What's Wrong with Facebook

I never wanted to be one of those "I hate Facebook" people. I mean there are just too many of them. It's too easy (especially with Boomers) to think this makes you special or sophisticated in any way. So, like many commercially minded Boomers, I joined and try to keep up, though my son says Boomers have like 50 friends and his generation averages more like 500. That's beyond me. So for the longest time I have tried to stuff it, smile and get on with it.
But it's tough. It reminds me of why I don't like television. It's not anything exactly I can put my finger on, but it's partly the barrage of ads (though true many are better than the shows), it certainly isn't sex and violence ( though interrupting sex and violence by salespeople is irritating) and it's not even the superficial assumptions of TV news (like how I need to be kept up to date on that hostage crisis in the Knoxville Walmart). It's more of a Marshall McLuhan thing. There's a "buzz" I associate with television and I'll try to explain that. There's an insidious assumption behind most of it (news, ads, shows) that "out here in viewing land" exists a large population of more or less like-minded people, people who want the newest shampoo, who care about hostage crises and who really need their plots neatly resolved in either thirty or forty-five minute bites. I find this tremendously irritating, annoying, intrusive. Not that they're so wrong. They're casting a wide net; I get that. But on the personal level of my own home and more personally MY OWN BRAIN, I find it radically invasive.
What I find similar about television and Facebook is this: there is an assumption on Facebook that you live one life, more or less openly, that you are uninhibited about sharing that (normal) life, that people accept you for who you are (even your politics), and that you are more or less a "mini celebrity". I know this isn't original and I'm sure others have said it better, but I need to say it for myself. Facebook is television. There, I said it. It's pretending you are on television. No, it's being on a tiny tiny television that your distracted "friends" (whether 50 or 500) watch or maybe don't watch while most likely they're doing something else. The great Distracta.
I will continue to post, to smile, to show up in the town square because I don't want to be like those crabby Boomers who don't like television and force their children to play with wooden toys because that's what Maria Montessori or Mr Waldorf advocate. They are even less my people than the mindless masses who care about the hostage crisis at the Walmart. So, oddly, in a world that is supposed to be shrinking (the global village) it's actually homogenizing in a superficial way. A way that destroys creativity? The furious juries are out on that one, but certainly in a way that undermines the concept of a private life, private thoughts, and quiet time to think. Alone.

Uncle Rico and the Ghost of Fame

Fame is such a funny thing and relative thing. What percent of the "kick" is that people around you (in your small town or large town) see you in the paper, see what you have done, think you're successful and famous. Of course, "insiders" who are generally NOT FRIENDS know the truth, know the painful limitations of local modest fame. But how much do they matter? And we're not talking dollars (yet).
Dollars would be nice, would be a completely different way the world says Hello. But short of dollars (we're talking trophies and medals and ribbons and nice writeups in the local paper)... what is "fame"? Very odd, I can tell you that. Stories of the (small-time) famous washing up, remembering their moment of glory. Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite... reliving his moment of glory from high school football over and over ad nauseum. That is all of us, that one moment, I coulda been a contender.
In a pagan world we'd be interacting with a rich pantheon of gods. We're talking garden gods, forest gods, neighborhood gods, maybe even city gods. There are beyond that the gods of the mountain, and some vague dieties that created heaven and earth . Lucky for us they're preoccupied with their own petty squabbles. That's it. That's fame. Before writing, there wasn't much beyond the kings who could force us to build their damn pyramids. Maybe that's partly why the pyramids fascinate us so. The ego on display, the massive folly of self-invented importance combined with the mundanity of thier dessicated remains, as pathetic a corpse as any (despite mummification which I admit was something).
So here we are.
I often think about that scene in Minority Report, where Cruise's character wanders through the video simulation salon, everyone hooked up to virtual reality machines that made them a pope or a Hugh Hefner, or a Micheal Jordan equivalent. What would that do to our ambition? I'm not going to work on that (hopeless) novel, I'm gonna go over to the virtual salon and pretend I'm Salman Rushdie for a while, darting through the streets of London escaping Iranian assassins, clutching the only copy of my next bestseller to my breast.