You don't have to put any information on Facebook that you don't want to
and there are privacy settings that allow you to control who gets to see
what you do post. As for the commercialism, well, you live in a
capitalist economic system. Every time you spend money you contribute to
some company's fortune. If you did not you could not function. But
Facebook does not charge for its services. It makes its money from
advertising and you are free to ignore the advertising. I have so far. I
will admit that as they get better at learning my likes I have been
tempted a few times, but I have still not spent money on the site yet.
The ads are a lot less distracting than ads on television. I think that
may have something to do with my blindness. On television the ad
completely stops the content you are trying to watch. Facebook ads are
more like ads in a magazine and I suspect that to the normally sighted
person they are about as intrusive as a magazine ad. But they are
oriented to the sighted populace. So it is even easier for me to skip
past the ads than it would be if I was reading a magazine because I
can't see the gaudy pictures anyway. There are a lot of commercial sites
on the Internet, probably most of them. If you object to using a
commercial web site just because it contains advertising you might want
to boycott the entire Internet. But whether you contribute to the
commercialism or not you might want to consider the impact of a personal
boycott. Organized boycotts can have some effect. If masses of people
refuse to buy a certain product and that starts to hurt the bottom line
of a company there is a chance that they might start making concessions
to make the boycott go away. If you personally decide to boycott
something, though, no one will notice. The company will not even know
that you are boycotting them. I remember one woman who declared a
personal boycott on Exxon for their Alaskan oil spill. She didn't keep
quiet about it either. At every opportunity she declared that she was
boycotting Exxon. The only effects I could see to her efforts was that
she was often laughed at behind her back, and not always behind her back
either, and she deprived herself of Exxon gasoline. That deprivation was
not really much of a deprivation either. Exxon was one of the more
expensive brands and she was not prone to pay more than she had to on
gas anyway. But whatever the personal boycott, if you are not prone to
by or use the product anyway then your boycott is not really a boycott.
If you are prone to use the product then you deprive yourself of it and
no one even notices your sacrifice. You end up doing yourself harm and
doing no noticeable harm to the company at all. It seems to me that a
personal boycott serves no real purpose but to be a way of bragging
about oneself. And the people to whom the bragging is directed at are
unlikely to even care.
On 8/7/2017 4:01 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
I have an aversion to Facebook without ever having tried it which is why I
won't try it. I don't like putting all my information in a social media
platform. I don't like the commercialism. And I don't want to add to its
owner's fortune in any way. It's very difficult to resist the world we're
living in. I do what I can.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Monday, August 07, 2017 3:38 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Facebook Finds Another One
I have never tried Linked In, but Facebook does have a feature that, while not
automatically sending friend requests for you, suggests friends. That is what
prompted me to do that search last night for the little girl who is now
thirty-six even though I still think of her as a little girl. Facebook
apparently does searches for you in its hidden innards and makes friend
suggestions based on what it can dredge up about you. When I first created my
account it was through a link that my state library commission sent me inviting
me to follow them on Facebook.
After I created my account the first thing I saw was a list of suggested
friends. Because I was brand new to Facebook and didn't know what I was doing I
sent a friend request to all of them thinking it was part of the sign up
process. As it happens Facebook has a rule that you are supposed to send friend
requests to people you already know and they determine that you don't know them
when they ignore you. They have various levels of punishment for every
infraction of the rules and I started right out accidentally violating a rule
and I had my ability to communicate suspended for a week. The rules said that
sending friend requests to people you don't know is considered spamming.
Anyway, when I sent those friend requests I thought the names sounded vaguely
familiar and since I had followed a link provided by the library commission I
thought they might be library commission employees. Well, I don't know who they
might have been, but there might be good reason for me to think that they
sounded vaguely familiar. One of them did accept my request and I remain
Facebook friends with her to this day. It turned out that she and I both
subscribed to the Victor Reader Stream users list at the time. The rest may
have had some tenuous connection to me too. The better Facebook gets to know
you, though, the better their suggestions and the more likely their advertising
is to be for something that you might actually want to buy. You do get tracked
on the site and off the site to determine your interests. Well, even though I
have been out of contact with Kristy - that's the little girl now adult woman's
name - I have heard bits of news about her now and then over the years. So one
of the friend suggestions that popped up last night sounded familiar. I
happened to know that Kristy had a daughter when she was sixteen and who is now
twenty. The friend suggestion bore her name. I looked at her profile and the
age was right and the city of residence was right. I don't know if it was her
daughter whom I have never met, but I got the spooky feeling that it just might
be. Now, I have done a number of searches on Facebook for people I used to
know, but I have never searched for Kristy. I think it is because, even though
I know better, I still kind of think of her as seven years old and just did not
expect a seven-year-old to be that easy to find. This friend suggestion made me
think of it, though, and so I gave it a try. I search for her name and got hits
from all over the country. I then narrowed it down by adding city and last
known place of employment. One result came up and a look at the profile told me
that it couldn't be anyone else. By the way, I found someone else at the same
time. Over the years Kristy's mother has called me every few years. I think the
last time was about five years ago. I have looked for her on Facebook too, but
the only thing I could find was an inactive page with no way to contact the
person and it looked like she had never used it.
