Dusty Nix: Time to do an about-face from Facebook
I'm stepping back. I'm edging away. I'm cutting back to moderate consumption levels. Facebook is like wine. A few glasses can be delightful; too much of it leaves me with a sick headache, and unable to focus.
The problem for me is that The Social Network has largely become a socio-political network. And before anybody says I've done my share in that regard, I'll concede in advance you're right. I have. But that aspect of it has grown stale for me. Worse -- it's grown toxic.
I'm more and more uncomfortable with the political agendas being played out and "liked" -- and blasted, no matter where on the political spectrum they're coming from. It's not just that some of these FB "dialogues" get really confrontational and combative -- my email and voicemail are flooded with that stuff every day, and if that bothered me I'd have found something else to do for a living long ago. I sure as hell don't do this for the money.
That said, there's a vibe I get from some of these manifestos that suggests they're not so much about joining a fight as picking one. I could probably ignore that -- just scroll past the anger and the bitterness and the suffocating sanctimony, and get to the funny videos and the cartoons and the birthday greetings and the back-and-forth about how terrible the Falcons are.
What's hard for me to get past is the really troubling (to me, anyway) stuff that comes from loved ones and friends. Not Facebook "friends" -- friends. People I would never "unfriend" on a computer and couldn't in real life if I wanted to, which I never would.
These are people I could never just shrug off as cranks or bigots or zealots, because I know from the depths of my heart they're not. I don't want to respond, and I can't put it out of my mind, so I just sit in front of the computer screen stewing and fretting when I need to be working.
This is what Facebook has become for me.
(A side note here: In a perfect world, I'd never see another Facebook post about guns -- from anybody. I am neither a pro- nor an anti-gun zealot. I was taught firearm safety by both my father and my grandfather when I was very young, and I have owned and fired guns all my life. I think most people who own guns are sane, decent people. I think people who are obsessed with guns and consider them more important than anything else in the world are creepy and more than a little scary. When those people are men, they are desperately in need of a less lethal form of male compensation, if you get my drift.)
It's really kind of funny, in a perverse philosophical way, how little overlap there can sometimes be between personal relationships and ideology. I came
to the realization a while back, with a combination of dismay and amusement, that a lot of the people I care the most about are people with whom I agree on almost nothing; and some of the people with whom I agree on just about everything, I really don't like very much.
So my preference is to spend as much time as possible with the former, and leave the political stuff to whatever time I am compelled to spend with the latter.
Facebook has thrown that painfully off kilter.
I'm not going "off the grid," so to speak (as if that were even possible), not even with Facebook. My solution is to check in when there's a reason (like a "notification" I trust), take a quick glance, perhaps add a civil comment or two, and check back out into the real world.
And of course the things I write for this organization will still appear on the Ledger-Enquirer Facebook page, where people are invited to respond. I hope you will.
Dusty Nix, dnix@ledger-enquirer.com.
This story was originally published December 12, 2015 at 3:19 PM with the headline "Dusty Nix: Time to do an about-face from Facebook ."