The Facebook Follies

So sad. I've just unfriended and blocked someone I'd hoped would be a good Facebook friend ... occasionally someone turns out to be a paranoid obsessive: the world is ending, we're all going to die, there is no evidence, there are no facts, none whatsoever, to the contrary. She uses Facebook as her primary news source You know how it goes; we all know the babbling chaos of willful disinformation Facebook is steadily turning into! 

This otherwise nice lady is hammering doom messages into my feed, floods of them, day in and day out day. It's all just Trumptrumptrumptruptrump, Corona is the Black Death on Steroids, no one will survive, America's economy is crashing that country straight through into Armageddon, and so on ... and ON. Every damn' day, you surf this wave till you don't even want to open Facebook; and this is actually a stupid way for Rational Me to respond --

Because of the 120 people I've friended, or who have friended me, there's only maybe three (including Ms Paranoid Obsessive herself) who do this. It's 119 friends now, because I've chosen to delete the one rather pitiable lady who's making Facebook a minefield for me. Also --

Activists could learn a rather valuable lesson, and it's this:

"Over-posting" is an Extremely Bad Thing. The very news which appalled, sickened and perhaps frightened the reader in Post One will, 500 posts later, every one re-re-restating the same thing, have assumed "meh" proportions. This is human nature: it's not me being obtuse or hiding my head in some handy sand.

The condition even has a name: it's called "compassion fatigue." It's a defense, or coping mechanism, which soldiers, doctors, those in the front lines, especially in traumatic situations, must learn in order to do their jobs. But compassion fatigue also operates at desktop level: that tenuous connection between human and screen, where horrors are depicted, and repeated ad nauseam in absurdum... until they either cease to horrify or nauseate, or one's cheese begins to slide off one's cracker.

COVID-19, 1080, Trumphate, Johnsonhate, Morrisonhate, climate change, fill in the blank ... the whole nine yards. Hammer on this anvil too long, and noise simply makes people deaf. One's eyes begin to glaze over, one scrolls on to something less bloody depressing -- you must, it's imperative ... before you shoot yourself in the head to make it all STOP.

A few days ago I posted to Facebook, telling friends I would be scrolling past Corona stories, and I've tried to. I'm also scrolling past DWP horror stories, and political buffoonery from EVERY country. So --

For friends are reading this post -- rest assured, if it seems I'm not responding to your posts, please don't take it personally. I have such a case of Facebook Fatigue, I'm trying tremendously hard not to obey the knee-jerk: some knot of neurons in my brain wants to shut the thing down, delete the app, take the icon off the desktop, and forget it ever existed. Trying not to, because I know so many beautiful, beautiful people on that platform! In other words --

If there's a lesson to take away from this, it's probably "Don't let the turkeys get you down." Or something equally glib. Then figure out who's causing you the pain, and disassociate from them. Drive on ... DO THE RESEARCH, KNOW THE FACTS, ignore the disinformation. But do drive on ... make the best of social media, not the freaking worst!

Here we go, then ... making the best. There, I feel a little better now.