Charles Dickens

I got a Facebook message from Facebook yesterday, and so I opened it, scrolling down through the many neglected messages, fascinated that so many people had so much to say and I so little.

What's wrong with me? Why do I feel when I'm on one of the social networks that I'm being used, and that somewhere behind the scenes others are being used so that they can serve me and my Facebook friends?

Obviously there's something wrong! Not necessarily with the delivery systems but with the larger overriding corporate message that this stuff is good for me and you and not just another business like so many other businesses, not just another a method of exploitation and control in the current capitalistic mode. I can't prove it but I know it's true.

Alas, social media is most likely where both free-speech and cultural invention comes for its complete watering down, one final hosing, before everything means nothing and next-to-nothing means everything. The subject matter on my Facebook account seems almost inexhaustibly trivial – too many pictures of dogs and cats and food arranged on pretty plates. Progressive political rants outnumber posts from red states, though that's more a reflection of who I've chosen to be friends with or who's chosen to be friends with me. I was surprised how many poets post: I could go to two or three readings a night, whether I was in Schenectady, New York or Berkeley, California.

The Facebook message I received yesterday had something to do with privacy, with wanting to protect a Facebook user's human rights under the law. To be honest with you, which translates in contemporary-speak to, 'I haven't really been honest with you before,' I really didn't read it.