You will be assimilated.

Resistance is futile.

I mentioned yesterday my unwanted familiarity with the bowel and stomach irregularities (or regularities) of my social-networking friends’ pets and children. However, today, I’d give anything to be inundated with those kinds of comments on my Facebook page . . . because I CAN’T ACCESS IT AT ALL. For those who follow me on Twitter, you know that I’ve been having increasingly worse trouble with being able to use Facebook over the past few weeks until now, I can rarely get anything other than an “Account Temporarily Unavailable” message—if I can even get past the log-in screen. Then, when I do finally get logged in, I’ve apparently lost all my friends but one: my aunt Nancy McLellan (love you, Nancy!!!!), because she’s the only one showing up in my friends list.

As I’ve struggled with having less and less access to Facebook, I’ve started experiencing a little bit of anxiety—whose updates am I missing? what if I’ve missed something important? what if someone has posted a message to me that I can’t see/answer? what if I can’t get logged-in and share the pithy comment that crossed my mind?

I started to write off FB altogether, to delete my account and go about my daily business and rely on Twitter as my social networking site. The problem is that the majority of my family is on Facebook, and I’d be totally out of the loop on what’s going on with them if I weren’t there. Also, because I have so many friends all over the country (the world, really) with whom my (current) sole contact is through FB, I would not only not be able to communicate with them, I’d lose contact with them—because we’ve never exchanged e-mail addresses.

Yes, I’ve been assimilated by Facebook.

Freedom is irrelevant.
How is it that over the course of just a year or two, I’ve managed to put myself at the mercy of a website like Facebook that can now control me and my relationships with other people? One of the things I enjoyed about FB in the beginning was the way that I was able to connect with people from my past whom I never thought I’d ever hear from again in this lifetime, as well as family members with whom I’d had very little contact before but now have grown pretty close to by connecting with them and discovering things about them we might never have had a chance to know about each other by seeing each other only every third or fourth Christmas or at family weddings.

Facebook giveth . . . but Facebook taketh away.

Because I work at home, Facebook is one of my main sources of contact with the “outside world” during the day. In addition to the time I spend writing and reading blog posts, up until the last couple of weeks, I would spend quite a bit of time daily on FB communicating with friends and family. I mainly used FB as a communication tool—Addicted to Lost is the only active application I have on my profile, and I only use that when the show is on (in the springtime). So it’s not like I’m spending hours on FB playing games or building a farm or being in the mafia or giving people flowers or blessings or anything like that. It’s definitely a communication tool for me. And now that outlet for communication has been taken away.

You must comply.
Even though I know I’m not likely to be able to get on it, I still find myself clicking on the button in my quick-links bar a couple of times an hour to see if that will be the time I’ll be able to log in, if that will be the time that I can actually see my friends’ and family’s posts. And when I can’t, when I see things like Account Temporarily Unavailable, Validation Error, You Do Not Have Permission To View This Profile (my OWN profile), Kaye Has No Wall Posts, Kaye Has Not Posted Any Links, You Must Confirm Your E-mail Address followed by Invalid E-mail Address, I become frustrated and angry and tense because the website is controlling my ability to be able to communicate, to be able to connect with others.

I managed to post a status update today asking for anyone who could see it to comment on the update to make sure I still “existed.” And (after getting about 20 “validation” errors and “you don’t have permission to post that” errors and “you must be logged in to do that” errors) my one abiding thought was EVIL TECHNOLOGY. But it’s not really the technology that’s evil—it’s just failed. The “evil” is that I’ve become so reliant on being able to connect with people through Facebook (and Twitter, which has been “overloaded” much of the day today, impinging on my ability to communicate with folks there, too) that 99 percent of the time, I spend my entire week without having any meaningful face-to-face communication with people (or even on the phone).

Death is irrelevant.
Sunday, after being out of the house until about four o’clock in the afternoon, I spent most of the evening and night (until about 3 a.m.) pacing around the house and stretching my left leg, trying to alleviate the painful muscle spasms and cramps I was experiencing (a lingering side-effect of the back surgery I had in 2003). I couldn’t sit for more than a few minutes at a time, and being at the computer wasn’t on the agenda. I ended up sleeping until almost 2:30 in the afternoon Monday, and when I sent the daily challenge to my local writing group that afternoon, I made a quip about how I bet they were wondering where I’d been. One of the members responded that she’d been a little worried when she hadn’t seen any e-mails or Twitter or FB updates from me in more than twenty-four hours. I was actually comforted by that, because I’ve seen WAY too many cop shows where they find a body of someone who turns out to have been dead for several days/weeks and no one reported them missing—because no one noticed they were gone. So, I guess my addiction to FB (and to a lesser degree, Twitter) and blogging is a good thing, because hopefully someone would notice before a week had gone by that I wasn’t communicating and something might be wrong. (But, conversely, if the only way they know how to contact me is through FB, Twitter, or the blog, how would they contact me to make sure I’m okay? Ah . . . the conundrum.)

So, even though I hate to admit it, resistance IS futile.