A couple days ago, I was playing Scrabble on my app, and when I finished my current games, the app asked if I would like to play a game with a random person on FB. Usually, this offer comes with offers to play with people that are on my Facebook friends list, but not this time. "Huh," I thought, and moved on with my life, while the curious question of the missing friends stayed percolating in the back of my brain.
The next day, I checked into Facebook to find that all my friends, accumulated over years of activity, were now gone. In addition, all the links I had posted, to YouTube videos and web sites and this very blog, were gone as well (which meant that quite a few of my posts now made even less sense than they did before, with the context of a link now vanished; I deleted everything I could find in 2018, but didn't have the strength to go back any further). Finally, my cover photo was blank, leaving my profile photo to stare up into nothingness, an ironic commentary on the technological glitch I was now experiencing.
Of course, this shouldn't really matter in my life, as it's only Facebook. But it's a distinct pain in the ass nonetheless, a negation of the work I've undertaken to create an online persona for public consumption and a digital footprint of the things that are important to me at the moment. And the fact that I have no recourse -- there's no IT ticket to submit, no PR person to berate -- is the most frustrating thing about my situation as well as the current state of social media platforms.
I've decided that I'm not going to chase my old friends, so if anyone wants me back on the virtual toll call, that person will have to add me. Please don't take this personally, as it's more of a repudiation of the work involved than the person in particular. It also means that I may try to do more little posts to this blog, rather than posting (seemingly) endless dots and notes to Facebook. But no matter what, it was a nice reminder that in the sphere of social media, the individual matters not a whit.
The next day, I checked into Facebook to find that all my friends, accumulated over years of activity, were now gone. In addition, all the links I had posted, to YouTube videos and web sites and this very blog, were gone as well (which meant that quite a few of my posts now made even less sense than they did before, with the context of a link now vanished; I deleted everything I could find in 2018, but didn't have the strength to go back any further). Finally, my cover photo was blank, leaving my profile photo to stare up into nothingness, an ironic commentary on the technological glitch I was now experiencing.
Of course, this shouldn't really matter in my life, as it's only Facebook. But it's a distinct pain in the ass nonetheless, a negation of the work I've undertaken to create an online persona for public consumption and a digital footprint of the things that are important to me at the moment. And the fact that I have no recourse -- there's no IT ticket to submit, no PR person to berate -- is the most frustrating thing about my situation as well as the current state of social media platforms.
I've decided that I'm not going to chase my old friends, so if anyone wants me back on the virtual toll call, that person will have to add me. Please don't take this personally, as it's more of a repudiation of the work involved than the person in particular. It also means that I may try to do more little posts to this blog, rather than posting (seemingly) endless dots and notes to Facebook. But no matter what, it was a nice reminder that in the sphere of social media, the individual matters not a whit.
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