Media Matters: Facing Up To Facebook

Loads of scumbag stuff happens. It's true, it's true.  Predation, identity theft, email scams, spam and more.  Social media is denounced regularly in the other media.  Indeed all sorts of media beat up on all sorts of other media routinely.  Segments of the same media beat up on other segments of the same media as well.  Just look at Fox and MSNBC.  Or the New York Times, the Daily News and the New York Post.  OK, forget the Post.  Keith Olberman and Bill O'Reilly.  Rachel Maddow and every Republican with an outside chance of losing(Hi Rachel!).

But social media is here to stay.  Oh yeah, that's what I was going to blog about--social media.  I forgot.  Got distracted.  What a concept.  Killing retarded people will do that to me every time.  :(

Anyhowww....   As I was saying.  Social media is here to stay.  Gotta take the bad with the good.  Cost/benefit analysis.  Gotta weigh the good with the bad.  Cars good.  Cars bad.  They'll get you there faster than Nikes or Adidas, that's for sure.  But 10s of 1000s die every year because of cars.  Cost-benefit.  Not even a close call.  Cars are here to stay.  I could walk, but everyone will get there first and be home and the place will be closed before I even get there.

Facebook.  MSNBC.  To Trap A Predator marathons, every weekend when 911 big-style news isn't happening.  Social media is a boon for sex offending scumbags.  No more Aqualung at the city park eyeing little girls in public on benches.  No risk necessary, compared to the old days.  Sucks, doesn't it.

Identity theft is now the dollar for dollar largest crime in the good ol' U.S. of A.  My spam now exceeds the total number of canned hams sold in the western hemisphere this decade.  Facebook.  I receive links to get rich quick schemes daily from a loved one who sends them to other loved ones and infects their computers without ever knowing she emailed anything, and her own computer crashed, but not long enough to stop her from unknowingly emailing more get rich quick scams.  Facebook.

The ownership of Facebook is in court.  No one really knows who even owns the enterprise.  Security breaches--news reports of "friends" viewing chats by "friends" which are unfriendly to the aforementioned "friends" without the original "friend" having any clue others were looking.  OMG.  Chatting with "friends" and having your friend drop out of Facebook sight at crucial moments dozens of times.  The old Facebook chat cliffhanger chat phenomenon.  Will he/she return or not.

Twitter is just unnavigable and really only for snobs anyway.  A computer genius nerd told me the other day that My Space was about to be absorbed by Facebook anyhow, so why bother.  I figure it must be the high-tech equivalent of Walmart gobbling up fun places like Caldor's, Sears and K-Mart.

So what good stuff is there to say about social media?  After all this is supposed to be a feel-good piece after a few days of nonsense bad news.  OK, I'll give it a try.

Good stuff and good people are happening every day on Facebook and other media.  I met an aspiring young meteorologist whose main mission in life is to "keep YOU safe."  Please check out The Weather Explorers on Facebook.  Definitely worth the while.  The technology has enabled her to help me and me to help her with our own personal electronic goals, and to become fast friends beyond Facebook.  She is near and dear to me now, and my wife and I take delight in her every success.

I've met a mother of 4 youngsters, including one with horrible challenges, the owner also of a litter of puppies, umpteen other dogs, cats, guinea pigs and much more.  One of her puppies nearly died this week.  She's real and trusts me to vent in the middle of the day about stuff that matters, not these Republican/Democrat beltway Olympic games we play every day.  She is half my age and my role model, to say the least.

I've met people raising funds and been able to help raise funds for great causes including la-spca.org which still needs the help.

I've had great debates about religion, politics, and crime + punishment and oodles of other stuff with ordinary people who think and feel.  I've met famous people who take the time to chat with a plain old guy from a blue collar neighborhood who they've never heard of before and can expect nothing from in exchange but appreciation for their time.  I've seen just tons of expressions of love of all kinds by all sorts of people, including people I never would have imagined capable of making such expressions.  I would have otherwise just blindly and ignorantly passed them by.

I've seen beautiful photography with diverse subject matter.  I've seen mammatus clouds, tornadoes, hurricanes, puppies, angels and many more photographs that will never be submitted to the Pulitzer Prize committee but which would demolish them in any fair competition.  I've seen much beautiful poetry and philosophy.

What I've seen is the good side of humanity, just like at the Tobin Chiropractic Center, as mentioned in an earlier post.  Maybe I'm looking for different things today.  I don't know.  But on balance, my Facebook experience has reaffirmed my faith that in His infinite wisdom, God has a plan that involves our species.  And that part of the plan is for me to discover in my sixth decade that most of us are, in fact, just good folks.  Not bad.  God don't make no junk, of that I am certain and Facebook is confirming this view.  Tea Partiers notwithstanding(LMAO).

I've learned some icons.  Here goes.   O:)  <(")  :-D  and that old standby :).     I am certainly no O:) or a <("), I enjoy :-D ing now more than ever, and I do <3 you, believe it or not, Tea Partier or not.  LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLLOL   TY    TTYL   PEACE