I have this serious love/hate relationship with social media. I love staying in contact with family and friends scattered all over the world. But social media can be a horrific waste of my time, and I don’t think of myself as retired or ready to die. As the poet Robert Frost famously wrote, “But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”
I am self-employed as a writer. If I don’t sell a book or a short story, I don’t earn any income. If I waste hours upon hours each day engaged in asinine, juvenile arguments with presumably adult men and women about religion, politics, or Georgia Bulldog football, I’m wasting hours of precious time that should be dedicated to my work.
Earlier this year I threatened to quit Facebook entirely, having purged my Twitter account, with the idea that I would focus all of my attention on professional work, instead of writing for fun or worse, arguing with somebody who has assumed they know more about a subject than I do.
However, publishers in this digital era of mass communications expect writers to develop and maintain a social media presence. To my eternal surprise, my wife also opposed a permanent self-imposed ban from Facebook, even though I did manage to delete my membership from all the large forums where most of the arguments seemed to take place.
This left me in a bit of a quandary. Could I remain on social media, without getting sucked into a black hole of absurd arguments? The challenge may not be insurmountable, but it has certainly proved to be formidable. Today has been a prime example of why I “hate” Facebook.
My friend who runs a large forum composed (at least in theory) exclusively of Georgia Bulldog fans asked me to resume my role as an administrator of her group because things were on the verge of getting out of control. Sure enough, within five minutes of somewhat reluctantly accepting her offer, a firestorm broke out.
Because of a harmless, silly joke.
Dawg fans began viciously turning on each other. Some reported complaints about fellow members directly to Facebook instead of calling the issue to the attention of an administrator to deal with the problem, assuming something needed to be done.
Now is the joke tasteless? I guess it could be, especially if you are a Tennessee fan.
Every true Dawg fan ought to know that genuine UGA fans would NEVER celebrate a real injury, but jokes are a matter of taste.
Some of the very same people who claimed this joke offended them had posted jokes about Notre Dame faking injuries, but I wasn’t tempted to accuse anybody of not being sympathetic to the Notre Dame players. I was thinking more about accusing them of hypocrisy. Nobody was suggesting the Tennessee quarterback only pretended to have had his bell rung by Eric Stokes, and the member who posted the meme even made a point of saying it never would have been posted if he hadn’t been sure the guy wasn’t seriously hurt and in fact, recovered quickly. If memory serves correctly, he even wanted to go back into the game, but the coaches wouldn’t let him.
On the whole, Bulldog fans are very kind and decent people. I’m 100 percent sure that I’ve never seen any jokes about Devon Gales after he was seriously hurt in a game. What happened to him was a tragedy, not comedy.
I’m pretty sure the people who got upset by the Tennessee joke I considered harmless are kind and decent people, except those who referred to me with unpleasant language. We don’t all have to laugh at the same jokes. I freely admit that my sense of humor could be described as slightly warped, but that doesn’t make me an evil person. Nor do you have the right to judge me.
However, I have the newly reacquired authority to judge you. The most frustrating aspect of this conversation is we’ve had it before.
Sure, you all loved it when I laid out the rationale for describing the suspension of Todd Gurley as entrapment–to this day, it remains one of the most popular pieces I’ve ever written, but the problem is that I don’t make a nickel from writing that sort of stuff. It’s a labor of love. Administrator duties on Facebook is labor for which I am also not compensated and do not love, but I do love the friends who asked me to do it, so I agreed.
The second commercial in this compilation, where the man appears to cut off his finger and falls to his death, was also deemed by some viewers. I didn’t find it particularly funny, but you aren’t going to catch me writing to Martha Stewart to complain about it. I know the actor isn’t really dead, and he didn’t really cut off his own finger.
IT WAS A JOKE, PEOPLE. NOBODY GOT HURT. Laugh, or don’t laugh, but please don’t complain because I don’t want to deal with manufactured problems or faux outrage. It’s that simple.
Many were given the suggestion, even to the point of being begged, to simply continue scrolling if you felt the least bit offended. Instead, you chose to complain, and that’s why I wasted much of today playing the “bad cop” role. Life is too short to get upset about silly little things. Laugh when the spirit moves you, and don’t be afraid to cry when you’re sad. Not everyone is going to laugh at your jokes, and most normal people won’t expect you to laugh at theirs if you aren’t amused. I freely admit that my sense of humor is sometimes sophisticated and others sophomoric, and often bizarre. I don’t expect you to laugh when I do, but I also don’t expect to be criticized if you don’t laugh with me. I won’t hold it against you if you are humor-impaired, unless you try to impair my sense of humor.If you’d rather complain than say “Go Dawgs!”, please find someone else who cares.
As Bob Dylan once sang, It ain’t me, babe.
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