The first bolt of lightning illuminated my office. It was followed by two more, all within a minute and all accompanied by a knee-trembling boom. Whoa! Those sounded like they hit the house or barn, I thought, diving involuntarily to the floor in a duck and cover. In doing so, I caught a glimpse of our dog Max as a vague streak by the window in the sheeting rain. An imposing 90-pounder, he had never shown any fear of storms. This one, it was to become apparent, was the deal-breaker.
It wasn’t until some hours later, while winding down over our evening coffee, that we noticed he was gone. We shouted his name, checked under the deck behind the house, examined gates to see if he’d gotten hung up trying to squeeze through. I checked the hay barn to ensure he wasn’t wedged in behind bales. Because an animal in a panic will do these things, trust me. But he wasn’t to be found.
A long, anxious afternoon of looking bled over into an evening. As more storms rumbled through the valley, we broadened the search. We drove the main roads and the back roads, calling. We inserted a flyer into nearby mailboxes. Cindy also posted Max’s picture on Facebook. Thankfully, social media came to the rescue: Within minutes, it yielded a sighting a mile to the north. A flurry of eyewitness reports followed, in an area now centered on the junction of Johnson Valley and Sweetwater roads. Upon seeing the post, some of our neighbors took it upon themselves to venture out and search. Yet still no Max.
This turnout by neighbors, at the bidding of social media, made me uncomfortable. I had decided only a few days earlier to delete my Facebook account. Now, almost as if it had read my thoughts, it was showing a real-time value. I hadn’t quite pulled the plug yet, still weighing the pros and cons. Meanwhile, Facebook friends nearby were pitching in to search for a missing pet, knocking on doors, calling each other, calling us. One of them, while searching up and down Possum Trot, said she was stopped by an unfamiliar woman driving from the opposite direction who asked, “Has he been found yet?” All of this as night fell and the bands of rain continued.
You may have heard the old joke about the man who goes to hell. The devil gives him the choice of spending eternity in one of three rooms. In the first, the lost souls are being roasted on a spit over a flame. In the second, they are being flayed alive. In the third, everyone is standing knee deep in shit drinking coffee. “I’ll take this one,” the man says. His wish granted, he enters the room and the door shuts behind him. Just then, a demon guard comes in with a whip and says, “Coffee break’s over. Back on your heads.” That is Facebook in a nutshell: you endure a load of crap and punishment to get to anything of value.
I first joined Facebook that summer before my older sister, Cynthia, passed away. It was a convenient way to connect with family and friends. Once on board, I found that, like with the carefully crafted letter or email I sent to friends, choosing just the right words or image was highly satisfying. And, there was what initially seemed to be an added benefit: instant connection. I came to expect, look forward to, and sit waiting for feedback in real time.
But the upsides were also the downsides. My lifelong habit of writing letters dramatically declined. With a letter sent by postal service or even email, I expected a reply typically within a few weeks. Because there was no rush, I was free to move on with my minute-to-minute, day-to-day pursuits. Once plugged in to Facebook, I began to fear missing out on responses and new activity, and I found myself often checking in. Beyond the increase in frequency spent online, the quality of my communications also changed. Within a very short time, participating in social media had rewired and then replaced my traditional structures of written and verbal communication, reconfiguring them into pictures on speed. I had become a member of a pictograph society, yet I missed, greatly, those older forms of communication.
Early on, I found it difficult to see this “social” medium as the business model that it was designed to be. Sharing is such an innocent activity — a friend or family member’s wedding, birth of a child, loss of a parent had always before seemed independent of any outside influences. But quietly, behind the scenes, those algorithms were sorting, accumulating … controlling.
It would be rude to blame social media alone for the distracted mind and culture of our modern condition. That tragedy goes further back and extends further out. Like pulling on the threads of a sweater you wear on a cold winter’s day, you end up naked and shivering before you find the starting point.
Indeed, the whole digital landscape has changed us all with its fragmentation and distractions. Once I joined the new world, I soon realized that friends and family no longer replied to emails or took phone calls. Responses to letters became perfunctory or nonexistent. “Haha!” and “LOL” were now default responses to missives. And I found that I was doing the same. The old communi(ty)cation landscape had been reduced to PMs and texts, and it happened so quickly, it seemed always to have been that way.
Since this is a blog whose aim is to speak of community and connectedness, albeit from a very imperfect practitioner, here are my areas of concern with the rise of social media, Facebook in particular: It is not some commons of a communal resource. It is a global business posing as community forum. It offers, in return for gathering data points about every aspect of our lives, a Hollywood movie-set façade intended to mimic real interactions. For any value gained, there is an even higher cost, that of relinquishing the possibility of enlarging a deeper understanding of our neighbors, friends, family, and selves. It further erodes our commons as a species.
