FACEBOOK: MY DILEMMA

I've always had a love-hate relationship with Facebook. I enjoy the connection with friends and family, but I also resent the amount of time sucked away by this "social networking." I have not looked at fb for about a week, and to be honest, I don't miss it. I do miss knowing what friends/family are up to, but all the rest of it has gotten to be, well, like wasted time.

I'm not trying to insult anyone here. The issue is me, and my apparent lack of control. OK, there, I said it, I'm a fb junkie. Damn! Is cold turkey the only course of action?

I've thought that maybe I will spend more time writing posts on my blog. I can link these posts to Facebook, and people can read them if they want. But because I'm not looking at Facebook now, I won't see any comments to my post, because the vast majority of you comment on Facebook, not on my blog site. I could ask you to only comment on the blog site, but that seems somehow unfair. In other words, I don't want to spend time on Facebook, but I want you to spend time on my blog site. Hmmm, I wouldn't blame you for telling me to sod off.

I'll work this out eventually. Maybe I'll go back to fb, but only every 2 or 3 days. But that won't work well because I won't want to spend hours each time scrolling back a few days to see what I've missed. Kind of defeats the objective.

The reality is that there are probably about a dozen or so people I regularly see and exchange comments with on Facebook. Maybe I can set a filter so I only see posts from this smaller subset of people. Or I could hide or unfriend people I don't really have a relationship with. I know that there are people who have hundreds of Facebook friends; that has never been my goal.

I hope the future of humankind isn't that people will be "on screen," or whatever the technology is in the future, 24/7. Texting, tweeting, face booking, instagramming, snap chatting...will people ever talk to each other in the future? Will people actually be together in the same physical space at the same moment in time and interact without a technological device? Will the concept of a handshake or a hug be just historic gestures no longer within the human behavioral repertoire? Oh my.

If you have any ideas for me, leave a comment. But, um, please leave it on my blog site comments, not Facebook comments so I will actually see it. And stay tuned, I'll figure this out.