You do realise Facebook is for engaging with people you do know and privacy can be set so that no-one else sees anything.
Yes you can see or interact with other people on public pages like the LuLa FB page, but you do not have to engage. FB is an excellent tool I find for keeping in touch with friends and family I have all over the world or indeed friends I have that are scattered across the UK and I don't have to put up with morons posting their [usually anonymous] brainless/bigoted crap like you do on forums at times.
Yes, I do appreciate that, as both my kids and grandkids are on the service, but my resistance to involvement's too strong. I have been through several lengthy withdrawals from LuLa, as it is, and getting back on proves to be ever more a mixed blessing. I hardly need more distractions in my life.
It isn't that I find it difficult to handle as much as it is something that consumes a lot of my time. For example: during my last sabbatical, not only did I manage to shoot a lot of pictures, I found time and energy to put two books onto disc. That they will probably always bring me politely written rejection slips doesn't matter - I didn't do it for any hoped-for money, I did it for the interest in getting two distinct themes down into the most compact and concise form possible whilst at the same time allowing me the pleasure of doing a little research and writing, discovering details about things of which my actual knowledge had been very superficial. In other words, doing it became a pleasant learning experience.
'Social media' so reminds me of addiction. People, even today, rush out from their dining table to have a quick puff and cellphone consultation between courses. A couple of days ago my daughter and I were having lunch, and at the next table sat five girls around twenty years of age. At one stage, only two were left in seated conversation, the others standing in a group outside the door doing whatever one does with a cellphone. Apart from being rude, especially to the two girls left seated, it all smacked of such a pathetic fear of being left out of something... terribly sad, really, and symptomatic of why I resist! Life had always been liveable pre-social media and it still very much is; you just have to ask whether it's relevant to your own life.
My wife was very good at maths and the sciences; she never sent an e-mail. I used to try to coax her but she simply asked the killer question: why? She then went on to say that two seconds into a telephone conversation she would know from the voice whether all was truly well with the family or not. Written words mean whatever the sender choses them to mean, and whatever the reader cares to interpret them to mean. A known voice never fails to tell the truth, whatever it may be saying.
Also, from my own perspective on web communications, it becomes a bit discourging to write about something and receive a reply one short sentence long. The inevitable question one asks oneself becomes: what's the bloody point? It may be heaven for the one-minute mind, but hell on Earth for anyone genuinely seeking stimulating conversation. Perhaps the two are in irrevocable conflict.
Rob C
