The Complete Dummies Guide to Facebook and Facebook Dummies

In the beginning, Facebook was such a great idea and even now it holds some promise of being a decent tool for communication if people actually thought about what they were doing when they open their news feed. 

It could be so much more than what a lot of users allow it to be.  I'm talking about positive things, but too often it's an uphill battle to remain positive about all the ways people actually use it when they interact with friends and the world at large.  

Have we all lost our ability to communicate with one another? I think more people should look at Facebook as if they were having an actual conversation with a friend or relative, one that can be overheard by everyone in the room around you. One that your kids or grandkids can hear.  That might solve some of the issues I see with the platform.  

Two developments have taken much of the shine off Facebook, at least for me.  First, they learned to monetize the product and then they learned to weaponize the product. Advertising is a huge cash cow for the company, and I understand that the product would not exist if the company could not get some return on their investment so I'm willing to see advertising when I visit Facebook.  

What I mean by weaponized is that Facebook collects all sorts of information about us for the purpose of showing us specific advertising that we might actually be interested in.  That means that the company that paid for that ad would stand a better chance of getting the viewer of the ad to open the ad and, with a little luck, visit the company website and make a purchase.  Most companies don't want to purchase advertising that doesn't actually result in sales so Facebook works very hard collecting our likes, dislikes, politics, marital situation, number and ages of children, health, and all sorts of other information on each of us users.  In a lot of ways, they know more about us than our families do.  They even use information from people on our friend list to direct ads to us. For example, just this week I've had several ads pop up in my feed telling me that some of my friends "like" Best Buy.  

 It boils down to this: the more information you put about yourself on Facebook—where you live, your age, where (and if) you graduated college, the companies, brands, and activities you like, and even where you work—determines what kind of ads you'll see. In theory, it makes it so that targeted ads are more relevant to you personally. If you like knitting you will be shown advertisements for yarn rather than for sporting equipment. 

There are settings you can change and share a lot less information with Facebook....but that would not lessen the number of ads you see, but only change the type we see.

The second current problem with Facebook in my view is politics and it is a much worse issue than learning to deal with advertising.   What we have learned is that some very dangerous enemies of the United States have learned that they can sway public opinion in the US by making certain kinds of posts on Facebook using fake names and accounts.  That is a huge problem for the country and my hope is that law enforcement and security experts are working to defeat that problem.  

Perhaps less serious, but most annoying on a personal basis are those users who use facebook only for telling the world how much they love/hate whichever politician or how they feel on every single social issue imaginable.  It doesn't bother me that people have political opinions, I have them too, but why is it necessary to post 4 or 5 of those opinions each and every day.  I have "friends" at Facebook who post nothing but political "memes" copied from somewhere else. Some might even be funny, but mostly they are just irritating. If you tell me (and the whole rest of the world) once that you hate Nancy Pelosi I don't need to be told again, or again and again, or every day for months.  I promise. I will remember your political preference.  I promise too; if you post political memes that make fun of or belittle my political preferences I will remember that too. Are you sure you want to be friends with me? 

If you write down your own ideas expressing political beliefs I will appreciate those, even if I don't agree, but knowing those are your own words....I respect the idea that you went to that effort.  Two people, even with different ideas can have a conversation that way.  Posting the most unflattering, or even altered photo of your political nemesis, with some snarky comment, or even a false or misleading bit of information about that person does not invite conversation.  What it invites is just another snarky meme of the opposite view.  Why should I have to be explaining these concepts to adults?  

Don't get me wrong, I believe adults can, and should have discussions involving political ideas but most of the political rot I see on Facebook does exactly the opposite....it creates a feeling of not wanting to talk to the person who posted it, it creates isolation between two sides of any debate.  Each side simply moves to their corner and throws political meme's at the other side without ever really trying to understand what the other side believes and why they believe what they do. 

For those of you who are not quite sure what I mean when I say "political memes" this is a brief description.   The political meme — most often text over an image, sometimes short videos or digital clip art meant to spread and be imitated — is often a guttural, simple message, sometimes couched in humor, like the doctored video of Hillary Clinton being hit with Trump's golf ball. Four random samples of what I call political rot followed with brief comments about each.  

