Why I Hate Facebook

Now, I resisted Facebook for a long time. This is just part of my personality. If everybody starts doing something, I want to do the opposite. If everybody starts wearing bell-bottom jeans again, I’ll start buying boot-cuts. If sailing becomes the rage, I’ll buy a powerboat.

I haven’t always been like this. When I was younger, I desperately wanted to be popular, even as I put up a public face of indifference. I’m a lot older now and for the most part, my I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude is genuine.

But everyone agrees if you publish a book, you gotta have a website and do all that social media stuff, so when I decided to throw Tainted Souls out there into Kindlespace, I caved and hooked up with FB.

I find it surprisingly hard to navigate. Oh, it’s easy enough to check your news feed and see what weird stories your friends have shared with you. But just flipping around between my profile and the other parts seems inordinately strange, plus it’s hard to delete some stuff if you make a mistake, plus…well, in sum, it just seems to me in general more difficult to use and more limited than the product of a megamegabillion-dollar company ought to be.

I should probably note here that I basically hate all these internet companies that have lavished riches on others – principally because it’s others upon whom all the riches have been lavished. I hate Microsoft – enemy of the people – for many reasons, but among them is the fact that the pre-IPO Microsoft once turned me down for an editing job, claiming I was “overqualified” for the position. (This HR philosophy may explain why Internet Explorer, now in its ninth frakking version for heaven’s sake, continues to crash all the time.) I could be sitting on a beach sipping daiquiris.

But I digress. I’ve been trying to set up a separate FB page for a Tainted Souls  “tour” I’m planning and have found the whole process decidedly aggravating. I don’t get this whole timeline format and it seems stupid to employ it for a product. To see how the page looks to everyone else, I’ve gotta log on as a fake user. Plus I can’t move stuff around. Blogger is, by comparison, user-friendly. (Is that still a word?) The whole thing has been a nightmare.

All I’m trying to do is figure out a way to let people know there actually is a book called Tainted Souls available, but I’m a slave to Zuckerberg’s monstrosity. And inept at the task.

Once again, just as in high school, I’m not one of the cool kids.