I Need Spacebook

I wanted to take a break from Facebook because I’ve focused so much on it that I started to feel like I had tunnel vision. My brain felt crowded. I wanted to back up, look around, and open up my focus. I wanted to play around with Instagram as a platform, and see if I could “curate” a little more art, or visual interest in my online presence.

I use IFTTT, so anything I post to Instagram goes to my Twitter, and anything posted on my Twitter goes to my Facebook. What this means, when I back away from Facebook, is that I don’t know when people are commenting on my posts. If you’ve been commenting, I’m not ignoring you out of spite.

Facebook had just started to feel like this for me:

 

I think it probably has to do with the election cycle. It’s hard because we all want the same things. We all want to know that our way of life is secure. We all want our children to grow up in greater safety, with access to health care, fairly educated, and with some chance of getting to go on to higher education if they choose. We all want to know that we can retire one day, and not spend twenty years eating cat food.

The greater divide seems to be over whether we also want these things for our neighbors, and once you’ve decided where you stand on that, who is going to be the best person to steer us toward the goal.

So, here we are, all on the same side of the table, pointing, and demanding, and whispering, and griping, and elbowing for room while something big is going down. And we all feel the pressure. And we all feel the importance. And it just makes us that much more anxious to be heard. Me included. Especially me. I am very anxious about being heard.

I love Facebook because it allows me to reconnect and stay in touch with people from across the span of my life. But it’s also like sitting at a crowded table. I can’t even hear the friends I want because of Facebook’s metrics shoving something else into my face. I can’t see the friends I want because Facebook’s metrics push them down to the end of the table.

Anyway. I’m trying something new for me. We’ll see what happens with it.