And no, I don’t share in the latest outrage over the Russians’ or others’ use of Facebook to subvert an election. The very nature of the medium is subversion. Its primary goal is to get us to surrender eyeballs and information, commodifying the minutiae of our lives as opportunities to sell them back to us, repackaged. If our citizenry has grown so feeble of intellect that it is willing to trade in for infantile memes its duties and rights, then so be it.
For me, Facebook ended up providing the opposite of what I had hoped to achieve by living on the land. My goal was to learn much while seeing little; Facebook allowed me to see much while learning little. The conclusion I finally arrived at was that I’d rather lose all the Maxes in my life than surrender the very small chance of holding on to what remains of the old ways — that fractured (yet genuine) foundation, where a more hopeful edifice of social interaction, personal and direct, might reemerge.
So much has been written and discussed on this topic that there is nothing new I can offer except my personal perspective. Mine is an inadequate post to address something that is changing us in ways that make me fearful. My fear comes down to a disquiet with and a distrust of a medium that I don’t control or understand. The disquiet is in my own conversion into a communicator who swims only in the kiddie pool. The distrust is in something to which I so easily handed over my personal self and, distracted, missed the signpost informing me of a wrong turn some miles back.
………………………………….
A month has now passed since I first wrote the above words, and I did delete my Facebook account. My unspoken and irrational fear of disappearing was unfounded, for I’m still here. It is a modest start in a personal reclamation project.
There have been other changes in these four weeks. Most surprisingly, my garden looks a bit better. Amazing how an extra hour spent each day has helped me keep on top of tying up the growing tomatoes and weeding the rows. More important, I’m enjoying more time in the mornings and evenings simply sitting outside and staring — working on seeing little and learning much.
As for Max? Around midnight on the day he disappeared, Cindy got out of bed and went outside to look for him once more before going to sleep. Another storm was breaking over the valley, and she got in her car and drove up the road, calling his name. Nearing the junction of Johnson Valley and Sweetwater roads, she saw a movement in the overgrown ditch on the far side of the highway. And there he was. She called his name and he came bounding into the car, and she brought him home.
P.S. Reading this weekend: A Lesson Before Dying (Gaines).
Says it all! And laughably, I’m sharing it on Facebook! Glad you found Max.
Thanks, glad you appreciated it.
I’ve been following your posts for a while. Please keep them coming, they are so thoughtful and inspiring. I deleted my Facebook account recently and feel very happy about it.
Shucks, thanks for the kind comment, Ramona. It is interesting how such a simple act can seem liberating.
I’m always happy when I hear someone is no longer on Facebook. I deleted my account six years ago and have not missed it for a minute. I have more time, though i still spend way too much time online. Yesterday my family went on a picnic to a beautiful creek in a wooded area not far from where we live. My daughter and 12 year old grandson left for a seven mile hike, I stayed back to knit and read a book. A father wandered through with his teenage son, and the son was clutching a cellphone and not even looking around at the wonder and beauty of the Creation all around us! I fear sometimes for our future, when our children at like that poor boy, who would rather look at his phone instead of the reality right in front of him.
But enough of my rant. I always enjoy your musings of a Sunday, and I’m very glad Max is back. It is a terrible thing to lose a dog.
Heather,
That screen staring, by the young boy, is one pet peeve I spend time nurturing. It simply drives me nuts. Too often kids come to the farm and spend their time in the car or in the house glued to a device. The parents shrug as if to say, “kids”. sigh.
Thanks for the comment,
Bravo. Well said. I was never on Facebook. I’m a refusnik that way, one of only a few I know. No congratulations are due for having recognized the precise shape of the distortion field FB is (by design and default). Rather, I merely saw the bandwagon forming and knew immediately that it offered nothing I desired. Now that enough time has elapsed to analyze the live human trials of the experiment in social media (not unlike similar developments with TV, radio, telephony, cinema, and even photography long before), we have a sense of diminishing returns with every new fad that demands our attention and subscription. They all have their effects, some more comprehensive than others. The ebbing away of the typographic mind in favor of the pictorial mind (cartoons, pics, video) is the main point of analysis. Few know that using pictorial channels of apprehension smuggles emotion into messaging that short-circuits the logical, rational processing more characteristic of the slow, private thoughts conveyed though type or handwriting. But like fish in the fishbowl, we can’t see the water we’re swimming in.
That is a thoughtful response, Brutus. And, a fairly alarming one as well. Yet, another peeve (I have plenty) is the invasion of every public space with visual media. Argh!
Glad to hear you found your companion.
Facebook is the latest technological scam in a long line of scams. It reminds me of the question: Is all technology good? And, the answer, of course, is NO. Much technological advance comes with a significant downside, often hidden by clever advertising and other public relations tricks. But, if it makes the purveyor of the tech money, it is considered a net positive for all society. What a poor way to evaluate something’s worth.
