Tuesday, August 12, 2014

My facebook.


I don't watch the news or listen to the news or go to news websites. I don't like the news, it's always depressing. I don't need depressing things.

I appreciate that I should be somewhat aware of bad things so that I can pray about them, I realise that, and I am aware and I do pray. But it's still something I want to be in control of, how much (bad) news I am exposed to. Every so often, and particularly now, facebook (which I like to use to see things my friends are doing) gets swamped with bad news. I don't need more bad news, if I want bad news I will go to a news website. I just want to see what normal people are doing. I want to see babies, cups of coffee with cats drawn in the froth, and general sort of daily status updates about the weather and the trains and so on. That's what I like about facebook, and right now it's the tiny minority of fb content. This is what my facebook looks like today after a celebrity died and while ISIS is a thing and probably other depressing things which are all taking up about 80% of my news feed. I'm trying to force the fb algorithm robots to make it happy again. Baby photo, hide, hide, hide, hide, hide.


2 comments:

bec said...

If you had a like button on your blog, I would like this post.

In a semi related thing, a friend posted this Wired article today about a guy doing a FB experiment where he liked absolutely everything for 48 hours: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me/all/1 His friends' reactions at the end amused me.

Jessica said...

Thanks! I just read your post too, we are totes surfing the same wavelength. I was "liking" Iraq stories but that probably contributed to seeing more of them so now I'm hiding them. Feels wrong, but then I realised that I just want a distinction between news and trivialities, and the news websites are for the news and facebook I really want for the trivial.

I went to a Moore talk on this topic once, something about how much are we obliged to care about all the things we hear about in the whole world, cos it's a modern issue, news overload.