I Avoid Facebook

Yes, like the plague. I avoid Facebook for a lot of reasons. personally, it feels really shitty to see a whole lot of people who are labelled "friends" posting superficiality day after day. Facebook seems to bring out the worst in people - or perhaps it just reflects a species and culture addicted to drama and negativity. The evidence that Facebook manipulates you is everywhere, but you, like everyone else, have been trained to overlook such practices in your everyday life. Do you even know how you are controlled? Queue Robert Klein.

Who are you?

So the story trending is about a whole lot of dead animals, which we could interpret as people caring about animals and expressing sadness about their loss, but it is just another tragedy and that is what humans are addicted to, tragedy, drama, violence, and death. The more horrible the incident, the more people are attracted to it like traffic slowing down to try to see if there are dead bodies at a car accident. Go ahead, tell me you never slowed down to look.

Ridiculing people, laughing at people, and revelling in the drama of their livs is another negativity people are attracted to. A story with 42K people talking about it is Did Lindsay Lohan Convert to islam?. Seriously? Right up there is Tonya Harding. This is what so many thousands of people want to talk about at 11:00 AM on a Tuesday?

Facebook has this policy about real names. When you look up your own name on Facebook and filter to 2015 (or just look up your name), you never know what might come up lol. So much for legal names, Facebook. If you want me to use my "real name" then why did you give it to other people? Oh, because it is their real name too? Perhaps that is why we choose nicknames, to have a distinct unique (and fun) identify for our friends.

History repeats and when the control freaks take over, logic goes out the window.

After all that bullshit about then wanting real names to insure honesty and the integrity of their site and reduce exploitation, my ID is #100011453465210. Never believe a large corporation claiming to be looking out for your interests. They instituted the "legal name" requirement simply to find out more about you so they can target advertisements and make more money selling your identity and interests to people who want to take your money and control you.

But seriously, this is why I avoid Facebook.

Still, I maintain an account to maintain contact with people who communicate primarily through Facebook. I have no clue how the Facebook algorithms work, but this example shows they seem to select my "friends" that appear on my page differently with each log in. I have no idea what the mutual friends mean, since both of the images are from my account and page. These algorithms choose our identities and friends (and influence how we think by selecting specific content for us) too often on Facebook, one of the major flaws that keep me away. As if the real potential of suddenly being eliminated from existence was not enough.

If I did not have so many offline teams and groups who use Facebook to communicate regularly, I would probably post even less than I do on my account "wall" (my few posts are public and a couple of people who tag me set their tags to public but most do not so you have to add me to see all the posts if you want to see all the posts). I lost much interest in the whole concept of Facebook when they blocked the account I had for ten years.

Losing all the photos and posts and contacts there was a huge pain in offline life as well because so many depend on the site. It was like losing a phone and all contacts and having no way to reconnect with many - more than a thousand people just eliminated from my communications simply because Facebook said so).

So much lost, but I do love my teams...

You can find my responses to that as I created a page and a group under my original Facebook name, Bugs Webbot, in case anyone ever searched. The few who cared, did.

I was maintaining pages that I used as file cabinets for the reading and viewing and listening I do online. Sort of like my many many blogs, each with a theme and purpose. Almost two dozen were blocked when the original account was blocked. I re-created some of them and you can find a bit of babble about The Facebook Pages here in this babbling blog.

Hey, there can be much fun had on FB as there can be much fun to be had online, but I see Facebook much like AOL was. A closed and carefully controlled online portal that has much potential, but way too many ulterior motives to be trusted as the primary place to start wandering the web. many people may rather have someone else tell them where to look and what to think, but that follower mentality is not for me.

So I avoid Facebook.

Maybe someday they will bring Bugs Webbot back from the dead and I will enjoy reviewing ten years of memories and reconnecting with many online contacts, but for now, in case you are looking for me there and wondering why i do not respond, I avoid Facebook.