Facebook for Dummies: What Were You Thinking?

The headlines about hacking into Facebook are currently spreading like a disease.

Let me assure you literallists that I am not personally calling anyone a "dummy".   At least not in writing.

I am leaping on this momentary window, this wild, exciting breaking news opportunity, where we are focused on Facebook hackers, to ask a basic question.

With the reality of multiple hackings and identity thefts, why are you involved with Facebook in the first place?   And why in the world do you continue?

Full disclosure:   I am not fond of passing around snapshots of my gorgeous face from the past or the present, and am a fierce control freak about who knows my personal life and business.

It's also easy to write me off as a Boomer who has a neurotic attachment to what the word "friend" really means. Guilty as charged am I.

At a party this weekend, several people asked how to reach me on Facebook, to which I replied, "I'm only tangentially on Facebook".

I am sad to report that nearly 70% of those inquiries came from people who thought I was a comedienne who made up fancy words, like "tangentially".

I know people who proudly and publicly broadcast the exact, (rounded-up), number of their so-called "friends" on Facebook, for the baffling purpose of".?

Well, it can only be that a great majority of people have signed over their lives to having a Facebook-promoted virtual existence.

Please pause here and digest.

In boasting about Facebook numbers, do people really think those "friends" are "friends"?

(Insert here a user-friendly, antique book on friendship).

I do understand that people like to "share" their pictures with others from their long-ago past.

Speaking as someone who studies human behavior, I say that we have an epidemic of phone phobia sweeping across this country, if not the world.

The human voice is considered an obstacle, a dreaded infrequent necessity that there should be pills for.   Oh, wait, there are pills for that.

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