Fartin' Around On Social Media – Part 1: Facebook

So this is a kind of op/ed nod to these four sites. Hope you enjoy it. I will post one every Sunday morning.

First of all there is the age old argument that questions the very premise of owing anything to social media. In point of fact the converse is likely more true…that social media owes us its very existence, because it thrives and grows based on the content we so willingly provide.

But I’m not here to argue that or even try and rationalize it. I want to talk about what social media means to me.

I started on Facebook about 12 years ago. Most of the first year was just spent figuring it out and gathering ‘friends’. Back then there was a huge feeding frenzy for ‘friends, and in some ways a bit of a pissing contest to see who could accumulate the most in the shortest time.

At the time, I believe the limit was 5000, and I remember it taking me a few years (cause we’re all doing this part time), to build my following to about 2500 lost souls.

Mostly back then I would do mini reviews, as I was in the process of winding down my Couch Potato Chronicles column and transforming it into short format pieces that were easily digestible by Facebookers.

The next few years were spent learning how to create posts that would build my following. I guess that was successful because you never really know what works and what doesn’t in this medium.

But I go myself up to 4400 or so. But at the same time I was starting to realize that there was a stratification and that, at any given time, I would only be hearing from or seeing original posts from about 100 or so people regularly. The other 4300 seemed to be somehow invisible to me.

Then, probably about 5 years ago, I started to notice that if I spent enough time there, I was seeing a lot of what became known as trolling, basically from assholes with agendas who had made friend requests that I blindly accepted.

Like a virulent cancer, this trolling increased in frequency. These were not personal attacks on me, but about everything else under the sun. And this was way before Trump even reared his ugly head.

This got to be bad enough and insidious enough for me to rethink the whole idea of mindless friend accumulation.

So one day, I just closed my account. Thump. I waited a week and then opened a new account (under JJMurray). I took the massive ‘friends” list that Facebook sent me and I culled it down to a little over 110 names of people I knew personally, family and people I knew for sure weren’t assholes.

Basically I started over.

The Big Difference

The big difference was the amount of time I got back. With just over 100 friends, I was able to scroll through and see what everybody was up to in a few minutes, whereas with 4400 so called friends that could take days.

It was around this time that I started getting interested in memes. I was still writing long format posts and will probably never quit that, but Facebook people are there for a quick fix, a little update, a pic of the grandkids or a cool sunset, cat vides, all that stuff.

I added a few twists by encasing some of my lyrics and poems into memes as well.

Additionally, the memes became a great little way to make a substantial point and have some fun doing it. I started by going after Stephen Harper during the last Canadian Federal election. I carried on going after the late Doug Ford and his farcical stint as Toronto mayor. And I also started going after American idiots like Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz.

Then Along Came The Desperate Cheeto

The minute Trump descended that escalator with his mail order bride and his blonde combover and his XXXLong red tie to announce his run for the US presidency, I knew I had struck gold.

I remember thinking to myself…this guy is pretty much the biggest idiot anyone has ever seen, so this campaign it going to be a total shit circus.

Unfortunately that’s pretty much all I got right. And I’ll be the first to admit that this was all weirdly addictive and I caught the bug, and still haven’t been able to shake it to any great degree.

But many of my Facebook friends seem to enjoy it. So what the hell.

One of the things I like about Facebook (and there is a bit I don’t like too), is that they appear to work hard to help people make their posts look interesting.

Right now privacy is a big issue on all social media sites. But if you knew even a little about the Internet, you should have realized two things:

There is no privacy. They will take whatever info you provide them with and sell it to anyone who is interested in it. So your privacy is directly proportional to the amount of information you are willing to part with.

This is stuff everybody should have been able to figure out. It’s not rocket science. It costs millions a year to keep a site like Facebook going. And they keep it going well. So guess what? Your information is what they sell to pay the bills and make themselves richer than God.

Fair trade? Not at all. But here we are, all 2 billion of us, posting our brains out 24/7 and Facebook is like….ka-ching,

ka-ching, ka-ching.

The Big Conclusion

I made deal with Facebook. I get a place to vent and have fun. They get to stick ads for stuff that I might be interested in on my wall. These days they also apparently allow Russian trolls to try and influence my thinking.

But I’m a writer and writers can generally spot the trolls from a mile off.

Jim lives in St Catharines Ontario and is a partner at Bullet Proof Consulting. www.bulletproofconsulting.ca

You can follow Jim

On beBee: https://www.bebee.com/bee/jim-murray

On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-murray-b8a3a4/

On Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jimbobmur

On Facebook: https://tinyurl.com/y97gxro4