Off the Map

I got out for dinner with a couple of dear friends tonight, and the topic of Facebook came up.  I’m not on Facebook.  I’m not a fan of its time-suck potential, no matter “how effective it is in helping me keep up with friends and baby photos.”  The one friend agreed.  The second friend was more of a fan.

I started to talk about how Facebook cheapens relationships and people, makes me care so much less about photos than those three hypothetical baby photos I’d received  in the past, mailed with a greeting card.  How engagement announcements had become less important, just clicks and momentary glimpses before clicking on and forgetting.  People even because clicks, emails, or just texts I respond to with colons and parentheses.  I said something to the effect, “Photos and engagements had no lasting value” … and that phrase brought me pause.

“Lasting value.”  The value of something lasting.  The value of something persisting.

That value wasn’t valued anymore.

Compare an essay by Orwell, and an essay by me in this blog.  Granted, I’m no Orwell, but the Orwell essay will be read and read and read.  A blog post by me?  Not so much.  Maybe a better comparison would be a blog post written by Orwell: They probably wouldn’t be read as much as an essay.  Blog posts are fleeting.  You don’t really read the old ones.  You move on to the next.

I argue, the same with online baby photos, emails announcing engagements, birthday invites, friends, and so on.  Their lasting value diminishes when they go online.  You don’t spend time with them the way you would were you to be acquainted with them in the offline world.

That is, the online world diminishes lasting value.

Meanwhile, the online world increases fleeting value.  The online world values now-now-now.  The fast connections, the short tweets, the instant publicity.  There is a deluge of new to supplant the minutes-old.  Do you remember the minutes-old?  Well, no.  It’s not in a greeting card sitting on your desk, awaiting your filing its contents in a photo album.  It’s not a hello and a handshake from a friendly neighbor knocking on your door.  It’s an image, a click, and you’re done with them both, performed clinically removed from it all.

I find it sad.  There’s a value to “going e”–going electronic–but at what cost?  If going online increases fleeting value and diminishes lasting value, will we lose an appreciation for history?  Will we repeat the mistakes of the human past, lacking knowledge of them?  Will we continue to want to be entertained at all hours, jonesing for the next fleeting valuable?

The computer still sucks my time.  I don’t always know how.  It makes me think of the time I was on that cruise, and I was going to play the slot machines, but then I watched the old people mindlessly drop coin after coin into the machines.  The colors, the sounds.  All very captivating.  But I decided then not to do the slots.  Disgusint.

I start to wonder if my computer is little different from the slot machine–

See also: facebook, fleeting-value, lasting-value, values