I got out for dinner with a couple of dear friends tonight, and the topic of Facebook came up.\u00a0 I’m not on Facebook.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 The one friend agreed.\u00a0 The second\u00a0friend was more of a fan.<\/p>\n
I started to talk about how\u00a0Facebook cheapens relationships and people, makes me care so much less about photos than those three hypothetical baby photos I’d received\u00a0 in the past, mailed with a greeting card.\u00a0 How engagement announcements had become less important, just clicks and momentary glimpses before\u00a0clicking on and forgetting.\u00a0 People even because clicks, emails, or just texts I respond to with colons and parentheses.\u00a0 I said something to the effect, “Photos and engagements had no lasting value<\/em>” … and that phrase brought me pause.<\/p>\n “Lasting value.”\u00a0 The value of something lasting.\u00a0 The value of something persisting.<\/em><\/p>\n That value wasn’t\u00a0valued anymore.<\/p>\n Compare an essay by Orwell, and an essay by me in this blog.\u00a0 Granted, I’m no Orwell, but the Orwell essay will be read and read and read.\u00a0 A blog post by me?\u00a0 Not so much.\u00a0 Maybe a better comparison would be a blog post written by Orwell: They probably wouldn’t be read as much as an essay.\u00a0 Blog posts are fleeting.\u00a0 You don’t really read the old ones.\u00a0 You move on to the next.<\/p>\n I argue, the same with online baby photos, emails\u00a0announcing engagements, birthday invites, friends, and so on.\u00a0 Their lasting value diminishes when they go online.\u00a0 You don’t spend time with them the way you would were you to be acquainted with them in the offline world.<\/p>\n That is, the online world diminishes lasting value<\/em>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the online world increases fleeting value<\/em>.\u00a0 The online world values now-now-now.\u00a0 The fast connections, the short tweets, the instant publicity.\u00a0 There is a deluge of new to supplant the minutes-old.\u00a0 Do you remember the minutes-old?\u00a0 Well, no.\u00a0 It’s not in a greeting card sitting on your desk, awaiting your filing its contents\u00a0in a photo album.\u00a0 It’s not a hello and a handshake from a friendly neighbor knocking on your door.\u00a0 It’s an image, a click, and you’re done with them both, performed clinically removed from it all.<\/p>\n I find it sad.\u00a0 There’s a value to “going e”–going electronic–but at what cost?\u00a0 If going online increases fleeting value and diminishes lasting value, will we lose an appreciation for history?\u00a0 Will we repeat the mistakes of the human past, lacking knowledge of them?\u00a0 Will we continue to want to be entertained at all hours, jonesing for the next fleeting valuable?<\/p>\n The computer still sucks my time.\u00a0 I don’t always know how.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The colors, the sounds.\u00a0 All very captivating.\u00a0 But I decided then not to do the slots.\u00a0 Disgusint.<\/p>\n I start to wonder if my computer is little different from the slot machine–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I got out for dinner with a couple of dear friends tonight, and the topic of Facebook came up.\u00a0 I’m not on Facebook.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 The one friend agreed.\u00a0 The second\u00a0friend was more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[139,259,258,62],"class_list":["post-1024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics","tag-facebook","tag-fleeting-value","tag-lasting-value","tag-values"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1024"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1029,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024\/revisions\/1029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}