Thoughts About Facebook

In one of the classes I take, university students admitted to having difficulties completing their papers because of the pull of Facebook. One student admitted to deleting themselves entirely off Facebook as the only solution to keep ‘enough focus’ to write a paper. Many more nodded in agreement.

I do not struggle to stay off Facebook, I struggle to stay on it. But then, I am a fifty-five year old student of life. The students telling me they struggle to stay off Facebook are another wave, generation, workforce, next group of leaders, thinkers, contributors, actors, rehabilitators, reactionaries, respite and/or mighty mess makers of our collective future.

Is this a problem? Probably yes and no, like so many things we have begun to equalize and rationalize as necessary parts of our every day experiences. My friend that came to visit me was quietly texting someone else under the dining room table. My reaction might certainly be different on Facebook instead of ‘in your face’, to be sure, because I grew up when it was a sign of being rude to give your attention to anything other than the person you came to visit. I believe my friend now prefers to greet me virtually and not physically. Come to think of it, I do not hear anything from this friend anymore. I forged a new set of manners by telling my friend to their face what I thought about texting someone else while visiting with another.

I can share that my ‘focus’ and ‘uninterrupted periods of time’ are generally interrupted by things like friends with failing health, birthdays, deaths, children with psychological traumas, over-active children, just plain intelligent children, women, men, dogs, cats, birds, flowering plants, vegetables and fruit trees, all in need of a little attention that distracts me from ‘enough focus’ and punctuates my periods of time, but then, they don’t derail me like Facebook can to the student trying to finish a complex paper, they make me grow, expand, and create a space and time worth being in so I care enough to write the paper in the first place.

Facebook is the new hyper-active kid on the block, and it is time we all decided just how much time we need to spend with this new friend, as opposed to all our old friends like reading, writing and arithmetic, and uh, physical family and friends.

I am talking to a tune of ‘a disappearance’ from our society, that disappearance being the one called ‘solitude’. The capacity to be alone and at peace with one’s self in order to do or think about anything worthwhile, profound and not just responsive, as instant communications and quick information overload creates immediate and un-lasting results. No ‘solitude’, no class paper. No ‘solitude’, no new ideas. No ‘solitude’ no healing, epiphanies, and rejuvenation. Feeling pitted, plastered, knackered, disjointed? Then, you are too plugged in. ‘Turn off’ is the newest form of music for our ears. Seek solitude, and visit Facebook once a week or once a day, but by all means, control it, not it control us and NEVER at the expense of what is right in front of our faces, minus the electronic devices.

‘Solitude’ is a necessary environment which gives birth to ‘enough focus’ through ‘uninterrupted periods of time’ so that any student can write a paper at university level. Toss in the thousands of electronic texts shot toward the rising generation, the blinking boxes on our computers, cell phones and television sets and try to follow the translations of dis-ease caused by connecting with everyone at one time and not with one’s own mind, wherein students of any age stay off the page, otherwise known as not ‘focused enough’, creating the voids we are all beginning to FEEL, but find it hard to explain. Am I making sense? I think I am, but chances are, there is no one out there to respond with, we all just went a ‘twittering’ off somewhere else I suspect, once again.

Write. Write enough to find some new and different ideas to explore, that is why we go to a place to learn, to discuss different ideas, the place we discuss those with ourselves is in the space of silence, or while writing to one’s self, like this. I bet you thought this writing was for you, well, it is mostly for myself, but if it helps you, too, I am happy for that, but when I write, I write to find out what in fact I think about deep enough and strongly enough to WRITE about and push publish.

I care about the pull of Facebook; I care enough to have a sign in my office that says INTERNET ONLY from this time to this time, and after that, none of it!

Do I always adhere? No, but I do try and I am very conscious of the pull of not just Facebook, but anything and everything that will subtract me from myself for too long and thereby turn me into someone who points my finger toward another break in my solitude that then prohibits my showing up for myself at all.

Who amongst us can truly learn anything without deep contemplation, re-collecting all the information that has been blasted at us. We need to take the time to deconstruct, then reconstruct information so that we can achieve some kind of rational goal, like peace, like quiet.

I find that to be the single thing I desire from any experience, peace, and how hard that is when plugged into too many electronic devices that control my input and output in and to the world at large. If I cannot wait to go post the fact that I just made a new batch of cookies, the kind you really eat, and not the kind that attach themselves to me when I am online, then, perhaps it is time to take a decided Facebook holiday, contemplate and think up a new recipe to share, out there, all over the place, all at one time to everyone, this should be important stuff we stop the world in order to share, right?

And, the only reason I have for being on Facebook is that it is the major place I can find someone I know who might respond back to me. I have only one friend left who will write me an email, a letter, and, the rest of the world has simply disappeared into Facebook.

If you can’t beat them you have to join them is my syndrome I tell myself, but then lying in bed at night and the last thing my daughter says to me is ‘do you have your cell phone on you?’ and this happens now, and once, not so very long ago, like a reverse fairy story, it didn’t happen at all, I was not wired for sound but I liked the world better when I held a meaningful conversation with you, and not every day, but only when it was ‘our’ time to be together, now suddenly, we are all sick with one another’s problems at the exact same time through Facebook.

Turn this off now and go THINK about something. Write it down and send it to me, I will read it when 'I decide', which might be once a day, early in the morning and then OFF. After that, there is no room for technology in my life unless there is an earthquake to report on instantly to ease distant minds.

I am committed to being consciously alive, safeguarding my own 'solitude' and finishing this term of papers so I can come back to the wider world, but with boundaries in place, not just on Facebook, but fully present and fully un-present, whatever the case may be, depending on my own need for 'solitude'.

Enough is enough. Facebook needs self monitoring. Just do it! And, I just did.