 This one is a classic, text over a photo with a very simple easy to remember message.  
Often though the makers of these things
 look for the worst picture of the person 
 they can find, and if they can't find one  
they doctor one.  Very easy to copy and 
use on your own page.  Perfect for the
mentally lazy who don't want to be bothered writing something themselves.    

 Sometimes a bit of humor is used to make the message seem less unkind.  

But just as often humor is skipped altogether.  This one is classic in that they dug up an unflattering picture of the former first lady....and maybe enhanced it a bit to make her look worse.  

This is technically not a meme, but this is the sort of picture that haters of Nancy Pelosi dream of finding and turning into a meme. 

  







A note to my facebook friends....if you start using a lot of these on your page I'm going to lose interest in visiting your page pretty quickly.  

In Bold defiance of irony McConnell frets over partisanship!

"Listening to Mitch McConnell talk about the decline of bipartisanship is like listening to Jeffrey Dahmer complain about the decline of dinner party etiquette."  

I can not take credit for either of the above two quotes but I thought they were excellent opening words to what I have to say about partisanship and politics.  Before anyone gets their panties in a wad rest assured that the second quote is not accusing Senator McConnell of being a serial killer, nuff said.  

Politics in America today is a nasty, smelly cesspool and almost every member of Congress is guilty of helping to create the current mess.  Of course, they don't get all the blame, at least an equal amount is our own fault.  We keep electing the same people over and over again.  We never demand any sort of change. We don't hold them accountable.  We know next to nothing about what they are doing in our name, partly because we don't pay attention, and partly because they only tell us what they want us to know. 

How many of us know who the ten largest donors are to the campaign fund of our Congressional representatives or Senators?  How many of us know anything about those donors, who do they work for, what sort of things do they expect for their donations.  How many of us know whether our Senators or our Representatives have written or sponsored any legislation at all and if they have what it was.  Do you pay any attention at all to the votes those people have made?  Did they vote no on a piece of legislation that would have made your life better? How about something even more basic....what did your congressperson do before they got into politics?  Do you even know what town or county they are from or how long they have lived in your district?   

 Politicians in Washington figured out a very long time ago that they can pretty much get away with anything and the majority of their voters will never know a thing about it.  We have been willfully ignorant and we are paying the price.  

What the above quotes actually say about Senator McConnell is that it is absolutely laughable for him to complain about partisanship when he had been one of the biggest drivers of that partisanship,  for the past dozen years, at least.  

Some partisanship is expected from the leaders in Congress, some is even desirable from the point of view of "keeping the team in together working on common goals" so to speak, but enough is enough and too much is a disaster for everyone.  In one sense we send our representatives to congress and expect them to act in our favor, but at the same time to use their best judgment in that regard regardless of how the "leaders" think they should act. I would not want my Senator doing only what the party leader in that chamber wanted....I mean really, if that's what we are going to do then why do we even need two senators from every state if only two senators are making all the decisions.   

Often two people can look at a problem and come up with different solutions to that problem.  I believe we expect our representatives will not always agree on what solution to a problem works best and I get that, but we are currently in a much worse predicament than not agreeing on solutions. Where we are now is that we don't even agree on what is a problem and what isn't a problem and that my friends is a disaster.  Once upon a time, there was a center that held the right and left together.  The center has grown weak, having been chipped away by both the right and left.  There is very little holding the two sides together these days. Maybe nothing at all.    

Finally, I will leave you with this one simple example of how Mitch McConnell has broken the Senate.  You really only need to look at McConnell's treatment of Judicial appointments under President Obama to understand just how far McConnell is willing to take partisanship.  Under all the presidents before Obama, in other words from George Washington to George Bush 86 Judicial nominations had been blocked by filibuster.  In just the Obama presidency McConnell used the filibuster to block 82 nominations and that does not include his refusal to even consider taking a vote on Obama's last Supreme court nominee.  

Hearing him whine about partisanship turns my stomach.