Tuesday, May 05, 2020

as if I had anything interesting to say about facebook

I have nothing to say about facebook that no-one else has said before, but the current shizzle about the coronavirus app and privacy concerns is interesting to me, not least because of the ridicule accorded people who don't want to trust the government with anything as mundane as their meanderings around their safe little circles when they/we all willingly offer up our every little detail to organisations like fb. This makes me feel not like signing up to the coronavirus tracking app but to limiting my information to fb. There are probably really easy ways to thwart fb but I can't disconnect myself enough from it to imagine what they might be. The other thing of course is you wonder what sinister thing fb could possibly do with your 'information' other than try, ineptly as it almost always does, to sell you things.

I say ineptly but weirdly, in the last week for some weird, weird reason, a few days ago fb decided to start marketing unto muggins (i.e. me) a 6-CD box set of recordings by the Revillos.
I'm not against the Revillos exactly, they were certainly not part of my teenagehood so to get that engaged with their oeuvre would need a big extra prod of my imagination. But what I wonder is why CR, or fb, decided I would be in the market for something like this.*

What also intrigues me is why fb, presumably the most skilled and agile social media producer out, is so freakin' boring so often. My feed is so samey and stale, and while obviously I only know that because it is my default distraction so I am frequently going to it and realising 'hmm, this stuff was dull the first time around' (and therefore perhaps reinforcing to the algorithm either that whatever it shows me I will scroll for a while, or perhaps suggesting I like it that way) I can't see this as sustainable, perhaps for my own (this is overstating it, but I'll just say it) sanity I should wean myself off this 'feed'. 

* I fully concede that I am more likely than most fools my age with my types of interests to take on something like this on spec. But three discs are live shows and two are iterations of the same album... sure, great, sounds good, I dunno... 

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