Now that I found Kristy I looked at her timeline and there was a post with a
comment from her mother. Now I found her mother too. I will probably send her a
message soon too. I kind of wonder, though, if it is worth dredging up these
people from the past. Our lives have diverged.
In the case of Kristy, when I was around her she was a child and I was an adult
and our relationship by necessity had to be an adult/child relationship and
since that time our lives could have done nothing but diverge even more. Just
how much do we really have in common now besides old memories? Then there was a
certain other woman I found on Facebook.
That was the one who I described as my long lost unrequited love. I managed to
talk to her on the phone and reminisce. I finally asked her why she would not
have me back then even though she expressed such admiration for me. She told me
that I was too smart for her. Did I really need to know that? If she had told
me back then I could have faked being a dumb shit, but it doesn't do me much
good now.
On 8/7/2017 10:12 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Wow! Miriam, a belated birthday greeting. 80 is a landmark day. For
one thing, it means you've beat the odds and lived beyond the three
score and ten that the Bible allows us.
Roger, your adventures in locating long lost friends through Face Book
is tempting, but I'm not ready to open that Pandora's Box. At one
point a few years back I labored long and hard and located a number of
old school buddies and my boss at the Drapery Factory. My first two
attempts found that those buddies had died, but I did strike up a
renewed friendship with my one friend's widow. We chat from time to
time, but she mostly spends time telling me that she's praying for my
lost Soul. My boss, the only decent management person in all the
Drapery Business, had moved to Los Angeles after the Seattle factory
closed. I found his number and called. His wife answered the phone.
At least this tire old voice told me that this was the once lively,
energetic young woman I'd worked alongside. "Bill died ten years ago
from a heart attack", she told me. And then she spent the rest of our
conversation asking questions about my cousin, who had also worked at
the Sweat Shop. Very ego deflating. I also made the mistake of
joining Linked In. Try as I might I can't seem to make them go away.
So from time to time I get messages from people really wanting to link
with me. When my cousin in Minnesota showed up requesting to link
with me, I called her and told her I was not linking with anyone, even
one as sweet as she. Her surprise was genuine. She had never
requested to link with me. This made me wonder just how many of those
requests were merely randomly done by the mysterious Linked In.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/6/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I was 80 years old on Wednesday. Now that's really old! You're just
older than you were. (smile)
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger
Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Sunday, August 06, 2017 9:01 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Facebook Finds Another One
If you ever want to look up someone you used to know I think I can
recommend Facebook after some successes. I have already told you
about at least one person I found on Facebook from my sighted past. I
have found a few others too, but I didn't feel close enough to them
to actually contact them. Well, I just found another one who I did
just contact. There was a little girl I used to babysit. I met her
when she was two years old. The last time I saw her before losing my
eyesight she was seven. The last time I saw her in the sense of being
in the same room with her she was just about a month short of her twelfth
birthday.
The last time I spoke to her was on the phone on her fourteenth birthday.
Well, I was just thinking about her and I did a search for her on Facebook.
I was surprised at how easy it was to find her. I sent her a friend
request and a message asking her if she remembered me. Within five
minutes my friend request was accepted and she answered me telling me
that she could never forget me and asked if I remembered a certain
song someone had made up about me. I didn't remember the song. It was
probably sung behind my back because it was making fun of me. But I
forgive the song writer, someone else I haven't spoken to for decades.
What blows my mind is that that little girl is now thirty-six years
old and approaching her thirty-seventh birthday in December. Sheesh!
I'm getting too old too fast!