Why do we deactivate our Facebook accounts?
The common answer is "spending too much time". Fair enough. There are others and cleverfacebook has replied to most of these with suggestions because they don't want us to deactivate. In fact, they don't delete anything. They just set a bit that stops traffic but otherwise, it's all still there stuffed in the cracks of the iron the way a sharecropper stuffed newspaper in the cracks of a shack to keep out the wind. So, nothing is deleted and if we embarassed ourselves, we painted the rows and columns in bitter permanent red ink.
Is it like heroin or cigarettes? The only way to stop is to be sure there is none around and no one who can provide any. Fine but what exactly is IT?
Security? There ain't none. After being riff'd from my last job a "visitor" entered my home studio and checked the contents of my computer, and left a recognizable sign so I'd know it was a professional courtesy. If someone wants us, that's way easy these days and no, there isn't much one can do unless one wants to sit in a corner locked and loaded. Sorry, I can't live like that and it doesn't frighten me.
Tired? Sure. That is pretty easy to understand. Of what? Answering. There comes a point when one realizes few are doing much more than advancing the same causes with slightly different ;icks like a song one sings over and over again until as Arlo wrote about CONO, he was planning dinner and Goodman deserved better. Nothing is being learned.
Not useful? I'm not sure we should use each other in conversation like that. I deleted most of the connections to people who only used FB to send me their gig dates or announcements. IOW, if the only point of the conversation was to sell me something, I didn't consider that a friendship, virtual or otherwise. It was too much like people who called me to sell life insurance or investments. I don't need friends to do that. I could put a new song there and maybe a few real friends would notice or care.
I need friends. A friend helps, a friend needs friends to help and when I can do that, it feels good. I want to feel good but slowly and inevitably I suppose, FB came to be a political party gathering where almost everyone is trying to argue about the future, blame the past, curse the present and otherwise, talk me into doing something I'd already made my mind up about. (bad sentence construction; frack strunk and white). Because of that, I kept censoring myself, trying to be too careful, too correct, too... not me.
There is something in that. Facebook becomes a false face. It is too much like going to the office where the boss has a Romney sticker on his desk (still) and his subordinate rants about Obamacare destroying America and I have to be silent. Romney Scouse Git, so to speak.
And I can't play or sing with a false face and all it seems I ever really wanted to do was play and sing like the doomed Grasshopper in the fable. And taxes are due and the girl has to go back to college and the mortgage is killing me. I guess Betty White was right: Facebook, what a waste of time....
I miss the Curvy Girls Appreciation Page.
