I haven't gone anywhere; I just haven't been here...
Now, however, I'm going to make an attempt to return to my accustomed rants via Blogger, in an effort to unclog the mental recesses.
One disappears and reappears for reasons in conflict with one another. I blogged to create presence; I became absent to create another fascination from which to escape.
Which brings us to today's starting point, this dispatch from the Technorati.com website where one of their correspondents reveals his four reasons for absenting himself from Facebook. He begins his verbal sojourn thus:
After all, how much data can we assimilate on the doings of liked and friended people we hardly know -- to say nothing of know well? Such wallowing in minutiae is the epitome of a soul-sucking, personality-depleting vortex. One's life becomes subsumed by the culture of communal connection, with individuality the first casualty.
One should not quit Facebook. The imperative is that one should never join in the first place! It is the embodiment of everything that's broken and defective about the contemporary cultural life in the USA, a cheap imitation of genuine social interaction and intimate connection.
As bad as the telephone, which morphed into the omnipresent cellphone, is, the Facebook, social media phenomenon -- and actually, sad to say, the entire Internet -- has taken the pathology of fake interaction to a whole new level.
We cannot exist as autonomous beings without being entwined in these gigantic cybernetic "communities" of like-mined automatons, that draw their reason for being from the cheap imitation of real life that emits from our smartphone and tablet screens.
It's a bewildering and rather depressing world out there, in 21st Century America, where we've lost our privacy and our rights to individuality outside the hive, and are compelled to join these networks that exist for no other reason than to commodify the intimate relations between people.
Oh, well. It could be worse. You could decide to become a photographer...
Now, however, I'm going to make an attempt to return to my accustomed rants via Blogger, in an effort to unclog the mental recesses.
One disappears and reappears for reasons in conflict with one another. I blogged to create presence; I became absent to create another fascination from which to escape.
Which brings us to today's starting point, this dispatch from the Technorati.com website where one of their correspondents reveals his four reasons for absenting himself from Facebook. He begins his verbal sojourn thus:
The Top Four Reasons To Quit Facebook - Technorati Social Media: "“Has Facebook lost its edge?"I fail to understand the hullabaloo about Facebook. It has always seemed to be what this author only belatedly discovered: It's a colossal waste of time, and much ado about not much.
Over the past several months that thought pervaded my mind and I found myself seriously pondering that question.
For nearly eight years I counted myself among the 845 million of Facebook’s active users. During that time I wrote extensively on various aspects of the social network— everything from comical observations of its users to the seemingly endless wave of privacy issues that ultimately inspired my graduate research. When called for, I defended Zuckerberg, who many consider a close personal friend of Satan."
After all, how much data can we assimilate on the doings of liked and friended people we hardly know -- to say nothing of know well? Such wallowing in minutiae is the epitome of a soul-sucking, personality-depleting vortex. One's life becomes subsumed by the culture of communal connection, with individuality the first casualty.
One should not quit Facebook. The imperative is that one should never join in the first place! It is the embodiment of everything that's broken and defective about the contemporary cultural life in the USA, a cheap imitation of genuine social interaction and intimate connection.
As bad as the telephone, which morphed into the omnipresent cellphone, is, the Facebook, social media phenomenon -- and actually, sad to say, the entire Internet -- has taken the pathology of fake interaction to a whole new level.
We cannot exist as autonomous beings without being entwined in these gigantic cybernetic "communities" of like-mined automatons, that draw their reason for being from the cheap imitation of real life that emits from our smartphone and tablet screens.
It's a bewildering and rather depressing world out there, in 21st Century America, where we've lost our privacy and our rights to individuality outside the hive, and are compelled to join these networks that exist for no other reason than to commodify the intimate relations between people.
Oh, well. It could be worse. You could decide to become a photographer...
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