Subtitled Deep Thinkers Deep Feelers?

I de-activated facebook in order to try to detox. I was off for all of a day and a half. OK, I DNA matched a new first cousin that first day. Contacted him. He asked me to connect on facebook. OUCH! So, I got back on.

Now I noticed some of my friends are missing. FB is being WEIRD? Is that an overstatement? Does FB deliberately try to drive a persona crazy?

I have family who dropped facebook years ago. For mental health reasons. It is easy to see why. But, I do genealogy, and it seems the ONLY way anybody communicates with others is via social media. People don’t write letters, don’t send email, don’t even have email addresses, and they don’t give out phone numbers. But they use facebook. It seems to be a necessity.

I run a group of family members. It is an easy way to (sort of) do the equivalent of a newsletter that goes to all relatives.

Immutability. I am constantly telling people to BLOG BLOG BLOG and then post links. This way facebook cannot censor what they write. And when facebook kicks them off, well, their material does not disappear. That is a huge advantage. But nobody will even try to blog. Bloggers are a different bunch. I follow several philosophical type people. They write long introspective pieces. Some write about theology.

Organic Organization. I like wordpress because I can form topics and categories, develop material over a long period of time, and organize it organically. In other words, I do not have to decide the structure of the organization ahead of time. It grows organically. Which fits my thinking style. My thinking style is not linear. Instead it is sort of a star that has radii in all directions at once. I synthesize. This means making observations about many things, and then finding where they link and cross over and dovetail. Or where they are in conflict. That leads to synthetic ideas. This is a voyage of discovery, and you cannot pre-organize the pathways and links because they have not been discovered yet.

WordPress also allows expansion and iterations of existing data.

Social media completely short circuits all the above. It is linear in a reverse chronological order. It is basically dis-organization, or the opposite of organization.

Facebook pretends to be a bulletin board. It isn’t. There are no topical categories. The tools just are not there. So facebook, and all social media, are very limited in scope. And they do not foster thought.

This post, if you read this far, if on facebook, welllll…very unlikely anybody would even read it. If you want to get someone to hear your ideas they must be a

If you don’t use a meme nobody will even look at your message. Then, if they have a strong emotional reaction they may give an opinion. Not thoughts, just opinions. People with actual thoughts really belong on a blog or a bulletin board. But they are stuck on social media because all their friends are there. And they don’t know how to blog. Most of the time they just click a like. Or, if they dislike they will say something in the way of a nasty opinion. Which causes conflict that almost never can reach a reconciliation.

Ergo, social media is just toxic as hell, and will harm your health.

I have noticed on blogs people will go to great lengths to describe their internal evolution. On facebook nobody will admit to even having internal evolution. Instead they try to hide it.

But just try to get off facebook! I lasted less than two days. Facebook warned me I had 20 days before my groups would be deleted. In other words, the two years I spent introducing relatives to each other would go POOF! So I am not allowed to take an actual mental health break from facebook.

This is a disease fostered by facebook. Or, more simply, facebook itself is a sociological disease infecting humanity.

Why is facebook addictive? 1) Instant emotional gratification with no work involved 2) Active promotional feedback is facebook’s strategy to drive addiction. Notifications sent to you. Messages sent to you. Your name being mentioned gets your attention. Likes. That sort of thing.

I maintain about 100 facebook friends. I personally know almost all of them. 60-70% pay no attention to me at all. The other 30% are people I talk on the phone with. I have blocked 350 toxic people. 250 of these are right wingers and 100 are left wingers. Call me a name on my page == BLOCK. So the really toxic are weeded out. I do not have a public forum or a semi-public forum like many people have.

What facebook needs: The ability, like wordpress, to turn off commenting.