361 Friends

Who could possibly have 361 friends!  What the!  Oh, I get it, it’s not friends, it’s “friends”.  As if!  Well I’m sorry, but I’ve had it with “friends” on Facebook. I have two friends in real life.  And they just happen to be the same two friends on Facebook.  They’re the people who care to ask me about my health and the weather, the sort of modest enquiry I regularly make of them as well. It doesn’t seem to matter that they live on the other side of the world in the South Pacific.  We still talk, Skype, FaceTime and email.

I’ve retained the Facebook platform just because I like having another perpetual internet site to store my favourite photos (I already have a Google blog and a web site).  And the day may come that I want to share that stuff with some other friend (though time is running out in that department considering the two friends I have go back about forty years).

It cheered me to hear on BBC this morning that Twitter is in trouble.  What a preposterous platform that is!  Have you read that stuff?  Garbage! Utter garbage!  I would be embarrassed to add my name to 99% of that dribble.  I get more fun out of watching a toilet flush.

Maybe I have one or two other friends.  But they don’t use Facebook, not that I and my current Facebook friends use it the way the kids do.  And even though it is most certainly not beneath me to condescend to cultivate a phoney-baloney society I just haven’t the inclination to read all that nonsense that everyone insists on publishing on Facebook.  At least I confine my submissions to photographs  – which by the way I have taken myself – and which admit to the viewer’s personal interpretation.  Things like hijacked videos and unacknowledged text from the internet are nowhere to be found on my Facebook.  Geez!  If I want to see that bilge I’ll troll the net myself thankyouverymuch!

This isn’t the first time I’ve culled my “friends” from Facebook.  In the past I have relented and proffered some feeble excuse about having accidentally deleted my “friends”. I never used that horrid word “unfriend” – as though it has any more meaning than “friend” in the context of Facebook.  But once the disease is reignited it spreads amazingly fast and before you know it you have 361 friends!  What could possibly be the point of that!  Mass produced friends! And with just about as much personal appeal!

I doubt I’ll be starting a trend but at least this rant satisfies my curmudgeonly instincts.  The platform could still be useful if it were restricted to people who really care about what you think and do.  As it is, it is more directed to displaying one’s own unattached significance.  I say this with love, as a friend.