Face Time

 Not being on Facebook has been a challenge for many relationships I try to maintain. The fact that this blog has its own page on the social media blunt instrument is not lost on me. Nor is the fact that I am, through my job, entrusted with the responsibility of keeping our school's Facebook page "current." Such is the confused life of the "tech guy." 

Just over my shoulder, most days, my wife is chuckling or clucking about something she has seen on her window on Zuckerworld. This causes me to ask what she found so amusing or outrageous. And there is always an element of "you had to be there," since my mode of discourse is generally this profoundly one-way conduit and the hack and slash world through the lens of Twitter. Having a conversation, as I have heard folks do on The Facebook, evades me. I am almost exclusively a transmitter here. Very rarely do I receive. Which I am sure points to some large character defect on my part, but not one to which I am unfamiliar. 

But when I heard that Facebook was becoming Meta, it gave me pause. After what seemed like minutes of speculation across Al Gore's Internet, Marky "Mark" Zuckerberg announced that his company will stop being named for the application that has nearly three billion users. Instead, they will become something more, and something less. I looked it up. Meta means "(of a creative work) referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential." And isn't that precisely what Facebook has been doing for its existence? Nobody does self-referential better than the web-based system for rating college girls than The Facebook. And now it will be shepherded into its next incarnation by this new name. 

Could it be that after seventeen years, and in particular the past four, Facebook is looking to distance itself from whatever surly images people have generated about it and the folks who rule over it? As if the damage done by the 2010 film Social Network was not significant enough, the billionaires who attempt to connect us with one another have done little but create an echo chamber for a generation. It put quotation marks around words like "friend" and "like." Sounds pretty meta to me. 

And now, after helping fan the flames of really ignorant dissent last January, before and after the insurrection, Facebook is no longer the new or cool kid on the block. Seventeen years ago, you were pretty with it to be on the Facebook. Now, your mom is on Facebook, and she wants to know why you won't accept her friend request. 

That's so meta. 

Or is it just a continued assault on the senses? Or a continued assault on common sense? Or just a few more minutes until it's MySpace.