Post a Comment On: ehewlett

"Why are you back on Facebook?" my son asked the other day. It's a good question.

I'm not back on Facebook because I care about the platform - I got frustrated with its ad-riddled, privacy-bending, mining and selling of my personal information long ago. I do keep wanting and hoping for it to be/become something better, but that's probably an insane hope... one of those "definition of insanity" sort of things. I'm not back on Facebook for the quality of the dialogue there or because I have spare time to waste... So, why?

The first and most poignant reason is my father. He didn't use Facebook all that much, so it was a bit of a surprise to me to hear from him, when I left Facebook in the midst of what turned out to be his final illness, "...but how will we hear about our grand-children?" I reassured him that I would find other ways of sharing our cute baby pictures with him and Mom, and he was supportive of my principled stand despite his own principled resolve to never refer to me as "father" (based on the standard Protestant interpretation of Jesus' injunction to "call no man 'father'"), but we never did find anything quite as conveniently connective as Facebook, despite my upping my game in Google+.

And that, I suppose, is not too far from my other reason for experimenting with a return to Facebook. As I said in my post, Facebook is the "agora" of our day, so I'm there for the dialogue, however much I may lament how frequently low-quality the dialogue is there. (Which I think is largely a function of the need to respond as quickly as possible before the ephemeral post in question drops off peoples' news feeds forever...) But it's more that connecting with the dialogue there and seeing the other roughly curated glimpses into others' lives there - the cute baby pictures, the cat-videos, the endless stream of sometimes fascinating, sometimes click-bait links that others are interested in - somehow manages to convey a sense of connection with the others that are there. Yes, we're all well aware that its an imperfect and incomplete and not-entirely-representative connection, but it's an important connection "for a' that."

And, perhaps the more roughly curated the glimpse is, the more honest - and thus the more connective - it becomes. Perhaps, in the end, that's the ultimate reason for Facebook.