You’ve heard me say this before:
“There’s a country song for just about
everything.”
And
if you’ve been paying attention to the grilling Facebook’s CEO, Mark
Zuckerberg, has been getting from Congress, “Choices” by George Jones comes to mind. The late silver-haired Possum sang
about living and dying by the choices we make.
I can recall
plenty of times that I wish I had chosen differently, but that’s just a frailty
of humankind. If we are fortunate, however,
we learn from our mistakes.
If
you are a subscriber to Facebook, that isn’t a mistake. It’s a choice which comes with consequences—good
and bad. You know the good. The bad is what had the 33-year-old
billionaire on Washington’s hot seat. An estimated 87 million of his
subscribers—unknowingly—had their privacy violated. Their personal information was gleaned and
leveraged for someone else’s benefit.
But
as they say, “It is what it is.” One of
the downsides of the internet is the risk of having your private data mined or
hacked. Hacking at Harvard is how
Zuckerberg launched his entrepreneurship.
His devious intrusion almost got him booted from college, but he laughed
all the way to the bank.
I can’t explain
the gears that click inside Facebook’s Peeping Tom-like machinery or its
addictive lure. Apparently, few
can. Nonetheless, I made a choice in the
beginning: I will never have a Facebook page.
Yes,
I know.
That might make
me a modern-day Luddite, as in the 19th century folks who rebelled
against industrial machinery. But before
you think I’m from the Dark Ages, our newspapers have a Facebook page. That’s what you expect, but I choose to let
someone else oversee that.
Why
don’t I have a Facebook page?
The
choice was based on several factors. Ben
Mezrich’s book The Accidental
Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and
Betrayal was one reason. Read it and
decide for yourself. Zuckerberg is
loaded with brains and money. The Ivy
League dropout is a genius who has changed the way 2.5 billion
communicate. For many of those, their
world spins on Facebook’s axis. That’s
their choice.
Another
reason that I don’t add Facebook to my informational diet is that my plate is
already spilling onto the tablecloth. I
am a voracious reader, and I don’t want to squeeze in more screen time in my
already-packed waking hours.
Cell phones,
emails and text messages are matter-of-fact necessities. I believe in being accessible and responsive,
but I don’t find a personal need to add more mouths to feed, i.e., Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Snapchat or a host of other communication
platforms. I’d rather “like” some of
that time to mail a handwritten note to my real friends and family.
This
isn’t a complaint, but I was born in a hurry.
I choose to have two speeds: wide-open and off. My life is much like a track meet, dashing
from one commitment to another.
Saturday—as I was zipping through Odum—Alabama’s tune “I’m in a hurry
and don’t know why” was rolling
through the jukebox between my ears. Out
of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a familiar white pickup truck.
Four
hours later—if I had a Facebook account—I could have reached out to Mickey
Morris and my social-media friends to say, “Hey, I saw you standing in front of
your cane-syrup business.” Instead, I
turned around and went back to have some old-fashioned “face time” with Mickey. A bonus was seeing his nephew, Michael, and
his son, Patrick.
That, my
friends, is something you can’t buy, even with Mark Zuckerberg’s pot of Silicon
Valley gold.
dnesmith@cninewspapers.com
