More 'Babbling on'....

Reading over my previous rant about Facebook and its users, whoever you may be, I should explain that it's certainly none of my business how you get your jollies or your entertainment, and I'm not trying to be a 'smart-ass'.... actually, that latter is not strictly true - I've always put a conscious effort into trying to use whatever 'smarts' I've got, because ever since I've been a little kid, I've known that there's a lot of smarties out there trying to manipulate us into doing something that works out more to their advantage than to ours. So I've always tended towards being the suspicious type, and asking "Why? What's this all about?" Because, there's a lot of different ways to skin a cat.

My cousins in Atlanta surprised me with their news that they both enjoy spending time on Facebook, and I'd like them to know that I'm not trying to tell them what they ought to be doing. I was surprised, though, because both of them are very well educated, presumably have above-average I.Q.s, and therefore theoretically, should probably not be so susceptible to manipulation by some wet-behind-the-ears youngster like Mark Zuckerberg.

There are aspects to all of that which tend to set off my alarm bells, because in this day and age, far too many of us are becoming reliant upon virtual realities like Facebook, the Internet, Google's Blogger, etc., rather than formerly traditional interpersonal relationships like visiting the neighbors, or attending real live social functions, or gossiping with the kids at the supermarket while we do the shopping. Real human face-to-face interactions, in other words, are now becoming in a very real sense a 'lost art'. And that's something that ought to be really troubling all of us, I think. Why? Because - we're human animals with a built-in 'herd' instinct which has served to nurture and protect us from life's dangers for millennia, and switching to isolated individualism in a world of virtual reality exposes us to the obvious dangers of the old 'divide and conquer' principle.

If you don't think that's happening, take a look around, for example at recent political events. Party lines are blurred, radical factions are finding acceptance where they formerly wouldn't have, and crafty manipulators with too much money are finding it easy to 'buy' their way into positions of influence. And this is in part because we aren't as a society nearly as socially cohesive as in past eras prior to the advent of the personal computer and the Internet and the land of cyberspace, mystery, wonder, fantasy, and yes, just plain bullshit. We're allowing ourselves to be bamboozled into thinking virtual reality beats the honest-to-God real thing - and it doesn't, and it shouldn't, and we ought to be smarter than this. 

And that's why I did the rant about Facebook. It isn't so much Facebook as that whole virtual reality world we're finding so seductively distracting that really worries me. And I'm just as susceptible and just as vulnerable to it as you are.
All I'm saying is, let's recognize this, and try to keep one foot in the real world,
and one eye on the bouncing ball, before something clobbers us from where we aren't looking.