Facebook is becoming increasingly bothersome to me lately. I've had the same facebook page for many, many years and I know online sites change their layout and other elements from time to time and we're not always going to be fans of such changes, but more recently, some of the changes have caused me to feel tempted to shut down my facebook page (I'm not going to yet, but I've been more tempted than ever).
For many years, I've been putting certain important-to-me life events (including poetry chapbooks/books but other personal life events too) in the Life Events section of my facebook page and now I don't even know where that section is. Does it even exist anymore or did facebook get rid of it and thus delete all the life events I had shared over many years?
And lately, every time I visit my own page, an AI work partner shows up at the top of my page, even though I've never used this work partner, have never expressed any interest in doing so, and don't want to, because I dislike AI. Others can use AI if they choose to, but does it need to be forced upon those of us who have never expressed interest in using it, dislike it, and yet it still automatically appears at the top of our page, like it's trying to force itself upon us?
And facebook groups that I haven't even joined (and don't even think I was invited to join) are now showing up at the top of my Groups section.
And I have a lot of facebook "friends" that I've accumulated over the years and the majority of my Wall Posts are only made visible to those friends. I do sometimes make certain poetry oriented posts public, but again, the majority of my posts are only made visible to my fb friends. But recently, I've noticed that posts of mine that I only made visible to my facebook friends are being "liked" by people I'm not facebook friends with, so what is up with that? As in, how did they even see those posts? I'm not referring to posts that I have other people tagged in; I'm well aware that in those cases, the tagged people's friends can see those posts too. I'm referring to posts that I have NOBODY tagged in other than myself, so I'm not sure how people I'm not even friends with can see them. If I log out of my own page and then type my name in the Search box, I can't even see posts of mine that aren't public, so I'm not sure how some other people can. Maybe I'm just cluelessly babbling into the ever changing internet void here.
What catalyzed this post was because I was going to write about a disconcerting dream I had that involved my deceased dog. I'm terrible with timing and time seems to increasingly speed race faster and faster and faster to the point that sometimes things that happened 5 or more years ago seem as if they were just 1 or 2 years ago. I wasn't sure how long ago my dog had passed away, but I knew I had shared that in my Life Events section here on facebook, so I was going to view that section to remind myself when. But now that Life Events section doesn't seem to exist here anymore or at least I can't find it. And while trying to find that, I saw various Groups that I'm not even a member of showing up in my Group section and blah blah blah...
It seems as if the only things that are important anymore online are what's happening RIGHT NOW. As in TODAY or sometime in the LAST WEEK or so.
Mind you, I do tend to be a person who is focused on the present more than the past. But for me, the present doesn't mean the last few days or weeks or even the last few months or even the last few years. The present means focusing on the present more than the past. But that doesn't mean quickly deleting the past and plus 10 years ago doesn't seem like an extremely long time ago to me.
To reiterate, I have no desire to focus on the past more than the present. But that doesn't mean I want to delete the past. And I certainly don't want other people or online sites to quickly delete whatever they feel like quickly deleting whenever they feel like quickly deleting it.
I feel like so many online sites and AI trying to overtake such sites is geared towards trying to make people be less and less individualistic, less and less personally expressive. Geared towards copying and pasting. Geared towards online sites offering to speak for you. Geared towards quickly shared photo drops instead of thought out words. I like some photos. I like some memes. But I don't like those forms of sharing to outweigh personalized words. I sure as hell don't want online robots speaking for me.
For crying out loud, these days if we're saying Happy Birthday to a friend online, gosh forbid we take the time to type our own sentence (or two or three words) instead of quickly clicking on some computerized clichéd robo-word...
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