Dear Facebook

 

 

OK. I have given it a realistic go. People pressured me to try it. ‘You are missing out’, they said. They also said ‘do you realise you can join groups and communicate with other like-minded people?’ I was told once I start I will be hooked. That there’ll be no turning back. Endless hours of sated curiosity and soothing reminiscence. And more friends that you can shake a stick at.

I am talking about Facebook. I started it six months ago. Now it’s the New Year and it’s time to give it the boot. Well, mostly, anyway. I can’t take back that time wasted on looking at mindless posts and naively falling into loads of traps.

The first trap was to accept the ‘friendship’ of people I knew long ago. Some of these were women who have now had children. Others, men I didn’t really click with way back when. The children ones were the most disturbing. Endless ‘selfies’ and other shots holding their sweet little babies. ‘Friends’ gushing and posting ‘likes’ and comments like ‘aaawww, too cute!’ Me thinking, but not posting, ‘aha, at last you have found a reason for living.’

The second trap was to join endless groups to find out what other people around the globe are thinking about the people or the things that you like. This is not always a complete loss. For instance, the people on the Katherine Mansfield website don’t post very often, and when they do it is usually informative and useful. I found out, for instance, about a 2016 symposium for Mansfield in France somewhere. Someone who does post sometimes is a woman called Gerri Kimber, who is a major writer and publisher about Mansfield, a world-wide expert if you like, and it is an honour to see and receive her posts. Another writer, Colm Toibin, as you might expect, is very sensible and sensitive, and he often alerts his followers to interesting newspaper articles he comes across, or posts from critics and journals that reference his works.

 

On the other side of the coin, I was, until recently, a member of the Justin Hayward appreciation group. I don’t really know any Moody Blues fans over here in Melbourne, and I thought it might be fun to converse with some online. What tipped me over the edge, and caused me to give it the flick once and for all, was a recent post by somebody starting off an A-Z list of things about Justin Hayward. The first ones were ‘A is for amazing, B is for beautiful, C is for charismatic’, and so on, and I’m thinking ‘what’s going on here? are we in primary school? are these people all idiots?’

The Melanie Safka appreciation society is a bit better, but it got me fed up and depressed as well after a while. Melanie herself does lots of posts, and the other day she put up a video of her singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in a croaky voice, with a Santa hat on, next to a Christmas tree. I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Joni Mitchell or Van Morrison would never do that. Maybe it’s better to grow old a little more gracefully.’

And don’t get me started on the trivial little themes people employ. How many ‘Happy New Year(s)’ have there been? And ‘Merry Christmas’, and the posting of clichéd music videos, such as a famous one by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (ok, I’ll admit I also posted a Christmas song- River, by Joni- but at least this one wasn’t quite as obvious).

A fan appreciation group you think would be safe is the one devoted to the films of Ingmar Bergman. But after a while this too got me totally fed up. How many times does one want to see somebody posting an image from ‘The Seventh Seal’ or ‘Fanny and Alexander’, and getting 80-100 ‘likes’ for their monumental effort, or, just as stupid, a comment that comes up frequently like ‘what do you think is IB’s best film?’ or ‘was Harriet Andersen in Persona?’ (to these people I say either go and watch the film or look it up).

Besides all this there is the vast multitude of people out there who use it as an excuse to encourage others to admire their legs, or their teeth, or their hair, or whatever else it might be. Maybe their car. And usually people do. ‘Looking good sister’, or ‘LOL gosh you’re beautiful’, with an ‘aaawww thanks’ in reply.

So why have I decided to refrain from giving Facebook the flick completely? Well there is the matter of keeping in touch with local and some overseas people you actually do like, and it is an easy and convenient platform for this. Sometimes curiosity can get the better of me, and I might wonder how such and such is going now that they are now 40 instead of 20. And finally there are people you might respect and admire from afar, and seeing what they are thinking or feeling or posting can be somehow interesting. How does someone like Salman Rushdie, or the editor of the Cambridge D H Lawrence, or an old friend of Ted Hughes spend their free time?

So Facebook, even though I detest and loathe you, and feel used and somehow unclean because of you, I won’t give you up entirely, but at the same time I won’t allow you to take away so much of my precious time, either.

 

 

 

Resisting The Urge

 

                          

Social media. It’s hard to know how to take it. You don’t want to appear old and reject anything that’s new and popular with young people. Then again you feel like there’s better things to do than ‘speak’ to a bunch of people on Facebook, get into a chat room or begin an Instagram.

Sometimes I think to myself, ‘am I possibly missing out here?’

I went out the other night with a friend of mine. We ate a pizza in Lonsdale Street in the city. He had his phone within easy reach all night- a special expensive Apple one. In fact, he used it a lot of the night. He sent his wife a picture of his dessert and she promptly texted him to ask for him to save some for her. He took a photo of the two of us and posted it on Instagram, and within twenty minutes over a dozen people he knew sent him a message saying that they ‘liked’ the photo (which gave him a real buzz). Next he talked about some items he recently sold on eBay, as well as some items he bought, including a plastic Barbie kit for his young daughter which shipped from somewhere near Sacramento. After  conversations and laughter, or even during conversations and laughter, he scrolled down his phone to check whether or not any ‘friends’ had posted anything,  people within his own immediate circle, as well as female models who happen to be partners of Australian rugby union players.

I spoke to a teenage girl recently- she is about fifteen- and asked her if she read anything during the recent holidays. She said she was busy reading all the time- (encouraging) - and told me it was in the form of text messages- literally about a thousand of them (discouraging). And then I thought about how social she must have been, and how being in a stuffy room brooding in your pyjamas and staying up all night reading or playing computer games would be decidedly less healthy.

I sometimes hear people say ‘I will chat to you later tonight’ and wonder what they really mean by ‘chat’, and whether or not that term has totally changed meaning. People of all ages on public transport get sore necks from bending their head over their phone for hours on end. They almost crash into you on the footpath because they are not looking where they are going.

I know adults who are on Facebook and would never want to give it up. It keeps them in touch, they say, with all sorts of people they would never normally be in touch with, and it serves the purpose of quenching their curiosity about what these people on their margins of their social world might be up to. Instagram seems to be popular with almost everyone. I can see how it might give you a real buzz to see where famous people might be in the world, or what Cindy wore to the races at Caulfield racecourse last weekend.

Then there is tweeting, or in other words the ‘twitter sphere’, which has always seemed to me to be too ridiculous for words. Then last night I became curious and impatient for a new MJ Hyland novel, so I looked at her website, and saw she is tweeting about this and that. For all I know, Sylvia Plath, at the age of 83, might be doing the same thing if she hadn’t decided to commit suicide all those years ago. Jim Morrison and John Lennon, too, and Melanie, who is still alive, does do it, although I’m pretty sure Joni Mitchell doesn’t.

So tweeting is definitely not for me. But there are days when I am sitting around looking at my lovely books, or going for a run, or driving the car somewhere, or reading The Age online, when I think to myself ‘am I missing out on something here? Am I so totally disconnected to the ‘real world’ that it is at a personal cost to me and preventing me from living a more fulfilled life?’  I wonder about this, and there are days when I would like to invite myself into the world of cyber gossip and see what all these people everywhere are up to. I could throw away the old clumsy and outdated Nokia phone I rarely ever use, the one where it is getting ridiculously difficult to read the smudged numbers and letters, and replace it with an Apple 6, 7, 8 or 9, with instant internet access.  I might suddenly increase the number of ‘friends’ twenty, thirty, even a hundred fold.

Aaahh, but what’s the use? When would I ever get anything real done?