Several years ago my brother-in-law and I were discussing the merits of the cell phone in regard to its effect on our construction businesses. We agreed that it made us much more efficient and timely. However, all our competitors quickly adopted cell phones and our competitive advantage disappeared. And now we were working harder and faster, AND, had a monthly cell phone bill. Now that’s progress!
Thanks, hotrod. He was pretty cowed by the experience and has not ventured very far in the past month.
Having already made a comment, I would add that while there is a lot of rubbish on Facebook, there are a lot of good things and people as well, provided that one doesn’t get too ‘hooked’ and waste too much time. I don’t use it so much to connect with personal friends as I use it to connect with people with similar interests, who don’t necessarily write blogs on those subjects and who can still provide interesting and useful information. I guess it’s all in how you use it that counts.
Brian, Thank you for this post. I think personal perspectives on the real-life impacts of social media and other digital communications technologies are exactly what is needed to encourage people to explore their use of these “tools,” not the voices of “experts” discussing what Cal Newport calls “legal-techno geek issues.” Stories like yours can help encourage a bit of self-awareness, and maybe even some life changes. You do such a good job of pointing out the complexities of the pros & cons.
I resisted Facebook until the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011, when we used it to keep track of and share what was going on in Madison and around the state. I kept the account after the protests ended, but it never really “took” with me–in part because I was so disillusioned when I learned that Facebook was using algorithms to determine which posts by my “friends” I would be shown first. Or maybe because I don’t have a smart phone, and didn’t have a portable internet device (tablet) until 2015. Cell signals are spotty here and it’s not a primary form of connection, so I don’t text and I only use email on a computer, which I’m not eager to spend time on in the evening after sitting in front of one all day at work. In other words, I’ve never grown accustomed to wanting or needing a quick response.
Over time, it became clear that people were assuming I had seen things because I had a Facebook account, when in fact I hadn’t checked in for days or weeks. So I cancelled the account. I don’t miss it. Like you, I benefit from my partner’s account. He tells me if something is going on with the family that I might otherwise not know. But the truth is that my family and other people important to me know that if they want me to know something, they need to contact me directly. And that hasn’t been a problem. What has been a problem for me is the sense that people are becoming less and less interested in narrative, and don’t have the patience to write letters or to tuck in and read a letter from a dear one–never mind relish it!–whether it arrives via postal mail or email.
As long as there is money to be made on big data, there will be clever marketing and design to facilitate addiction to certain kinds of social media. I take hope from the growing awareness of this fact, and that conversations about it are more in the mainstream. Of course, I can’t claim to know much about it because I rarely swim there! Following a few blogs, having a daily dose of poetry, and keeping up correspondence with a few friends is about my limit. But I do struggle to manage the phenomenon of Google photo sharing, and going down the rabbit hole of family photo invites is tough to avoid. Oh well. One thing at a time.
Cheers, and so glad Max was found!
Sarah
Sarah,
Always thoughtful, thanks for commenting. It sounds like you and Rick have achieved a good life/work balance. Like you, I’ve got my blogs that I like to read. But, where I’ve really tried to cut back is to unsubscribe to any stray bit of commercial email that comes my way. I’ve been on a mission to cut the digital clutter. To that end, I’ve begun scheduling times I can connect to the internet. That has been effective. Fortunately, like you, we can’t stream anything. The connections are slow, phone connections spotty, each of which helps us stay focused on the farm outside the walls (or, the book in the lap).
Cheers,
I see I’m quite late to this party… but a very nice one indeed. Good post and nice set of thoughtful comments.
Like Brutus I’ve never opened a Facebook account. He and I may have abstained for different reasons, but I now feel like I’ve dodged a bullet. A friend once encouraged me to join LinkedIn – and I did have a look, read most of the small print before opening an account… when I got the part where they explain that all the information you enter about yourself, or content that you post, becomes their property – I decided against joining.
And like others have mentioned here and elsewhere, the FOMO phenomenon is real and pretty unsettling. Here in Ohio it is illegal to text and drive. But it is still far too common to see folks behind the wheel staring at an electronic device and keying away. Just the other day I saw the gal in the car next to me at a light keying away on her device. I tooted the horn and when she looked up I waved my phone at her. Her single fingered salute was probably to be expected. Part of me wants to believe that natural selection will cull those for whom this message is too complicated. But the innocents they take with them are the ones I feel for the most.
It seems, Clem, that each week Cindy or I report to the other a similar story. One of us have come around a sharp Tennessee curve to find an oncoming vehicle in our lane. That driver invariably has their head down staring at a device. “This is how we end”, is how we have begun to describe these moments. It will happen, I’m convinced.
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