You know how it started out. As an app for college students to assist nerds in their dating endeavors. If they could get coeds to post their status, whether they were involved in a relationship, looking, or not interested, half their battle was won. They wouldn’t have to muster up the courage to ask or find a way to engage a girl when they had no idea how to go about it. To this day, the tech world is still saturated with guys, and yes, they are still mostly guys, who are nervous around the female sex, and especially attractive members of the female sex. Oh, there’s lots of bravura, lots of boasting and objectification of females, but in reality, most of the guys are scared to death. Believe, I know, I’ve worked professionally in the tech industry for twenty years.

And wasn’t it cool, how you could get most people to post up private information about themselves. Of course, the assumption was, and the deliberate subterfuge was, that it was all secure. You were only giving information to those friends you had added to your group. It didn’t take long for skeptics to find that the privacy was a joke, not a funny one. But still people signed up until billions are invested in Facebook. I myself have an account, which I check once every three or four months. The app comes pre-installed on smart phones and it’s vacuuming up information about you whether you use it or not. And what happens to that information? How does Mark Zuckerberg get to be one of the richest men (not actually a man yet, really still just a nerdy boy) in the world? It’s not because he has ‘provided a service to humanity’, or allowed ‘people to connect’. It’s because he knows everything about you. He knows your birth date, not just the day but the date, where you were born, where you went to school and when, your married and maiden name if you were both, where you live, where you work now and where you have worked, organizations you are connected with, he knows everything about you. He has photos, he knows what you like and what you don’t. And it was all for free. I’ve never used the feature, but I’m guessing many people do, of storing all of your online logins and passwords inside your Facebook account. So when you login to your bank account, or any account to place orders, he knows it. Not him personally of course, but his company.

When you really stop to think about it, which most people don’t and which our society does not encourage, it’s amazing that one company could amass so much information about billions of people on the planet without paying a dime for it. So who does pay for it and how did MZ get to be one of the richest men in the world?

By selling your information to whoever has the money to pay for it. It’s not cheap, advertising on Facebook. But look what you get in exchange. If you want to target white folks over the age of 20 who are conservative and own guns, you can. If you want to get your message to teenage girls in a certain area of the country, you can. If you want to sell something to young professionals in the US and Europe, you can. Everyone knows you can’t sell ice to Eskimos and Facebook has your audience shopped, chopped and diced, packaged and ready for your advert. It has sucked up all the advertising dollars that used to go into local newspapers, magazines and radio, causing their virtual collapse. We are left with Facebook as a substitute for journalism, where anyone with a cell phone becomes a reliable source of information. They have a picture, or a video, and pictures don’t lie, or so we were taught to believe. That was before the advent of Photoshop where a twenty year old can make changes that prior to the 1990’s would take a video editor hours to accomplish. Just a few clicks and someone can be where they weren’t, they can be ‘quoted’ as saying something they never said. And it’s all lumped together there with your best friend’s photo of last nights dinner. What a mess.

It’s time to log off Facebook. I know no one wants to do it, they will lose their connection with their friends and their family. What about their logins and passwords? It will be hard, it was hard for me. I used to spend an hour every day on Facebook and sometimes more. But you can do it. You still have a telephone. You can call (!). You can text or email, or my God, send a card or a letter! Spend five dollars on a card and a stamp, it means more than a hundred posts, I guarantee it.