Column: Midnight musings
I don’t “like” Facebook and you won’t find me on it.
You might find photos I’ve taken that someone else posted but you won’t find my name, to the dismay of my brothers and sisters. My brother coaxes me to at least post my columns and maybe I will, someday. But for now, I like my cyber privacy. I know I don’t really have privacy online. Ten minutes after I’ve looked at shoes at Zappos, an ad from the company conveniently pops up next to my email, in case I’ve decided to buy those shoes.
My sister doesn’t understand my reluctance. She posts her daily doings, everything from her crazy birthday outfit with matching sequined glasses to photos of her polar plunge and dirt bike adventure. My brother posts his opinions on articles from the New York Times and Washington Post; there’s no question of his politics when you read his posts.
I know about my family’s updates because my husband has an account. He didn’t write a profile, only included his name and birthday. Within a half hour, he had 20 people on the Island who wanted to “friend” him. How did Facebook know where he lived? I found this utterly creepy, in a Big Brother sort of way.
Since then, my husband has become a true Facebook convert. He doesn’t post much, though he did get speedy answers from his musician friends on what guitar capo to buy and how to clean the spit out of a harmonica. The cool thing is that he has reconnected with his hippie friends from his Haight-Asbury days in San Francisco in the late 60’s, friends he was close to at the time but has had no contact with in almost 40 years; they’ve been looking for him since. The fact that he had another first name at the time didn’t help and no one remembered how to spell his last name.
He likes to read their posts and will occasionally put up pictures of himself and us, to show them what he’s been up to. They’re surprised he has a family and are understandably curious to see how much he has changed from the man they knew with long hair, soulful eyes and orange crushed velvet pantsuits. Old girlfriends? Probably. I don’t ask.
Which brings me to my old boyfriends. There aren’t that many of them and they were nice guys — well, not that nice — but they weren’t stalkers, just guys that if I had contact with now, I’d have nothing to say to. I attended a large high school 500 miles away and have never attended one of my reunions, not because I’ve gained a lot of weight (I haven’t) or my husband is fat and bald (he isn’t) but just because I don’t really have any desire to rehash those high school days. I still see my best friend from high school when I go visit my parents; anyone else doesn’t matter.
Then there’s that evil auto-correct feature: you type in one person’s name and a different person pops up and if you’re not careful, you just sent your reply about the British Ukulele Orchestra to a complete stranger.
I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg, when dreaming up the concept for FB, was watching Sally Fields’ acceptance speech at the Oscars when she won for her 1985 film, “Places in the Heart.” “You like me,” she gushed, “Right now, you like me!”
Facebook reminds me of something my younger sister used to say when she was very small. If my mother complimented one of us, she’d pipe up, “Am I good too?”
Do we really need to tell the world what we’re doing every minute of the day? Like Hilary Clinton, I believe in a “zone of privacy.”
As writers, we constantly face the decision of what to reveal and what to conceal. The author Don DeLillo said, “You need to know things the others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
Why would I give that away?
