Sword Of
Facebook is definitely a two-edged sword.
I’ve commented many times in my life that it takes a fair amount of time and effort to keep up friendships. And I was saying that long before Facebook made it obvious just how many people I know but am not really keeping up with.
I actually don’t spend much time on Facebook these days. I’d say that that’s because I prefer to maintain my friendships the old-fashioned way, but I get nervous about typing things like that when God is watching me type. He has a tendency to hit me on the head and make me fix things like that. It’s not that I don’t prefer keeping up in person, it’s that that isn’t why I don’t keep up with Facebook. The real reason is a mix of having many other things to do with my time and with the lack of degrees within Facebook.
Facebook claims to be able to present me with the best and most relevant posts from my “friends,” but I don’t trust them. I know whose an acquaintance, who’s family, who’s a friend, and who’s a close friend. Not to mention who’s an object of my lust. Facebook doesn’t. And even if they gave me a way to specify, I certainly don’t trust them well enough to actually tell them. I mean, I’ve had enough heartache in my life from telling my close friends who I think is cute or not, I certainly don’t want to give that information to some heartless corporation. And as for their algorithms figuring it out on their own? Well, the few times I’ve let them try they’ve done pretty badly. And I’m not surprised. I write software for a living and I keep up on what’s going on in the industry, and I really don’t think computers are going to figure out what’s interesting versus what’s drivel — to me — anytime soon.
But then, God tells me that that’s the Killer App of Social Networking just waiting to happen, a program that can tell not only that something is drivel, but that it’s drivel that I’d still like to read. Somehow, I think we’ll get the singularity first.
So yeah, Facebook is a two-edged sword. It’s full of drivel, but buried in all of that are nuggets that I really would like to read, really would like to know, but just can’t justify the time it takes to dig them out.
Sometimes I think that the reason we invented swords at all, is just so that we could have the metaphor of referring to things as two-edged swords.
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