Stephen King quits Facebook

Personally I found this rather interesting (and somewhat gratifying, being that I'm an inveterate Facebook holdout myself):

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/02/us/stephen-king-quits-facebook-trnd/index.html

RealLindaL wrote:Personally I found this rather interesting (and somewhat gratifying, being that I'm an inveterate Facebook holdout myself):

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/02/us/stephen-king-quits-facebook-trnd/index.html

King may have predicted the Coronavirus decades ago when he wrote his masterpiece "The Stand." In fact his character Randall Flag is a lot like a certain demonic character we hear about every day.

Stephen King is smart.

I never got on Facebook in the first place. Anybody I want to stay in contact with, I e-mail. All Facebook would do is make the people I never liked (i.e. everybody) in high school feel bad when I refuse to "friend" them. Whenever I've poked around and looked up people I used to know, over half of their Facebook "friends" are people from high school. Decades later and they can't let that shit go. It's sad.

The disinformation factor is just icing on a cake I already didn't want to eat...

Well, I never registered on FB either and have never regretted it, other than the rather frustrating fact that it prevents me from commenting online on my local newspaper's articles.  

That said, I don't think cultivating contacts from back in high school days is such a bad thing.  Old friends have a history, know your history, and are often the very best and most loyal of life's companions.  

In my own case, my closest email contacts are a group of about a dozen women around the nation who shared experiences at a wonderful, very special summer camp in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that we all attended for years in our youth.  We have a multitude of rich memories in common:  the songs, the mountain hikes, even the beloved horses' names. Now we follow each other's treks through life, and provide unwavering support through triumph and tragedy to all in the group -- some closer than others, but all sincerely caring.  

It may seem sad to you that we spend time on geographically distant cyber friends from way back in our younger days, but this is truly a great group of people and I'm delighted to be one of them.  Several have even come to visit from time to time over the years, usually with a spouse or partner - a real treat for me, and my husband has liked each and every one.

What's probably sad is that, other than my very best friend (my husband), I'm like so many retirees who relocated to a distant locale in having very few local acquaintances, much less friends.  Not working, not a churchgoer, not a club joiner - it's a situation of my own making (and it doesn't help that hubby's not comfortable socializing with groups of new people), but there you are.  

So I thank goodness for my camp friends!  Many are also on Facebook, but I'm adamant - that's a non-starter for me, though I can understand its appeal.

Now it's late and I've run off at the mouth again - sorry, z.

RealLindaL wrote:Well, I never registered on FB either and have never regretted it, other than the rather frustrating fact that it prevents me from commenting online on my local newspaper's articles.  

That said, I don't think cultivating contacts from back in high school days is such a bad thing.  Old friends have a history, know your history, and are often the very best and most loyal of life's companions.  

In my own case, my closest email contacts are a group of about a dozen women around the nation who shared experiences at a wonderful, very special summer camp in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that we all attended for years in our youth.  We have a multitude of rich memories in common:  the songs, the mountain hikes, even the beloved horses' names. Now we follow each other's treks through life, and provide unwavering support through triumph and tragedy to all in the group -- some closer than others, but all sincerely caring.  

It may seem sad to you that we spend time on geographically distant cyber friends from way back in our younger days, but this is truly a great group of people and I'm delighted to be one of them.  Several have even come to visit from time to time over the years, usually with a spouse or partner - a real treat for me, and my husband has liked each and every one.

What's probably sad is that, other than my very best friend (my husband), I'm like so many retirees who relocated to a distant locale in having very few local acquaintances, much less friends.  Not working, not a churchgoer, not a club joiner - it's a situation of my own making (and it doesn't help that hubby's not comfortable socializing with groups of new people), but there you are.  

So I thank goodness for my camp friends!  Many are also on Facebook, but I'm adamant - that's a non-starter for me, though I can understand its appeal.

Now it's late and I've run off at the mouth again - sorry, z.

Don't be sorry, it was good reading. Besides, how'm I gonna fault anybody for running off at the mouth? If you have good friends from back in that time, o' course you should keep in contact with 'em. And a good summer camp is bound to be a lot more fun than a lousy high school! Nothing wrong with keeping in touch with friends from your teenaged years if if you liked 'em.

Everybody's high-school years differ. I didn't enjoy mine much. I got along with most of 'em to varying degrees, but I didn't have much in common with any of 'em. I went to a private academy, one of those monstrosities the Conservative Citizens Councils developed back during the civil rights era to keep their white kids from having to go to school with black kids. My parents didn't put me there out of racism, but because the district we lived in would've put me in a really terrible under-funded county school with bad teachers. And I had a really high IQ that they didn't want to waste (turns out you can waste it anyway by becoming an English major ). They briefly considered moving to town or getting one of their friends listed as my "legal guardian" so I could go to the good public school in town, but, in the end they decided on the academy... which was a bad move in retrospect, because I got the worst damn education from that place. Luckily I always read a lot and studied things on my own so I was still okay when I got to college, but a lot of my classmates flunked out. I got a good look at exactly how much better the public school was when I went to college with kids who'd gone there. They were so advanced over the academy kids it was nuts. Everything had to go through a religious filter at the academy so not only did we not learn a lot of stuff, we'd gotten taught a bunch of lies instead. Pretty surprising.

Anyway, my classmates were mostly a bunch of overprivileged country-club rednecks, not very bright and conformist to the bone, and the place was run like a church camp. I used to try to be religious when I was a very little kid, but it never worked... I think there's a genetic component to religion, and I just don't have it. And when I got older I got into punk rock and metal, which my classmates didn't know about at all -- they were afraid of it because it was "Satanic." Same deal with horror movies, and horror books. Few of my classmates read much of anything, much less horror. I did some hunting, but not as a "culture," and I didn't care a damn about watching sports (that's never been a spectator thing for me), and I didn't go to church, so finding stuff to talk to them about was a chore. I still got along with 'em okay, but in the way you get along with co-workers you don't really like. A lot of 'em were nice enough people, but were more like random strangers I was just stuck standing in a line with than anybody I felt any kinship toward.

So when I graduated I was happy to never hear of any of 'em again. I still sometimes run into one of 'em and they always get excited and want to "catch up" and it's awkward because I don't want to hurt their feelings, but I don't caaaarrrre how they're doing, really. I don't wish 'em ill, but I don't want 'em taking my time up, either. I just act busy and tell 'em "Glad everything's going okay for you, great seein' ya!" and flee the scene as politely as possible. Facebook would just end up as the online version of that. I'd be expected to say something nice about pictures of their grandkids or whatever, and I'd be like, "Agh, I hope they turn out different from you." A few were good people, most were a bunch of racist, class-conscious drunks and druggies with nothing interesting about 'em... just put-up-with people I was glad not to have to put up with anymore.

I still keep up with one friend from high school, but that's more 'cuz we lived in the same neighborhood, so we grew up like brothers. But he moved back to the neighborhood (after spending a lot of time in L.A. casting reality shows, of all weirdnesses) so I don't need Facebook to see him.