When I checked in with family and friends on Facebook Stories a few days ago, I saw a beautiful sunset in Hawaii, a message about racism at the border of Ukraine and Poland, and an image of a golf resort in England set to relaxing music. It struck me that these three messages encapsulated the […]
If you use Facebook at all, you will have seen some random questions occasionally. You have also, probably, answered a few of them. I once answered the question about how far I live from my birthplace, and the one about how many grandparents I can name. Mostly, though, I have resisted the temptation. These questions […]
I stopped using Facebook in March 2018 when I learned that Cambridge Analytica had hijacked information about all of our Facebook friends. I might never have reactivated my Facebook account if Covid-19 had not put us in quarantine. I missed being in touch with family and friends and so I reconnected in December 2020. My […]
A couple of weeks ago I reconnected with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I had stopped using them in early 2018 and 2019 and restarting those connections has kept me away from this blog. It has also kept me from reading other, favourite, WordPress blogs and I apologize to those bloggers for my absence. I probably […]
In March 2018, I deactivated my Facebook account and I really haven’t missed it. Occasionally, when talking about something they had read or posted on there, family members have said: “Oh, I forgot you aren’t on Facebook anymore.” Otherwise, its absence from my life has been largely unnoticed. Yesterday, I was so disgusted by yet […]
The process of disconnecting from Facebook started out easily enough. I put up a post to tell my friends and family that I was planning to deactivate my account and two days later, that’s what I did. It took me a few minutes to find the right page and the right link in order to […]
Imagine that you are going to be away for a long period of time, and so you ask your good neighbour to take care of the house for you. He says “Of course! No worries. I’ll be happy to.” Then he says, “By the way, we’ve got guests coming for a short stay. Can they […]
I am so spitting mad right now I can’t think straight. How could Facebook not know that Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica were messing with our minds through its website? And why isn’t someone under arrest for this already? I have loved Facebook. I have loved seeing my friends’ and family’s photos, updates, travels, celebrations, […]
For the last couple of years, I have mostly kept my comments on Facebook to my day-to-day activities and reactions to the events in the lives of the people I care about. I love seeing their family photos, weddings, vacations, weather concerns, and pets. My thoughts about politics have been channelled into Twitter and sometimes […]
We can’t put all the blame on Facebook and Google for fake news stories when we are the ones who share them without a second thought. As the news media grope around for someone to blame for the outcome of the US election, they have included social media in their accusatory gaze. Facebook and Google […]
I have been happily chugging along thinking all is well until yesterday when I realized that one of my younger son’s Facebook posts had not shown up on my news feed. I only discovered it because a mutual friend had commented on the post, and that did show up. So, I started to wonder what was […]
Yesterday I was weeding the flowerbeds in our garden when a dog in the back yard of a house two doors down the street started barking. I think it was barking at me, but it’s hard to say. It barked intermittently for the whole ninety minutes I was outside, both in the front of our […]
Keeping track of which method of communication people prefer is really difficult. We are awash with choices. Individually, each is wonderful and enhanced by modern technology. Collectively, they are a problem. Person A doesn’t like making phone calls because it always seems to be an intrusion on friends and family, and corporations have those awful robot […]
My children are social media butterflies. They hover around a networking site for a while and then they fly off to check out some other blooming online communication opportunity. Because of this, I have been introduced to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, Tumblr, and probably some others that I have forgotten. It’s quite possible that […]
I like Facebook. I like Facebook in spite of it selling my information to the highest bidder. I even like Facebook in spite of it making me change my privacy settings three times in the last couple of months. I like it because it keeps me in touch with family and friends all over the […]
“You are more proper than I’m used to,” he said. “It’s probably the accent.” I was completely surprised. We had just spent over an hour chatting about our lives, children, houses, jobs, travel, and so on, and I thought we had quite a lot in common. Then, out of the blue he ended our lunch […]
Snowbird of Paradise 