Monday, September 6, 2010

OK suppose you left the bathroom door open...

...and then....

oh, enough of my crazy life.

Just counted my morning trip for the first time on this gorgeous September morning. One hundred and twenty city blocks. Some are long, some are short, some are up hill, some are down, some are rough and bumpy, some are smooth, but it is seven miles before switching bikes to stretch different muscles for another three miles. I probably could do more, but maybe next year I'll up the gear again instead.

There is a movie coming out which I think will be VERY popular and the trailer looks cute. It's about the boys and girls (I'm old, I can say that)who created Facebook. It should be interesting to see how they realized people wanted to use their new electronic devices to stay in touch with all their "friends" for ever.

I read about kids who sleep with their phones. The television shows now have conversations using laptops, and people of all ages are walking around talking to themselves.

I think back to a time when television was black and white and the only contact people could have (when not within ear shot) was writing a letter or using the corded telephone.

Writing a letter took some thought and time waiting for a reply. The telephone was usually cut off by parents, so the conversations were mostly, "What are you doing?"

And today, the immediate reply could be, "Not'n what r u doin?"

But Facebook is an interesting phenomena. One, it is FREE! (At least for the moment, so the inventors had to have the capitol for servers up front). Two, you can just about put anything you want out there to millions of others around the globe to view. Profile information (true or not), photos (retouched in Photoshop or not), links to favorite video clips, or just personal thoughts about what the baby ate and threw up last night.

And we all go out and make "friends" with everyone so we can scroll down this list of nonsense every day. It is as if we make ourselves important enough for someone else to spend time reading about us like we were in "People" magazine.

Of course there is the privacy of messages or personal email, but we tend to post a "status" as if the world will change with the announcement that "I'm going to the beach".

And what do you believe? It is as if a "friend" at a cocktail party just told you two other "friends" were breaking up. How does this information affect you? Is it true? Should you even care? Why are you listening to second or third hand news?

As a generation have we become so interested in each other, like the 'Inside Edition" or "TMZ" reporting, that we can not live our lives without telling the world?


OK, I've spend my allotted time writing this crap. Got to go to Facebook so see what everyone else is doing on Labor Day.

1 comment:

TripleG said...

You're right on. Why does Facebook seem like a moderately intelligent fun activity to me, while Tweeting and texting is just more herd-mentality nonsense? There's no difference except for the slightly longer life, with maybe a little more effort applied, of the former.
FB allows us to pretend we're not isolated nonentities; it fills the same needs as the make-up-your-own-brand megachurches.