The Facebook Fallacy

You should be grateful. I was up to my ankles in a rant about a rude woman in the Ladies’ Room when I was summoned to Facebook.

“But Auntie,” you say with touching concern, “You hate Facebook.”

I know, sweetie, but this was for a noble cause. In fact, it was for the best of causes. It was for a picture of a cute little doggy, and ultimately worth it.

Besides, it gave me something new to rant about and saved you from yet another saga of the Ladies’ Room.

(For those of you just tuning in, there is ALWAYS drama in the Ladies’ Room. Trust Auntie.)

Here’s my new beef about Facebook: The same three people are still going on about the same three things that they were going on about when I stopped looking at Facebook over a year ago.

Don’t be snide. I have more than three Facebook friends. I even know most of them. Ba-dum bum. That was a joke. It’s true, though.

I’m sure there is some serious news going by. Congratulatory or commiserative events must have happened to someone I know. There’s just no way to see it unless I check the stream constantly. You know, like everyone else on the planet does.

That’s not going to happen. I can’t do it. I haven’t got that kind of time. Besides, it takes me that long to keep up on Twitter.

Father Knows Facebook Best

Somewhere along the line we lost our authority figures.

Teenage rebellion, the impulse that spawned the cri de coeur “You’re not the boss of me!” has lost its sell-by date. Now we carry that defiance into adulthood.

This goes beyond the parental-equivalent authority. Granted, nowadays, Grandma and Gramps – or even Mom and Dad -- are just as likely to be bungee jumping or hitting Match.com as you are, maybe even more so. But let’s face it, you weren’t going to ask their advice anyhow. Because they just wouldn’t get it. Things are different now. Ancestors are not an authority.

We’ve replaced the wise authority figure with a consensus. Think about it, if you’re ambivalent about something, you’re more likely to poll your friends on Facebook (and me mine on Twitter) than to seek out someone who might actually know the answer.

This cuts the other way too. How many times has someone asked you something which you know from experience or training, and then watched them ask four other people the same question? It especially rankles when the other four people were chosen for their looks or something other than that they might have as good an answer as you did. It’s even worse when it’s a stranger. That bartender is only guessing what’s wrong with your relationship. You don’t want to get your medical diagnosis from him, either.

The irony and coincidence (it’s both, Ted, so back off) is that I’m posting this on the day of the Wikipedia blackout, when we’ve also lost our substitute authority figure. We may not take relationship advice from Wikipedia, but a lot of people do go there for medical diagnoses.

It’s enough to make me call my mother just to ask her advice about something. Maybe she can think of the name of the father from “Leave it to Beaver”. I was going to put it in the title, but with Wiki down, I can’t.