Recently it dawned on me that we have returned to the days of the party-line. But, it's on Facebook instead of a telephone. Yeah, I'm rambling on about Zucky's little enterprise. Again.
 |
| Grandmother's version of trolling. Party-line. |
My grandmother had a party-line back in the day and she hung on it, listening, until the cows came home.
She also had a fancy quilting rack, and in her spare time she would take months to whip up lovely coverlets. Of course, the eavesdropping came first. The quilts could wait.
The irritating way Facebook is designed is not that different than those days of party-lines, in many ways.
Grandmother (yes, I called her that, she was the formal sort of eaves-dropper), would slide into her comfy chair, quietly lift the receiver and hear all the good gossip from far-and-wide.
People, communicating in a group-some speaking their news and views, some silently lurking, hanging onto their receiver.
Sound familiar?
It is not that we request to be a new-age-party-liner. It is not like we log into FB and ask them to feed us a constant stream of information about the world in general, or the world of our friends. If we log in to the site, we are hit with it.
In general, unlike my paternal Grandmother, I am not an overly nosy type. I am curious about things of interest to me, but I truly don't care what my neighbors are up to in their spare time.
Likewise, the information popping and snapping on Facebook is something I scroll past, for the most part.
We have come so far in the world of communication and technology, but when I think of people hanging out, trolling and lurking on Facebook and other sites, I smile.
I smile because I think how like a party-line it all seems. Funny, Zucky and Grandmother are so similar.
Grandmother would never get anything done if Facebook and the like had been around in her day.
That quilting rack would just have to sit there, empty.
Gotta dash...
##
No comments:
Post a Comment