In my old age, the glories of a lot of things the Moderns love do escape me. Facebook? Biggest corporate escape artist in town. Between its habitual invasion of privacy and its faceless corporate obstinacy, I find Facebook utterly obnoxious. I’ve never been able to figure out its appeal, but the more I’m forced to know about it, the less I grasp people’s fascination with it.
Facebook appears to have stopped reposting from Funny about Money. At least, it has if you believe JetPack, whose corporate credibility strikes one as a lot more reliable than Facebook’s.
Because I have no patience with Facebook and do not wish to consume the few hours remaining to me on this earth with learning how to operate a system whose point goes over my head, I hired an ad manager to run a Facebooks Ads campaign to publicize Fire-Rider and the diet/cookbook. She asked for my log-in details so she could set up an ad account for me.
Turns out Facebook, like Big Brother, is always watching you. Its machinery noted that someone was logging in from a different ISP than my Macbook and so they canceled the ad account, took down the ad campaign to which she had devoted a number of hours, and forced me to dream up a new password. When I asked for my money back (turns out the business of spying on your ISP is a known issue with FB — apparently no normal person can be expected to log in to FB from more than one computer), she came up with a workaround. It remains to be seen how long Big Brother is going to let that stay in place.
Understand: the feed from Funny was set up years ago by a long-since retired WordPress guru. She’s not even in the blogging business anymore. I wouldn’t have known how to set up a blog feed into Facebook, nor would I have been inclined to do so without said guru’s prompting — FB doesn’t interest me and I wouldn’t have signed up at all except for the choir’s insistence that everyone must go online.
JetPack makes it easy to feed blog posts to WordPress — thereby increasing everyone’s potential for pointless clutter by vast orders of magnitude. So with the latest update, it asked me to “refresh” FaM’s connection to FB. Obediently, the little sheeple did so.
It — JetPack — seems to have had no problem connecting Writers Plain & Simple to my Facebook feed, but it no longer can get Funny online, apparently because FaM is posted with the old password. I have no idea how to fix this, and I’m pissed.
Not that the world rotates around FaM. But since I’ve drifted away from PF blogging per se, FaM has become my personal blog. The old connection with FB, then, made it easy to update friends about whatever is, famously, “on my mind” (grrrrr! patronizing bastards) without having to log in and upload links or post bleats.
Among the many things I dislike about Facebook is the lack of control you have over what goes up on the thing. Facebook is like the Borg: We will assimilate you. It’s spying on you everywhere you go, and it seems to pick up messages for group B that you really would not like to share with group A among your friends, family and associates.
Why do Facebook’s arrogant developers fail to grasp the possibility that you might not want your church group to know about your spicy publishing venture? I do not publish porn because I so love it. I publish porn because I can’t make a living at teaching, a trade that now pays less than minimum wage. It’s not something I want anyone but porn readers to know about.
Facebook makes it difficult — IMHO probably impossible — to separate out groups of acquaintances and friends. It mandates against setting up more than one “account,” and the thing is set up to confound efforts to send out messages to targeted groups and still actually reach those groups. In theory it’s possible to do so, but who trusts Facebook? The risk that a message for Audience A will end up being shoved in the faces of Audience B is definitely there. And IMHO, any such risk is too much risk.
Brave new world, isn’t it… So we think.