Reflections on Facebook

I really don’t like Facebook. It’s too exposed. If I am going to tell you something personal, I really have no interest in just anyone who cares to stumble through the Internet being able to share. If it’s not at all personal (and private), why bother to write it?
I’m old enough to think that a lot of things actually are private. Even my illnesses, my problems with neighbors or creditors, or—for heaven’s sakes—news of my sexual partners. I might choose to share with one or two people close to me, but not with all of you!
This is a day and age where everything is public—even if it costs a job or causes terminal embarrassment. I occasionally hear of someone clucking because naked pictures of him or her are being broadcast around the world wide web. Does it not occur to them that there was—at a much earlier point—an easy solution to this problem?
If I want to send my wife a naked picture of myself (why?), I’ll hand deliver it, thank you. There will be no other copies, no surviving negatives and, for crying out loud, no uploads on the web! In the days of the internet, the old story has more application than ever!
Someone once asked a lawyer if it were a good maxim to live by: Do right and fear no man. The lawyer gasped and corrected his interrogator. “DON’T write and fear no man.” I had a friend who spent several years as legal counsel for a national magazine.
He told me that in all that time he never, EVER put anything in writing. If he felt an editor needed a heads up on a certain piece, he walked up to the editor privately and gave his views orally. No witnesses, no paper trail. No record at all.
Dave is today (still) a very competent litigator, benefiting hugely from all those lovely people who never took advice like his. Whatever happened to the sense that things publicly recorded can have consequences? Drastic consequences!
Is it a general feeling I seem to detect among kids today that there are no consequences—for anything? Ask a student why he didn’t finish a course, or take the last test that would qualify him for a job. It seemed of no moment to him at the time.
Why, when you pass out an assignment to a class of twenty-five, will there be as many as ten papers left on the desks, untouched? So if flunking or not finishing course work cannot in any way impact your future life, why should a naked picture or a criminal admission on the web?
If two sixteen year old girls can sit in a classroom describing their first sexual encounters (one line I found memorable was: “I hated him but I loved the sex”—did I need to know this?), why shouldn’t they hang it all out there on Facebook?
I told someone the other day that I had had an invitation to attend the original Woodstock concert In 1969. I passed. I’m not at all sorry today. There’s something about naked people sitting and walking in mud, with no toilet facilities, that wouldn’t have appealed to me then—or now.
Yesterday an old friend wrote and asked me to be a “friend” on Facebook. (In a fit of madness, I opened a page a few weeks ago. Since then I’ve heard from three old school chums, a long ago former lover, my oldest son’s fiance’, and a couple we used to attend church with.) I said “yes” to the friendship part and then I wrote back briefly.
I will discuss many things on Email (that have no legal ramifications), I will keep in touch on Email, but I will not “keep in touch” on anything as public as my face page. Let’s chat—but give me your Email address.
I hope he sends the address. I liked him very much. But he will hear very little from me on Email. My son’s fiance’ has gotten the point and both he and she communicate by Email. We even do old fashioned things like telephone each other.
There was a time when “mooning” someone was seen as an almost daring aberration. Now it or its emotional equivalent on the internet seems to be the norm.
The root of the matter seems to be that feeling that it is a God-given, democratic right to live without consequences, without embarrassment, without shame—no matter how heinous the act—and, frankly, without any forethought.
Every so often, living like that snaps back and bites someone. But the kids on their right and their left go on oblivious. The only reaction anyone seems to express is horror that anybody would take a naked picture off the web and spread it around.
Never the thought that the idiot who put it there should have known better (there is no longer any such thing as knowing better that I can tell); it’s more a question of how anyone could be so nosey and evil as to listen in to a public (and LOUD) conversation.
Talk softer, write less publicly and I, for one, promise not to listen or read. In the meantime, I shall go on avoiding Facebook as much as I can.
What I did or did not do last night is absolutely none of your business. Thank you very much. I only hope you are wise enough to feel the same way.