Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Friday, August 29, 2014

Facebook: Some Of You...

Hi folks. Let's call this post, "Facebook For Some."

Facebook is a place for people to stand up in a room full of...everybody...and spout an ignorant, ill-advised statement the likes of which they would never have spoken aloud to you, if there were only one other person watching and listening. They'd have shut their mouth. 

They wouldn't have said the thing they just said to that particular whole, wide circle of their world.

Why this happens is a bit of a mystery. It's because they see certain people spout very definitely-worded views, they themselves have some definitely-held views, and they think that's the same thing. "I can do that!" When it turns out the view in question, so definitely-held, had never once been even cursorily-examined by the viewholder - that's when you get those ignorant, inadvisable statements.

It works so great! People they love come out of the wordwork, gently gently, probably only one at a time because they see oh, Aunt Sally Ann already took care of his ass for him: "Dogimo. You can't really mean that, can you? Even in light of bif, bam, bop?" People they respect come flying out from all directions ripping the ignorant statement to shreds and then pounding them into the dirt. "What's wrong with you? Expect better from yourself!" And then the people to whose worldview the statement was attempting to pander come flying in from all the other directions, "DAMN RIGHT!" "TELL it!" "Finally someone with the GUTS!" "Don't listen to these fools and deniers!" Then everybody gets in a big fight.

The system works perfectly! People who are ignorant and indifferent to reason get, really, no worse from the reactions their ignorant, ill-advised statement brings. People for whom human reason and, particularly, reality-as-jointly-observed go together to form a bit of an "Achilles's Heel" in the foot of the courage of their convictions - those folks may end up failing, losing their shit stancepoint in favor of an open-minded hopeful expectation of eventually coming to a better one, or better yet, skipping straight to a better one. And because almost every strongly-worded stance is going to get enough rah rah support from the likeminded knee-jerks in the camp it's meant to stand for, encouragement results. The person who never, ever would have said that idiotic, ignorant, unadvisable thing to you face-to-face will be reassured: on Facebook, this simply is the social norm.

Now for me, Facebook is less about all that. Facebook is a place for me to view and enjoy the beautiful, underage children pictures of my paranoid, privacy-obsessed family. I honor that. I make a point of never accepting a Facebook friend request except for someone who A) I recognize the person's name.

B) I have looked the person directly in the eye. A human eye, a space between filled with nothing but breathable atmosphere, no windows, no screens, and another human eye. The eyes, as they say (apart from Zooey Deschanel's which are windows to heaven) are the windows to the soul.

And C) aforesaid eye contact has occurred OUTSIDE OF WORK. In the context of a social interaction which was at a minimum not unpleasant.

Technically that was a policy before I realized how well my familial paranorms justified it. Originally I had no justification at all for my comfort levels and normal responses! Imagine that.

All of this was before. Some of you, a couple of you asked me if I could be a friend to you on Facebook. Given all the above (and to be fair, the family objection/justification did come in pretty quickly after an idle talk with my sister - I don't think I'd ever had a Facebook friend request to turn down yet, at that point), if you did, I probably turned you down.

What a scumbag!

I have a Facebook account now, one that I am beginning to use for more than just to see pictures of my beautiful and ferocious mother, occasionally father, constant brothers and sisters and the many, many progeny of many of them. I'm using this one for no good. No good reason. No reason. All of the above. Friend me!

If you want, now you can friend me. As he comes begging and cowering back, trying to get those good graces, "Oh, NOW you want to be my friend!" Well, to be perfectly truthful, not really. I want to be your FACEBOOK friend.

Some of you, I was already your friend.

Good morning!

I am,

Dogimo Jones

2 comments:

Mel said...

And because almost every strongly-worded stance is going to get enough rah rah support from the likeminded knee-jerks in the camp it's meant to stand for, encouragement results. The person who never, ever would have said that idiotic, ignorant, unadvisable thing to you face-to-face will be reassured: on Facebook, this simply is the social norm.

I read this a coupla days ago; relevant to this post ...

People are likely to shy away from discussing anything controversial on social media unless they know their audience agrees, a study says.

For myself, I never discuss politics or religion on FB or IRL with my inner circle. Any article on Australian politics that shows up on my timelinewallfeed gets HIDDEN.

Because comments.

Oh man, the comments.

dogimo said...

This is good to know.

I wish I'd known this prior, in fact. Surely I've KNOWN IT since Aug 29, 2014 (in some sense), but in a sense (innocence) it apparently didn't get in deep. Thank you for the reminder, Reader Mel!