I shut my face

I killed off the fb for a bit.  Needed a respite.

As a social network, it's got volume and little else.  It fosters a "convenience socialization" ideal.  Click 'like' after 'like'.  I get multiple likes and the occasional "yummm" if I post a picture of dinner.  I get multiple 'likes' on some pictures I'm fortunate enough to capture.  "We love your work," they say, but only to the extent that you place it conveniently on the newsfeed.  Even if there's 517 photos on flickr, just a click away, it doesn't exist unless each photo is on the fb feed.  Or perhaps there's a link to something mind-expanding, something that expounds a point that the person just 'liked' minutes before... no dice.  It's outside of the feed.  This is something I've noticed over the past several months... what you present here is worth checking out, so long as the reader doesn't have to go anywhere else to look at it.  Surely the purpose of a social network is to not just "shoot the breeze" with pictures of our dinner or thoughts on the weather or inspirational messages superimposed on images of unicorns and rainbows.  One would hope a network like fb - with more users on it than anywhere else - would be able to foster a meaningful dialogue among people.  Instead it's a repository for seven-second soundbites and the uneducated/unevolved political harum-scarum of the paranoid masses.  Just imagine what it could be, though. 

This is not to say I don't have some good dialogues there, or that I need constant "likes" or acknowledgment to feel popular on the site.  It's not expected everyone will see everything and must click to acknowledge everything before I believe anyone's reading.  That would be silly and desperate.  It's just disappointing sometimes to see, of 100+ people, the implied opinion that "we like what you had for dinner; we're going to skip your creative work; oh, and we enjoy this picture of a cute cat dangling from a branch saying 'Hang in There'."  When you realize this is happening virtually every time, it's not unreasonable to ask yourself whether or not you're just a "'like' of convenience" to most as well.

I have many brilliant folks on my list (many who are far more productive and intelligent than myself) but I think even they are becoming jaded.  Such potential for the site, but "the lunatics have taken over the asylum."  So I need a break from it.  I'm curious to see who I hear from outside of its walls.