That is, unfortunately, not the case. A good many of my (former) Facebook friends also made the decision not to feed the beast. They are probably feeling the same kind of "let down" as I feel every time I pick up my phone. I though that once I left Facebook my email correspondence might increase, but there is very little I see of a personal nature in my inbox.
Most of what I get are substacks encouraging me pay to subscribe, messages asking me to support candidates for public office in states other than my own, advertising emails from stores I have purchased something from during the past year or two, countless reminders about medical appointments (five or six about a single appointment), and bulk messages from people I do not know who ask me to listen to recordings and make blogposts about them. Most are in musical styles that I am not equipped to discuss. Clearly the people who send those requests have never actually read my blog.
Sometimes I get a request to review a recording that is both appropriate and interesting to me, but that hasn't happened for a long time.
I still do the stuff that I do, and find joy in the doing. But I feel like I have forgotten exactly how to interact with people the way I once did. When I do send a personal email I worry that I might have said too much, or that the person getting the email message, who is not as prompt at ridding their inboxes of spam and ads as I am, might forget to respond.
Remember the email exchanges we had twenty years ago, when the internet was young? I loved those days.
I clean my inbox several times a day. And it isn't much fun to do all that cleaning without the reward of having actual contact with living beings. And the degree of instant contact and attention we have been conditioned to receive over the past two decades is unrealistic. But gradually, without even being aware of it, our appetite for attention increases.
I clean my inbox several times a day. And it isn't much fun to do all that cleaning without the reward of having actual contact with living beings. And the degree of instant contact and attention we have been conditioned to receive over the past two decades is unrealistic. But gradually, without even being aware of it, our appetite for attention increases.
At least mine has.
This new "normal" (and I guess it is normal and human to communicate in ways that we can control, particularly when it comes to not questioning whether what we say and what we hear is true) is going to take a lot longer to adjust to than I thought.
2 comments:
Facebook had become exasperating even before its recent controversies, but I guess that was inevitable given that it can only make a profit by marketing its users. It seems to be far worse on mobile devices than on my laptop, perhaps because I have Social Fixer installed on my laptop and it cuts out some small portion of the noise. One or two of my friends have left for Bluesky, but I’m frankly not enthusiastic about dealing with another social media platform. I’ve always stayed well away from Twitter (which I refuse to call by its new name). I do wish people would engage more in "old-fashioned" blogs, as readers if not as creators, but I guess that’s too much to expect. Most of my Facebook contacts are old friends I wouldn’t expect to hear from again if we left, so I’ll be sticking around for them and for the few virtual communities devoted to very specific interests that aren’t well-represented elsewhere. And I try to limit my screen time to early morning and spent as much time reading, walking, and generally living the kind of life that existed back in the bygone pre-internet era.
Thanks for commenting, Chris. It is comforting to know that a fellow blogger can keep a healthy perspective. And thanks for Dreamers Rise, which is a blog I will be visiting more often (why not fill the void of Facebook’s loss with something truly interesting, right?).
Post a Comment