Lessons of Facebook

[Phoebe]

I promised some people I would give the old Facebook a whirl, for reasons not relevant here, and so I did. I have learned many things from this experiment:

I really do have wonderful friends out there, thank you God because I was doubting it, and they mostly all live over 800 miles away, and I miss them horribly, even moreso now that most of them have kids of roughly similar ages to mine and it would be so great to hang out with them. Facebook is a cruel reminder of this fact, and seeing a few extra pictures of their kids and exchanging a few extra pleasantries to keep in touch with them is a poor trade-off; I would be better off writing a real letter or card or phoning them up to chat. But FB makes me feel we're still vaguely in touch somehow, and probably makes it less likely I'll be stirred up with motivation to write, call, or visit. Worth it to stay connected, but bittersweet, especially at a time in life when you're really missing having friends to hang out with.

Most of the people I've striven to be friends with who live in my area are not people I should be striving to befriend. I am not into... whatever that is they're doing. Not sure how to explain. On the other hand, various people I'd like to be friends with are really not into being friends with me either, which is a little sad even when you're old and cranky. So one finds oneself on both the giving and receiving end of "eh... let's not be friends," and probably we would have had no reason to experience those negative feelings unless FB had made it happen. But then you don't want to say things in front of the eyes of people who dislike you or whom you don't really want to be hanging out with, and the whole thing becomes even more uncomfortable until you'd rather say nothing at all.

Some of my relatives are awesome, which I already knew, but FB does not bring us any closer than real life does, especially since I see these people regularly in real life and that's way better. Meanwhile, some of my relatives are utterly batshit crazy and they either harass me through the happy medium of FB or else make me really not want to see them regularly in real life, which is sad. Google Plus had that "circles" stuff totally correct, and FB needs the same mechanism.

I like a firm, strong boundary line between "work friends" and people I engage with outside of work. Sometimes people have a foot in both worlds, but more often than not FB is just a way for your work friends to peer into the rest of your life in a potentially scary way. One day you realize your office mate is friends with your cousin - stuff like that! No, not a great idea! No, y'all also shouldn't date, ever. See Google circles above and also politics below:

Extreme political polarization and general insanity makes political discussion there rather futile. Some people do well by gently pushing subjects that aren't quite as obviously political, and then drawing people out for beneficial discussion. I don't mind doing that but I'd rather (a) get paid for it, and (b) fuck that and just do GOTV calls and voter registration where it helps, so there is no point to my using FB in this arena. I also don't like it when work people then want to talk to me about opinions I might express casually via social media but not at all at work. I don't mind explaining or defending my opinions, but most of the time I don't want to get into it at all. I like to be like Switzerland in my workplace that is chock full of political landmines and serious disagreements. And this happens even if you don't post about stuff yourself, but happen to comment on something someone else posts, or even merely "like it", since FB shows people that stuff and in some cases actively pushes it into their timelines. So your work people start wandering into your friend territories, and suddenly they want to know about why you said X about Y, or they want to start unburdening their own spleens about gun control or abortion or other topics we Really Should Not Discuss at work. Sighhh.

Finally, when you are an introvert who wants to live in a cave alone, social media is dumb for you. Please just send me visitors from the outer realm of humans from time to time, and let me hide away here until I'm forced into the vile, exposed, public life of the nursing home someday. At that point I can pretend selective hearing or just stare at people idly for no reason without speaking and it's all good. You'd think I would have learned all of the above lessons without having to try - we keep taking up these idiotic Sisyphean burdens in order to hurt ourselves.

[Tahlvin]

Facebook does have some ability to do some of the things you're looking for. For instance, if you go to your list of friends, you can list people as Close Friends, Acquaintances, or add them to other lists of people (e.g., Work Associates, etc.). Then when you post something to Facebook, you have the option to select who can see the post, and include or exclude certain lists of your Friends. You can also click the little down arrow at the top-right of posts in your feed and select how you want to handle things. For example, don't want to see any more posts from that batshit crazy 5th cousin 7 times removed? You can hide their posts from your feed without actually unfriending them. I've had to do that with some of my nieces, so I only see their stuff if I actively search for it, rather than having it just pop up in my feed and have to scroll past it.

I don't do too much on Facebook. For the most part, it's a way to keep in touch with the major happenings of distant relatives, friends from high school, etc.: people I would probably have otherwise just allowed to fall out of my life, not because I don't like them, but because I'm an introvert that's not good at writing letters or making phone calls to a 2nd cousin I haven't seen for decades, especially with the day-to-day demands of working and raising a family. I generally refrain from posting, liking, or commenting on anything remotely political, and feel it's not the appropriate forum to try to effectively debate anything, so I avoid some of the pitfalls you mention, like work folks wanting to discuss why I said X about Y. The people I'm friends with either a) already know how I feel about those topics, b) don't care how I feel about those topics, and/or c) don't need to know how I feel about those topics. They just want to say happy birthday or happy anniversary once a year, want to see prom pictures of my kids, or check out pictures of our latest vacation.

[Phoebe]

Yep, all of that seems exactly right and wise. It's there for the occasional check-in with people you can't easily check in with otherwise, and that's the main Goodness about it, making it worthwhile. I experimented with the custom sharing settings but they can't accomplish what google circles did (unfortunately, google plus is a nightmarish hellscape for someone like me), and my main issue is that FB takes the initiative to push content and people around in front of you and others in a way you don't like and never wanted, and your activities are exposed to people on a level that makes me uncomfortable. So you know, back to the cave!