I did not so much enlist for Facebook as i was drafted. I knew about it for a while but ignored it. A lot of my friends had been on MySpace, and I had opened an account, but I found it all too ugly. Folks said that I could customize it anyway I wanted, but I just wasn't into having myself as a brand. My MySpace is probably out there on some 4-bit server, linked to a Hotmail account that I have long closed. Folks said I might like Facebook, and it did seem less hideous, but not anything I wanted. Then a friend, who has himself left Facebook, made me an administrator of a group that organized neighborhood cookouts, so I felt obliged.
That was in the old days when one's status was a fill-in-the-blank. 'Dale "woke up to find a winter wonderland"' or such. I still drove a Nokia flip phone with no support of course for MMS, and I had a Dell Inspiron running Windows 57, the smallest I could find with a video drive. I was in the middle of a period of my life when mostly I was on vacation, paddling oceans and rivers and creeks and lakes. But when I found myself once more growing content with collecting books as well as having waves smack me in the face, I found Facebook growing in content as well, adding paragraphs and photographs. Out on my bike or in my boat--my username in those days was paeddler--the usual thing to do when I met new people was to become 'friends' on Facebook. Most often that meant little more than receiving a reminder that someone was having a birthday and I could look at their profile and remember having had a beer with him once in Mount Vernon. But it also meant receiving friend invitations from people with whom I had had very important connections but with whom I had lost contact: college friends, high school friends; my first grade girl friend who now is married to someone named Tom with whom she raises horses in Texas; my freshman philosophy professor whom I had suspected to have been a CIA agent and who, when I asked him on Facebook Messenger whether that were true, neither affirmed nor denied it.
Already some of my friends were criticizing Facebook. Either some small changes had ruined it or the information about themselves which they had put on the internet, information now being called 'personal data', was available to be found on the internet, and that allowed them to receive advertisements related to things they had posted about themselves. None of that bothered me. I always took the position that if one were too unhappy about the appearance of Facebook, one could leave. I had read the small print and realized that there has been no privacy since women started gossiping over their clothes lines. Facebook was basically a huge clothes line, but one that had huge electric bills that needed to be paid somehow.
There was also a thing I really liked about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg: the concept of one identity. A lot of people were upset when aliasing became more difficult on Facebook. But I think the more honest we are about ourselves, the better it is for everyone. I semi-jokingly called this the Luke 12:3 effect. So I try not to present a false depiction of myself on Facebook, although of course I probably don't really know myself well enough to present a completely truthful depiction.
However, as Dieter Boen, executive editor of The Verge, a part of Vox Media, a blatantly left-leaning bunch, says, 'here's the thing': Facebook is not one identity. Just last week Mark Zuckerberg stood center stage at D8 and talked about Facebook being a privacy company that was going to increase its support of groups of 'real friends'. Except for the privacy bit, which drew uncomfortable laughs from an audience who mainly drew their pay checks from Facebook, it sounded like the sort of neighborhood cook-out encourager that had drawn me in. And just last week Facebook banned some people from the community forever.
Whenever cracks had appeared in Facebook's one identity, I had tried to apologize for them. To use Bohn's phrase again (and in my own effort to have one identity I should admit that probably the main reason I keep The Verge at the top of my News Feed is that I think Dieter is seriously hot), 'here's the thing:' there has never been anything quite like Facebook before and there isn't an operating manual for such a thing. People complain about Facebook, but they still use it because it allows them to publish their thoughts in a way never before possible. With a $100 smartphone one can tell the world to stop, one wants to get off, or whatever else is one's status this fifteen minutes. And, Facebook has seemed most often to be the most open 'social medium', the one least quick to remove content because it 'violates community standards'. The photograph of Robert Lentz's icon, 'Lord of the Dance', was removed by Google+ as being pornographic, but it stayed on Facebook. It's hard to know what the standards are of a community of 2.23 billion people.
Unless, of course, those standards are required to be the standards of Marky Z & Company. As is becoming increasingly clear, those standards are pretty vanilla shit-posting progressive. Now don't get me wrong. I have many vanilla shit-posting progressive friends, and they are nice people. I just don't want them to be the arbiters of what may be said across the global clothes line, any more than I want the Donald to control what can be said. I would not even find it outside the rights of Facebook to censor people who seem to be to the right of their position if they admitted that they were a progressive social adjustment platform. Vox never claim to be unbiased. But Facebook do. They claim to be wanting to connect the whole world. Except for those they don't want to connect, those who belong, I suppose, in Mrs. Clinton's basket of contemptibles.
The 2016 presidential election was an interesting event in the relatively young life of Facebook. People used the platform to call each other all sorts of things. I was called all sorts of things because I not only did not find either party's candidate worthy of my vote nor did I think that the things said about them were necessarily true. Because I didn't think Mrs. Clinton actually ate sausage made of unborn children for breakfast, it was assumed that I was a socialist or in cahoots with Wall Street. (Actually, I abhor socialism and admire Wall Street, but that has nothing to do with my opinion of Mrs. Clinton.) Because I voted for Gary Johnson, it was assumed that I must have secretly supported Mr. Trump.
The real position of Facebook was revealed in an internal memo circulated just after the election, stating that they had failed in their mission, a memo issued just after Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had been sent to Purgatory for funding a billboard suggesting that Mrs. Clinton might be a bit greedy.
And now, Facebook has a black list of people whom they consider 'too dangerous' to be allowed to speak to the 2.23 billion folks on Facebook Why do I think that Marky Z should change his grey t-shirt for a pink suit now that he's making the place nice?
And yet, despite my revulsion, I have not yet left Facebook. I am exploring other platforms, ones less likely to ban me forever if I make a slip in correctness. I am lucky it didn't happen already, because once I shared a comment Alex Jones had made about public education. At the time I had no idea who Alex Jones was, but I then and now found what he had said accurate. I am not one to indulge in ad hominem arguments. I stay on Facebook because I think that in the long run, having 2.23 billion people in conversation is good thing, even if that conversation does become heated and insulting and silly, and that the 2.23 billion people in the conversation are more important than Mark Zuckerberg. I stay on Facebook because I think that both Mark Zuckerberg and Alex Jones are sincere in their positions, at least much of the time and insofar as they understand themselves, even if I think they are often acting from fear. But, here's the thing (two things, actually): first,what one fears one often comes to hate, and removing the face of what one fears from the book, one invites more hate; second, the one identity of a community of 2.23 billion people is very complex, and Facebook reminds me of that complexity every time I click on that blue icon, punching through my bubble.
One more thing, a confession of sorts from one who claims to value one identity, a concession to how complex and contradictory life in the Zuckerberg Galaxy can be: a friend on PornHub asked me if I were on Facebook, and I didn't tell him my real name. I remain on Facebook because so I am not ready to throw the first stone.
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