A series of daily on Facebook Roulette kept me off the site except to check messages for a few consecutive days. Then #31 landed in the virtual slot, allowing my return. My perspective was different when navigating after a few days away. When I signed on about ten years back, the allure was connection with friends from childhood who had drifted apart. We had missed out on some forty years of living, new geography, careers, families. There were also new people, those not at all close in high school but more visible and accommodating in cyberspace. I never knew what any of them thought about political issues, religion, or even our school. Forty years usually exposed interests from cooking to travel to music. I knew who the extroverts and introverts were. That rarely changes once established. Yet I had no sense of people's wit, little of their humor, little of friendships maintained in reality. This was different than the office, where I probed into people's lives for their benefit. Here I probe, or more typically they volunteer, for my own curiosity, with no obligation in return.
Eventually my Friends List, or really contacts, grew to about 100, A few got snoozed or even eliminated, but most just drifted on the list. If my synagogue has attrition, so does my Friends List, though more remaining inactive than disappearing from the nominal census. The sponsoring site seems to have transformed over those ten years as well, from a platform serving users to a money generator enabling companies to pitch their products or candidates to pitch their positions.
I knew that the people I most like responding to no longer appeared on my screen when they posted. It is possible, though unlikely, that I antagonized them all. Far more likely is that the Geeks created algorithms that reduced my interactive list to ten, and not the ten I would have selected if asked to vote on the Friends most valued for their minds and wit.
On my day back, I did some counting. Starting from a random place on my screen, I counted the next 20 posts. I did this about five or six times. With each series of 20 less than ten came from my friends list. The majority were companies trying to sell me something, organizations to which I subscribe or sometimes not, local political figures who had a message to convey. But not personal voluntary disclosures of my friends. And there weren't more than fifteen unique people when all the series of twenty were combined.
My best conclusion, though not the only possibility, is that the company really did redefine what a customer is. As a nascent offering first generating popularity, uniqueness and attractiveness to potential users like me prevailed. As it became a more mature company, I was no longer a valued customer but a target for messages from payers. Who I wanted to interact with became subordinate to who the Geeks wanted me to interact with.
FB was always a time sink, but initially one of justifiable allure. Once the allure has dissipated, as seems the case, I can ration my participation more easily. And FB Roulette seems a way to do it if I only want to restrict access by half. Or I could go to Calendar 5/0 on. Or I could just drop it, but there is still merit to wishing people well on their milestones and condolences on their losses. It still enables that with efficiency.
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