I am not a young person, but I am not old yet either. That means I am less inclined to adopt new technology than a 20-something, but I will if it is practical. The older you get, the definition of “practical” tends to narrow. A teenager views a smart phone as a necessity, while a senior views it as a novelty. I have a smart phone and rely on it a great deal, but I also know I could get along without it, because I remember a time when these things did not exist. The dark ages get a bad rap. It was not so dark.

Facebook was sort of the reverse. In my youth I was an early adopter of mobile phones so I moved up with the technology. Facebook sis not exist in my youth, so I was a late adopter. Anyway, one of my friends badgered me into signing onto Facebook a few years back. I setup a page and did nothing with it. I added friends for the first month or so then I stopped. I would log in daily to see what was posted and maybe comment on occasion, but mostly it was a daily peak into on the lives of friends and some strangers.

The fact is, I never really used it much. I like my friends, but I have no need or desire to communicate with them daily. E-mail is better anyway. The friends of friends who come into view from time to time are not very interesting. It seems that the more prolific users are crazy. They are like drug fiends who will do anything to get attention on-line. They quickly run out of good ways to get attention, so they lurch into the unlimited supply of bad ways to get attention. You learn a lot about people a a result. None of it good.

My liberal friends have some real wackos in their circle. If you are logging onto a website of a politician to tell them and the world how much you love them, you need a psychiatrist, not a platform. Otherwise, the daily fare on Facebook is boring scraps of information about the collection of average people in my life. God bless them, but they are just not that interesting. Neither am I. I read a lot and know a lot of things that most people don’t know, but I am no more interesting than the next guy.

So, I deactivated my account. It seems that may be the one thing I have in common with young people. Facebook is now losing its cool factor with the young. I’ve always said it was a fad, but I started to wonder if I was mistaken. It turns out I was right. We know that a very large number of the accounts on Facebook are fake. We also know many are dormant. More important, we know that most of us are not that interesting. Facebook is like reality TV, without the parts created by writers to make it interesting.

The whole rationale for the company, however, is they get young people hook ed on the site, so they can sell them stuff or have the ad makers sell them stuff. If it turns out that they do not get young people, then you have to wonder if Facebook is a viable business, at least in the long run. The myth of marketing is that you have to sell young people in order to sell older people. Maybe that’s false, but if they are not selling young people, what are they selling to old people? That’s never been very clear with Facebook

Putting that aside, I wonder if social media has the legs experts claim. For all of human history, we lacked social media. Humans socialized in person. We have evolved to be good at it. We have never been good at communicating through writing or pictures. Almost all human knowledge is passed along in-person. A good way to look at it, consider the telephone. People will call one another to arrange a get together. No one meets with someone to arrange a telephone call. That would be absurd.

Telephone technology is a decent alternative to in-person communication, but not the preferred one. Social media like Facebook is closer to phone tag than anything else. It is people leaving message for one another on the refrigerator. Again, it works to a point, but it is never replacing normal human in-person interaction. Then there is the openness of these platforms. Despite the madness for an open society by the usual suspects, the truth is white people like their privacy. Facebook is anti-privacy.