Facebook Survey

FB invited me to answer some questions.  I don't know if they invited everyone, which would skew their sample as people with an axe to grind would be more likely to take them up on the offer, or whether they randomly invited a subset of users.  I took the bait and answered honestly.  Basically it has become another advertising medium like the newspaper and TV, offering me content for my attention but inserting commercial notices to offset their overhead for doing this.  And the consumers seem to be on the decline.

As a service, to which I have now subscribed twelve years, the more purposeful allure has run its course.  I renewed old friendships, some more firm now than when we interacted in school decades ago.  Little expansion has occurred.  Indeed, there is some contraction with presentations from some of my favorite  people much less frequent, sometimes essentially absent.

People used to exchange thoughts.  Now people resent the exchange, perhaps in parallel with resentment of challenges to ideas elsewhere in America.  People promote their agendas.  I know who is in Free America/ Smart America/ Real America/ Just America from what appears under their name.  People focus on milestones, responding in large numbers to birthdays and anniversaries.  There are condolences when an obit appears, though not many laudable summaries of the life just completed.  It has become Sound Bites for the eyes.

Most of life, which FB once reflected far better than it does now, has little to do with milestone events.  To get from one birthday to the next there are activities in some form every single day.  Special efforts to make dinner or take a course, fondness for a pet which still appears regularly, travel to a new place, the new restaurant, meeting somebody famous or highly accomplished, having a regrettable day at work.  FB could have captured lives.  Its users opted not to let it do that.