X Post Facto

My strange existence online, being one of those weird old people who still believes in privacy - and wants it, or at least believes in controlling my electronic identity pretty strictly, is something I share in common with X. There's probably an extent to which I learned it from him, as much as growing more crotchety and indulging the privileged pomposity that comes with age.

And ... the more and more I read, the more and more I am glad I *am* as old as I am, and have been able, at least somewhat, to manage this for myself.

I was very slow to come to Facebook, and when I did, I was very quick to leave again. For the life of me, the entertainment value of flinging a few colored pixels at a "friend" I neither see, speak to, nor even recall the existence of outside my Wall is utterly lost on me. I find the byzantine connectivity of Facebook intensely intrusive, and bafflingly unappealing. The content, such as it is (and there is not much) is stutifyingly drab and uninteresting, the sort of "look at my vacation pictures" self-indulgence once considered to be the height of boring/boorish behavior when sociability involved interaction in the first person, verbal conversation often extending to actual *minutes* in duration (!) with just one other person, and possibly interesting (sometimes good) food.

The point, finally, was impenetrable to me. With those people I was interested in, and friended, I felt no actual interplay on FB. I *have* lost some of them, losing my profile, but some of those had my email, and we don't seem to talk - so priorities prioritize, and decisions sort of don't get made. The little actual writing people do on FB seemed to me rarely to approximate anything I would or could call communication, mostly just unilateral comments. Of the automation of interests, turning activity or fascination into insubstantial algorithms: the less said the better.

Finally, the touchy-feely-ness involved neither touching nor feeling, nor even the most basic reaching out between people. I enjoy quite enough inability to touch or interact with some of the people I love most. It's been an endless source of joy for me and X, the cause of a veritable font of difficulty for us, loving, but being denied ... I really don't need to synthesize more of that.


So. When the wrong person tried to friend me - rather than go through the process of ignoring or rejecting them - I shut down my account. I've never missed it, and wasn't interested in my profile even when I had it. It seems to me there's been zero net loss in this decision. And I am acutely apt at identifying my losses.

Of course, some say an author needs to be on FB, and Twitter, and I can't deny the possibility EVER again amen. Yet I do find myself seduced by the hope that the nature of my genre, historical fiction, doesn't lend itself to 140-character bursts of chatter in the ether, nor can it be much served by flung girdles (... "what the ... ?"), livestock whose invisible cookie poops will feed my personal data to advertisers and political campaigns, or "dude such a rotten day" scrawled on an electronic wall. I like to think fans of WRITING prefer actual reading to snippets and miniature animations, detachedly judging the hotness of my friends and family, or wondering why I wore that particular sweater.

I'm not much a traditionalist, but I'm ungraciously old-fashioned, in my way.


So today when I read YET another article about the way the act of opening an internet browser (and - for the record - the link you are about to see actually is *not* all about Facebook, to be fair ... though FB beats at the heart of any and every approach to the subject of contemporary privacy - and will be hollered about sooner or later in any dscussion thereof) is an act of public exposure on hundreds of invisible levels, I gawped; I gaped at people's stupidity, and marketers' duplicitous avarice; I shook my head at Kids Today; and I thought about how blessed I feel to have grown up in a world where I was invisible.

And then I took a link, and opted out of one of the most heinously exploitive data-collection initiatives, perhaps, in the history of the world. I felt dirty just going to the site. Apparently, however, the opt-out is legitimate and effective (I found it at another of those sites prone to hollering about FB, at which it had been used and subsequently determined kosher). So please follow that last link. If you followed the "invisible" one, I'd hope you're eager to do so. And X, this one is on me, for you. Heh.