Facebook

I'm trying to remember what life was like before Facebook, and I'm having problems doing so.  I've come to recognize that allowing Facebook to infiltrate this much of my everyday life is becoming a very BAD THING.

Don't get me wrong; the instant messaging system is very useful, especially now that technology supports mobile apps on one's cell phone (though I've resisted the trend to upgrage to a phone that supports that),  as is the events function which I use to schedule weekly luns. I intend to continue to use those features. 

I used to skim my news feed to get information about friends in my network. I've come to do this less and less, as the content not only became more political, it became rather personal. In short, Facebook has become a shaming tool where certain types of people are using it to promote their opinions and exercising the act or threat of exclusion to gain acceptance for that view. It's a level of bullying that would be labelled as deplorable if those tactics were used against the people actually doing this kind of stuff.

I often consider posting an opposing point of view, but I choose not to make the mistake of equating intellectual with intelligent; ideology has nothing to do with facts, it has everything to do with how they feel about certain things. The result is that people nowadays are not rational beings as much as they are rationalizing beings. And the more untenable the position, the greater the rationalization.