Hubris

Facebook Ate My Homework

July 11, 2011 /

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“I think the trick now is to do something that’s not just part of the noise.” —Larry Gelbart (Producer of the TV series, “Mash”)

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—7/11/11—Facebook ate my homework.

In fact, for about three months there, last year, Facebook ate my marriage, my exercise routine, the book I’m working on, my e-mail correspondence, my housework, my homework . . . and my entire head.

Visualize, if you will, a woman sitting at her laptop, or piling stuff into her blender for a smoothie, or walking around the park across the street . . . while, simultaneously, a “Social Media Monster” (supply your own graphic details: enormous maw, never sleeps, omnipresent, probably green and scaly, but somehow exceptionally sexy) swallows her, head-first—and you have some idea how Facebook affected my life in its entirety when I first signed on.

Facebook had my whole head down its enormous gullet . . . and I didn’t even notice. I felt not the slightest inclination to pull back, turn off the computer, get back to the so-called real world of real voices, real people, real objects, real “work.”

I was Facebook’s “creature,” head, line and sinker.

I am not alone. I am anything but unique. I understand that this same thing happens to almost every loquacious, naturally gregarious and extroverted soul who dips a toe into Facebook. (I experienced a similar, thank-God-self-limiting addiction to texting when I first got my cell phone in Greece. Oddly enough, here in the US, I never text but, in Greece, where calling rates are exorbitant and land lines non-existent, texting, say, to your friend on the next island, or your friend on the ferryboat in the harbor, was catnip. It was just so COOL. It was clever, in the sense that the hula hoop was clever, the Walkman was clever, the flash drive was clever.)

For a moment, given the surprising gift of some new technological toy, one feels a bit like God, just after He invented the opposable thumb: “Well, hell, Gabriel! Why didn’t I think of that last week? Awesome!”

I’m not saying the thing is precisely like the pool into which Narcissus gazed, fell, and drowned . . . but Facebook (and other social media) can be a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Narcissus gazing at his mesmerizing and unreal reflection

I first signed up and on, despite my sympathy for Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a classmate named Divya Narendra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook), because I had launched this online –zine (www.WeeklyHubris.com) and knew the site would be a perfect medium through which to announce postings by my talented columnists and news analysts.

I did not sign on to find former flames, high school classmates, retired high school and college professors, or former readers of other journals I’ve published, edited or written for over the decades; nor did I imagine I’d discover rich new forums in which to share opinions and thoughts about creativity, faith, baseball, gardening challenges or The Arab Spring—though all of the above, in spades, came to pass.

I launched myself onto the seas of Facebook with a goal in mind, imagining I would be the one “in charge,” the one logging on and off at will, the one limiting my engagement with this Brave New Ocean to, oh, about half an hour a day.

I should have thought back to the Pasadena of 1958 . . . and my first hula hoop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_hoop).

The ubiquitous, addictive 50s hula hoop
The ubiquitous, addictive 50s hula hoop

Nation, it was just a toy. The simplest toy imaginable. A lightweight, plastic tube. My own was forest-green, with a white circumferential stripe, and I mastered the use of the thing, hipless though I was, immediately.

Virtually, I slept in my hula hoop. I was never without it. It probably contributed to my becoming the only rail-thin nine-year-old in Southern California.

So, you see, I have an innate weakness for novelty. Flash a new-fangled, shiny object at me, and all sentient thought goes right out of my vapid little cranium.

. . . for a while.

Remember, too, that I was brought up a doom-and-gloom Presbyterian (a real feat for parents rearing a child in cloudless, filthy rich, 1950s Pasadena).

So, unlike Narcissus, I eventually drew back from the social media pool. I established a Sunbeam timer (another nifty little invention) adjacent my laptop, and began limiting my time on Facebook (cracking wise with Emily, swapping Middle Eastern woes with Monster-not-his-real-name, and swapping yarns with Burt and David B.) to one, brief half hour in the morning, and one brief half hour in the evening, if and only if I’d met my writing goal for the day.

I can’t say I don’t still experience the-pull-of-the-new every time I pass my laptop, blinking in my office. But, now, I am back to watching Mets games with my spouse, writing (on the opposite side of my office) The Great American Unpublished Novel, and composing real letters and e-mails to old and new friends, far and wide. Not “Messages,” not “Chat,” but actual epistles.

One thing I do know, though: I wish I still had my original hula hoop. Dang thing’d be worth some money today.

Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, Publishing-Editor of “Hubris,” considers herself an Outsider Artist (of Ink). The most recent of her 15-odd books is The Visitors’ Book (or Silva Rerum): An Erotic Fable, now available in a third edition on Kindle. Her memoir, Greek Unorthodox: Bande à Part & A Farewell To Ikaros, is available through www.GreeceInPrint.com.). Thirty years an academic, she has also worked steadily as a founding-editor of journals, magazines, and newspapers in her two homelands, Greece, and America. Three other hats Boleman-Herring has at times worn are those of a Traditional Usui Reiki Master, an Iyengar-Style Yoga teacher, a HuffPost columnist and, as “Bebe Herring,” a jazz lyricist for the likes of Thelonious Monk, Kenny Dorham, and Bill Evans. Boleman-Herring makes her home with the Rev. Robin White; jazz trumpeter Dean Pratt (leader of the eponymous Dean Pratt Big Band); and Scout . . . in her beloved Up-Country South Carolina, the state James Louis Petigru opined was “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” (Author Photos by Robin White. Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)

17 Comments

  • diana

    July 12, 2011 at 2:36 am

    Yeah, I know the feeling. It was quite tempting and exhilarating at first. I’d sit watching FB while JotP watched a flick I’d seen before (and he had too but couldn’t remember it). But now, off in the outback, I’m getting back to a life with NO technology except for cellphone texting, when and if we have a signal. Glad you’re back in real life — whatever that means!
    xoxoxo

  • eboleman-herring

    July 12, 2011 at 7:31 am

    Diana, let’s discuss “the reality of real” at some point. I have NO idea, any longer, thank heaven. :-) Have I sent you a copy of “The Holographic Universe”? The new physicists make Galileo look like a tadpole . . . and they’ve made me reexamine everything. Facebook? Twitter? Television? Pshaw: small fry. Multiple, multiple universes? I’m with JoTP: old movies, again and again, for grounding. Love you both! e

  • eboleman-herring

    July 12, 2011 at 10:11 am

    You’re ON, Burt, though I’ve just lost 13 pounds of hips. I proved, as a nine-year-old, though, that hips don’t really hula the hoop. :-) e

  • eboleman-herring

    July 13, 2011 at 12:55 pm

    I don’t DARE tweet. That would be like mainlining, as opposed to simply snorting. :-) e

  • Scott Whitfield

    July 13, 2011 at 5:02 pm

    Sis-

    I’ll take 1950’s Pasadena OVER today’s Pasadena any time! We think of you often!

    Love,

    S, G, & G

  • eboleman-herring

    July 14, 2011 at 9:28 am

    I lived on Crestford Drive, Scott. The house, and my father’s Japanese garden, appear still to be there. I miss the entirety of that Pasadena universe: multi-cultural, literate, safe, sunny, nurturing. Gone with the wind….. Love to both, e

  • Cusper Lynn

    February 16, 2012 at 5:55 pm

    Happy to hear you came out okay!
    Some people get addicted to facebook to the point that they are never seen again.
    Be Of Good Cheer!
    Cusper Lynn

  • eboleman-herring

    February 16, 2012 at 7:03 pm

    Well, FB’s much like Godiva truffles: one never really kicks it, or them, once discovered. But . . . one keeps trying.

  • Cusper Lynn

    February 17, 2012 at 1:56 pm

    Stam’s chocolates are my Achilles heel. They are the chocolates I picture being used at the end of Terry Pratchett’s “Thief Of Time” when the immortal, having become human has decided she wishes to experience death. Knowing that the taste of this particular chocolate is so exquisite that her nervous system will be overwhelmed by an intolerable joy and will spontaneously discorporate she asks Death to assist her. Death, obligingly provides her a pool of this particular chocolate into which she dives naked to experience being completely human in both life and death. So were I electing for “death by chocolate” I would go with Stam’s.

    Godiva truffles, on the other hand, are the grenades we have been using in our running battle of the ages at work. When a woman in her early or mid-twenties, anywhere in the building, announces to the world at large that she is “Getting Old” or is appalled to find out that she is “Nearly Twenty five” our team assembles. Our comrades in arms, men and women of a “Certain age”, maintain an arsenal of Godiva truffles for what inevitable follows; the announcement of “A DIET” being publicly broadcast. At this point we spring into action, placing select Godiva truffles in the person’s cubicle or office. The cries of the battlefield never fade away and we never stop giggling as we here “OH MY GOD, NOT A GODIVA!” Allegations of cruel and unusual punishment and war crimes fly as these combatants in the “Age war” fall prey to the Godiva’s. By the time they have snapped up a pound of the chocolates we can see the burning resentment against the “ancient” people who did this, flicker in their lolling eyes. I am certain that somewhere in their chocolate induced stupor they realize that the ages of 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70 will inevitable occur and have to be met . But at least they are comforted as their youthful rage flickers out into unconsciousness, by the equally certain knowledge that there will always be chocolate.

    Be Of Good Cheer

    Cusper Lynn

  • Cusper Lynn

    February 17, 2012 at 8:24 pm

    Wasn’t aware you were in need of my services. But if that is an invitation, you do have both my email address and my domain name. Will be more than happy to pitch in and help where I can.

    Be Of Good Cheer!

    Cusper Lynn

  • Craig C Johnson

    July 16, 2018 at 1:10 pm

    This blog is out of the box. Absolutely top flight writing that challenges my neurons to change their axonal connections. Really great observations of a world often out of focus. What a find you are.