Less Facebook, More Blogging

In the last few years, Facebook kind of took over much of my time on the Internet. It became the window through which I browsed the Web, the "toy" with which I idled the time away. At first, I loved it, and busied myself "friending" everyone I could think of. But for the most part, I used it not so much as a social tool but as a kind of sorting-tool for my online experience. Through Facebook, I listened to scads of good music, read (or at least perused) many great articles, peered at thousands of remarkable images and breathtaking video, and (sad to say) argued about politics countless times.

Sure, there was always a lot of dreck. But I thought I might "curate" what rolled past my eyeballs by "liking" some things, "blocking" others. That didn't work. Ever the sad-eyed puppies kept coming ("Sadly, 97% of you won't share this, but . . ."). Ever the incredibly biased "news" headlines rolled by. And yet I went on scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

Like every frequently repeated activity, Facebook influences the way we think. It reorganizes our various patterns--patterns mental, physical, and emotional as well as those involving our use of that most precious commodity, time. It reconstructs our attention-span, fitting it to expect continual small pings of satisfaction, jolts of righteous indignation, spurious pleasures, all this repeated endlessly amid a flood of undifferentiated factoids. In essence, these little pings of pleasure are addictive enough to override the evaluative function. Instead of asking, Is this true, or Is this important or valuable knowledge, we ask no questions at all, but simply receive the next ping and scroll on. It's for those pings that we keep coming back.

Recently I decided to apply a few rules to my Facebook activity. It really comes down to how I use my time. I'm going to go back to the old way of turning to a book (instead of FB) during my idle moments (coffee-breaks, mass-transit, etc.). As for reading articles on subjects that interest me, I'm going to use Feedly.com to curate my web-content. I'm going to seek out quality (the good, the true, the beautiful) rather than merely scrolling past the stuff people "liked" or reacted to by instinctively tapping an inane emoji.

And I'm going to make an effort to process my thoughts in writing, here at A Stranger Here. I still like some of the interactions with loved-ones on FB, so I don't want to exclude myself from that, but neither do I want it to be my primary access-point for browsing the Internet, or my fall-back in idle moments. As for my own "sharing," I'll forego the politics (it's just no use). Perhaps I'll try to live up to the standard set by that famous itinerant blogger, Saul of Tarsus:

. . . whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.