.
I had planned on catching Ron Sparks’ announcement for governor in downtown Birmingham today at noon, but instead, here I sit still trying to catch up on the news — and Facebook comments from my already growing list of “friends.”
I was going to head down to the Sheraton Hotel this afternoon to hear E.O. Wilson speak at the biology conference, but there’s also that paying job offer to complete this afternoon.
It is no wonder people embedded in the newspaper business hate blogs and Web sites. There’s no time for news gathering or investigative journalism or even the time and space for enough reflection to write an essay or a feature when the bad change is coming fast and the good change not fast enough and there’s not enough room at the top of my Web browser for enough tabs to view everything I need to see at one time to know what’s really going on in the world.
The thing about the news business is this: News organizations have always competed for peoples’ time. Surveys have shown for years that most working Americans only have like 30 minutes a day to read a newspaper. They may spend five hours watching TV, but only a portion of that is news.
This Facebook monster is just making matters worse. And we thought blogs were bad. I was going to go ahead and set up a Twitter page this weekend too, in a total cave-in to the techno-trend line.
But now I just want to get back out on the road and camp in the mountains off the grid again, like I had the opportunity to do a couple of weeks ago.
Or, I want to build something with my hands, like a fine bird house out of a smooth piece of cedar.
Oh, goddess, where hath time gone, and what will become of us?
Maybe E.O. Wilson would have an answer for that. The last time I talked to him, he bowed out of an invitation to speak at the University of Tennessee due to his “crushing” schedule. And that was in the year 2000, WAY before blogs or Facebook came along and ate more of our time.
How did it come to this? Is the human species just that gullible? Are we doomed to not only repeat our bad history, but to create and perpetuate all kinds of new failures?
If I come up with any answers for anything, you can bet it will be posted here in this Web space, not in Facebook, where a few anonymous computer programmer geeks make all the money. Fuck them!
Comments
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April 3rd, 2009 at 12:04 pm
You, Glynn, should just used the status as a twitter. Cut and paste your headline and links.
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Or should I say: “Aaarrrggghhh!”
Twitter. Right. I’ll get right on it, after a fat stogie and about six Yuengling Black and Tans.
Ever wonder why I never use the & sign? Because the programmers say it is a special character only reserved for them, and any Web site that uses it suffers in the search engines. Isn’t that funny…
Another thought about Facebook. I have real life friends who refuse to put ads on their personal, professional Web sites, who refuse to write anything or share photos with their real friends who are trying to create a Web economy for us, yet they create a Web site with Facebook and give free content and photos away, allowing all kinds of nefarious ads on their Facebook Web pages.
I have no doubt my personal information is already compromised by this, if it wasn’t already just by having a presence in Cyberspace.
April 3rd, 2009 at 3:55 pm
All of this makes “Walden” by Thoreau even more meaningful than we could have imagined 15 or 20 years ago, much less Henry David himself nearly two centuries back.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:27 pm
I’ve recently nibbled at facebook but I haven’t been able to figure out how to chew, digest, and incorporate it into my life. I look at the box that asks me what am I doing and I want to type in that I am typing in this little box.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
LOL! Typing in a little box that moves slowly and goes nowhere…
Thoreau would just go for a walk. Not a bad idea. Or, who knows, perhaps he would have made a fine blogger? Emerson would have liked it more, I suspect, since he was a much better networker and self-promoter.
April 3rd, 2009 at 8:43 pm
I have a cell phone that’s supposed to be able to send text messages but I keep telling it to text and the dumb s o b just sits there. I guess one day I’ll learn to do text so that I can be “on the cutting edge” …Naaah.