or – a noob’s adventures on Facebook.
I joined Facebook about five years after everyone else, initially to be able to spy on my daughters before they abandoned it in favour of Instagram and Snapchat. For the first year or so I posted intermittently, but then we all started getting wise about the evils of social media, and I posted less and stalked more. However, I still use it regularly to see what friends and family are up to, and I follow a number of organizations and reputable news sources on it (at least I think I they’re reputable, could it all just be Russian bots? Or does that make me a conspiracy theorist?) Someone I follow is Tracey Spicer, a media personality in Australia. I met her and her family on a small group tour of Vietnam about 7 years ago. She did some travel writing back then. She’s probably the most famous person I know, although most Kiwis have never heard of her. She’s most famous as a newsreader and journalist.
Tracey did a post the other day about the black CNN journalist who got arrested during recent protests in the USA. I shook my head at what a shit show America seems to have turned into in recent years – it’s one horrible ghastly headline after another. A resurgence and even celebration of racism, sexism, and homophobia; loss of respect for the media and objective truth; an utterly shambolic pandemic response. I felt I had to comment, and I wrote “Tragic. A once great country.” I see now that the adjective “great” was a poor choice, but hopefully you can see my reasoning. It was the first comment on the post, and I got a couple of likes, including from Tracey, but then someone replied “When? During slavery? During Jim Crow?”. I was aghast. I broke out in a cold sweat and replied back “good point!” just to show that I was a good sport and willing to admit my mistake.
I should have just left it at that, but then I began to brood on how I felt I’d been misunderstood, and eventually I caved and posted a long explanation of my thought processes (“the decline and fall of North America: an essay”). Of course no one read it.
But then something odd happened. A couple of people put laugh reacts on my original comment. I was furious. I hate being laughed at. This is why I’ve never been a fan of practical jokes, whether played on myself or others. What’s funny about being humiliated? So then I instantly posted another comment, to the effect that I didn’t think Australians ought to get too smug about race relations. I could sense that things were spiraling out of control by now, and I decided to send Tracey a message asking for her help. She was typically lovely and supportive:
Luckily sanity prevailed, I followed her good advice and I then got my daughter to delete my last message, and all’s well that ends well. My original comment remains for posterity but as the days go by and it disappears off people’s newsfeed, I can feel more relaxed about it. Have I learnt my lesson? I hope so…