That's the devolution of Facebook. It is over-populated by over-sharing, over-opinionated idiots who are more concerned with exercising their "free speech" rights than they are with preserving friendships and family relationships. That's why so many early adopters, a.k.a. our kids, are now leaving Facebook -- they consider it to be obsolete, a haven for cranks and old farts.
Buster himself is an admitted Facebook failure. I will not go stream-of-consciousness and puke up every last fucking half-thought bouncing around in my head. But I do love my few remaining Facebook friends, because they do it right -- nothing major, just updates on the basic situation, without flame or controversy. And I know I've gone snarky in the past about FB minutiae such as people describing their meals, but please continue. Please! I'd much rather read about your breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snack than some of this other crap.
All of which is preamble to this: Yesterday, the lovely Mrs. Gammons just couldn't take it anymore and blew up ("un-friended") a few old FB friends. One is a neighbor who's an occasional travelling companion and the mother of a couple of our son's buddies. She's an otherwise good egg and a good friend, but when she goes on Facebook she's a hot-mess disaster. When I first joined Facebook in 2009, she was among my very first FB friends. Almost immediately, she was my very first "un-friend". Her post inviting me to "like" a page which was "praying for Obama's death" was all it took. (Whatever your politics, what kind of hateful horseshit is that?)
Ever since, I've been happily ignorant of her FB drivel. But, until yesterday, my dear wife still regularly visited our friend's page -- like a train wreck, it was awful, but she couldn't look away. Advice to our friend about perhaps toning down the wing-nut rhetoric fell on deaf ears.
The last straws for Mrs. Gammons were these two brilliant posts:
"I'll continue to mix politics and religion, and will not shut up." (Yes, and you'll continue to talk to yourself.)
"Today's immigrant is tomorrow's Democrat on Welfare." (Wrong, but today's low-information Fox-bot is tomorrow's insignificant old white Republican douchebag.)
As someone once said, marvelously, about such matters: "I am firm, he is obstinate, she is a pig-headed fool." Mrs. Gammons could no longer suffer a FB fool. Good for her!
________________________________________________________________________
Isn't it hypocritical for an obviously liberal blogger like Buster to rip on right-wingers who post crap on FB? Maybe. But I don't do my thing on FB. You go to my blog, any blog, by choice. You're not reading this unless you really want to. FB is much less deliberate. You can go to someone's page expecting one thing, and you may get quite another. An ideological rant on Facebook for all to see is the equivalent of sending a political or religious email to your entire contact list -- intentionally provocative, and kinda thoughtless and rude. Yes, we all have a 1st Amendment right to free speech, but Facebook is not the best place to exercise that right. Think about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment