This is nowhere as easy as it sounds and I am sure that people more media and tech savvy than me have worked out a better way. The problem is that my facebook feed bombards me with cat videos and clickbait articles from people who are theoretically friends. I was drowning in the many times facebook confronted me with how Henry liked what I liked, and how his digestive system, all the way from the mastication to excretion, was as much my business to know, to comment upon, as people far closer to him. I am bludgeoned by what my facebook friends—and some of them are extremely peripheral—eat for dinner, who they date, what kind of films they dislike, and a plethora of other information they have provided for free to market survey firms that trade in such data. That would be fine if I was at all interested in that type of material. I am not.
I realized last winter, while scrolling through eye deadening and mind numbing status updates and invitations to game, that facebook, was starting to control my mood and waste my precious time.
It was meant, perhaps, to bring people closer together, and it does that. I can feel the breath on my neck and the elbow in my back as if I am on public transit with everyone I went to school with and they are all chattering about the minutiae of their lives.
Instead of solving the problem the way some of my friends have, by deleting my account, I strove to find a solution that would bring together facebook and the types of information I do not have time to source myself. Accordingly, I “followed” the feeds of several science news sites. Now, instead of learning the ins and outs of Henry’s bowels, I am invited to read about the latest discoveries in dark energy, the tiny frogs making a comeback in the rainforest, the recovery of genetic material from ancient human skeletons, planet formation, and extremophile bacteria.
Of course I am still treated to what animal my friends are, what TV character represents them the best, and how mad they are that it is snowing in Canada in the winter. But I can endure that frivolity a little bit more if I know that just below my screen, is an entrance into some of the fantastic work scientists around the world are doing.
I encourage you, silent facebook sufferer, take back your mind, and make facebook work for you. Subscribe to news sites that offer news you would read instead of clickbait, follow the blogs of people who are worthy of your time, and become a good net citizen by not wasting your facebook friends’ bandwidth and making their media saturated lives just that much more difficult.
