Goodbye Facebook?

How does one set the limits of one's community?  Especially within a medium over which one has only the slightest token control?

I have ridden the wave of social media, in my own small, contained way, from the days of its infancy.  By the turn of the 21st century, AOL was all the rage.  It was, in fact, one of very few avenues to the internet available to Mr. and Mrs. Joe Average Guy.  In 2003, AOL launched its very infant versions of social media.  

I started signing on to the internet through Aol in about 1998.  In 2003, I was in an extremely lonely and isolated place in my life; as low, I think, as I had ever been.  I filled pages upon pages with my maudlin angst...at once an historical record of the sad events of a terrible decade of my life, and an attempt to use pen and paper as a substitute for talk therapy.  When J-land started up that year, it was a natural place for me to...put myself "out there."  At the outset, I had no idea it was going to turn into a community.  But it did...and I really think it saved my life.  Or at least, my sanity.

J-land was only around for about 2 years when Aol chose to take its very popular social media to the next level--it added advertisements around the edges of the journal pages.  How infuriated we were!  There was a mass exodus of j-landers away from the "commercialization" of our little internet home.  How funny that seems now.  What in the world ever gave us the idea that WE "owned" that little space, or had any say whatsoever about what went on there?

I had a little cadre of steady j-land "friends."  I have to laugh, now, when I think of how incensed we were about the ads on our blogs.  Some quit the neighborhood altogether, never to be heard from again.  Then, Aol closed j-land for good in 2008.  So, the whole span of that time of community and emotional support lasted a little less than 5 years.  Why, then, is it so branded on my psyche that I STILL miss it?

Most of my j-land friends, however, eventually popped back up on Facebook.  They missed the community of social media, I guess, enough to swallow all the things about Facebook which were EXACTLY the things we railed against at Aol j-land. 

So...here we are.  Fifteen years down the road of social media, all thinking we are so smart and so with-it to have claimed our little spaces on Facebook.  Up until the run up to the election of 2016, we had all told ourselves that we could manipulate the medium to serve our personal needs--whether it was to stay in touch with distant family, or reconnect with friends from our past, or communicate with current co-workers or neighbors, or advertise our small business for free. 

But as the dark political divisions in our country were highlighted and widened by social media, I think we began to get the inkling that we were playing with fire.  That this gigantic network that reached into the homes and hearts of so many Americans of diverse geography, lifestyles, ideologies and faiths had fallen into the hands of forces that could and would manipulate public opinion for their own nefarious purposes.  Ultimately putting us at war with each other. 

All for financial gain.  Someone is getting rich on this stuff.  Maybe a lot of someones.  But not Mr. and Mrs. Joe Average American.  No.  We are the pawns.  We are the puppets.  We are the masses to be manipulated in whichever direction the guy with the most money can point us.

Recent revelations about the extent to which foreign powers trafficked in and manipulated American social media have proven the Machiavellian depths to which this dark game of power and control have gone.

A friend of mine deleted his Facebook page after the Cambridge Analytica bombshell.  He said he felt like he needed to do this as a "public service."  

I'm inclined to go in that direction myself.  But...

I'm having a really hard time cutting that umbilicus. 

Facebook is my last, weak connection to my j-land "friends."  The folks who flit past my posts and click "like" if something strikes their fancy.  The same folks I used to interact with on a deep and personal level (or so I thought) on a nearly daily basis.   

If I leave Facebook, I say a permanent goodbye to 95% of the people "in" my life.

And I'm not sure I have the guts to do that.  Yet.

Am I a sap?  Am I just the kind of person that nefarious forces count on to continue their work of tearing apart the fabric of American society?

I don't know.

I have to do some real thinking about all this.