Confessions of a Facebook Noob
One of the most quoted Bible passages, both by the faithful and the skeptics is, “judge not lest you be judged.” The truth of this amazing little proverb proves itself out in innumerable ways in our lives. Most recently it has come to visit me.
In many and varied ways, I have been a great disparager of Facebook. But quite lately I’ve been told by my publisher that I must establish a social media presence called an author’s platform. Having a hard-hearted publisher is a great burden for a self-published author. We had a face-to-face shouting match in the mirror. I’m not sure why mirrors always win those kinds of contests, but they do. So now I am saddled with the task of feeling my way through the outer darkness of Facebook. Facebook on the other hand is having what I’m sure is a very satisfying, derisive laugh at my expense.
“Geez, Tom,” my wife of nearly 48 years exclaimed while staring in unbelief at her phone, “did you realize that you put out on Facebook that we were just married today?”
“Yeah,” I said, turning a splendid shade of chagrined red. “I noticed that.”
“So did all our family and friends!” My wife’s complexion, chameleon-like, resembled mine.
“Yeah, I seem to get more response from a faux pas than anything clever I post to Facebook.”
“Yes, you do, dear. You just have to get the hang of it and you’ll be okay.” Her satisfied little grin spoke volumes.
Only people who know my wife and me will understand how severely galling those last words were. My wife, who is a very intelligent woman, culturally savvy, and kid smart to the core like all great elementary teachers, can find electric can opener technologically challenging. She threw up her hands in defeat during her first encounter with a word processor when she reached the end of the line and had no idea how to get the cursor to go back to the beginning of the next line. And here she was consoling me in my despondency when facing total defeat by Facebook.
“I just wanted to update my personal information,” I whined. “It seemed like a good thing to connect us as husband and wife. But why did it say that we had the wedding today?”
“Yes, that’s what it does when you do that,” she smiled knowingly.
I’ve run entire information technology departments. That was not an answer. The software had not done what I wanted it to. It was clearly a bug, not a feature. Then I paused and thought about it for a minute. My wife has been happily using Facebook for several years. Along with email and instant messaging, social media has transformed her life. She has reconnected with friends and stayed in touch with family. Now that we have begun this nomadic lifestyle of ours, those electronic connections are more crucial than ever.
It makes you wonder if effective use of Facebook comes more from attitude than expertise. My wife’s masterful use of social media comes from simply accepting what the service does. My tendency to overthink its capabilities is probably why I’m doomed to Facebook purgatory for some time to come. When I went to set up my Facebook page I had an idea about how I wanted it to look and function. I have created award-winning websites, right? (Well, one site that won an award.) I should be able to create a highly successful Facebook page, shouldn’t I?
Wrong. I found myself filling out all of Facebook’s little boxes with highly personal information, which I wasn’t sure I wanted the world to know. And then Facebook decided what it would do with them. Some of them disappeared altogether. Some of them arranged themselves into a page that looked pretty much like everyone else’s. And some of them broadcast themselves to the world in a most unexpected way. And there was no way to anticipate which thing was going to do what.
My normal way of approaching new technology is to read books on the subject. Blog articles and technical how-tos are helpful to get over particular hitches but to understand a broader picture of a system a book can’t be beaten. I’ve been working my way through the BadRedHead 30-Day Book Marketing Challenge by Rachel Thompson, which is an excellent resource for what I’m trying to do. I was following her advice to overcome my parsimonious tendency to withhold personal information when I Facebook-married my wife 48 years late in a worldwide venue. It was not Rachel’s fault. I lay it at the feet of a short-sighted algorithm that could not anticipate that an old codger might want the world to know he had been happily married for many years.
Although another challenge from my 30-day book did leave me spinning in circles inside Facebook’s less than intuitive administrative interface. Rachel highly recommended the use of Facebook Notes for posting more lengthy text to better display my writing. Evidently, two to three lines are all anyone wants to read on normal Facebook posts. I suppose that makes sense, although I notice that talented cinematographers can hold interest for several minutes. Anyway, in order to implement Notes, I spent the better part of an hour referring back and forth to the Marketing Challenge’s careful instruction of how to set them up in your Facebook account. After multiple failures, I decided to ask Google for help. And it’s a good thing I did since I discovered that Facebook had capriciously ended this feature months ago. Uffda!
Having spent the better part of my technology work using open-source software, I am used to a module, no matter how stupid, never being withdrawn. Open-source software depends on community scorn to end the life of deprecated features. In the case of Notes, community shock had no effect on the hardened hearts at Facebook central. In truth, I suspect that the group of people who actually made effective use of Notes was small enough that their dismay caused only an infinitesimal ripple in the “Force” of Facebook.
I’ve begun to develop a theory about why Facebook is so problematic for the technologically creative. I think that Facebook has too many letters in its name. It should limit itself to three in order to be IT manageable. I have successfully negotiated DBM (Data Base Management) and navigated my way through DNS (Domain Name Service). I became fairly proficient at using an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for programming with HLLs (High-Level Languages) and dealt handily enough with many other information technology TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms). However, Facebook remains a black box—opaque, mysterious, and perilous. It must be the lack of an appropriate acronym to bridle it.
So where does that leave us? When the sublime is beyond our reach, one must be satisfied with the simple status quo. Even though it seems like the agony of defeat, I have concluded that I simply must accept Facebook at face value. As my wife cleverly advises, “it does what it does.” While I was an IT director, if a network engineer had told me that as an excuse for problems with our LAN (Local Area Network) I would have fired him or her. But in light of the thing in itself, Facebook, I am forced to capitulate. It does only what it does. So now I must willingly confess, “garbage in, garbage out.”