Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand wayPink Floyd
That is exactly what Facebook is doing to our lives. If we let it. When I summed up all the hours, days, years that I’ve spent reading the huge amount of bullshit people are posting on Facebook (and even more time spent actively contributing to it), I was devastated by the thought what good and creative things could have been done with that time instead. Years ago I made a self-liberating decision to stop following the mainstream media news. To stop polluting my brain with completely unnecessary facts that the rulers of this world call “news”, using the media to insert them in people’s heads in order to manipulate them. And now I’ve found myself as a participant in a cyber-reality show throwing around the same kind of garbage, only in a slightly different, interactive way. Is there a way out?
The radical way out, which many people have already taken (and I admire them on the guts and determination) is to simply close down their Facebook profiles, and abandon using Facebook for good. The experiment which I have decided to take is to find out if it is possible to use Facebook to reach out to people with your creativity, instead of being used by it as one of the billions of social media “contributors”.
So the question was – how to make the most out of Facebook with the least amount of time? When I analysed what uses up most of the time on Facebook, I realized that it’s definitely reading the huge amount of completely unnecessary information people are sharing on their personal profiles, and even more, engaging in the endless discussions about those posts, which never lead anywhere. That gave me a clear signal which way to go – ignore the random content that appears on Facebook timeline and focus on Pages. Thematic pages, every one of them featuring a specific theme that I want to present to the world.
Information on Facebook has a short life span. What you write today is “old news” tomorrow, and nobody will even remember it, or be able to find it months from now. So if you want to preserve a creative continuity on any subject, the only way to do it is to run a website/blog, either thematic or personal related, and publish your posts there. And that is exactly what I’m doing now. You can find those websites in the “Personal links” section in the right column.
And when it comes to Facebook, to complement the already existing pages covering various subjects, I created a new page, called “Aleksandar Veljković photography”, which is meant to be the new home for the huge amounts of photographic material that I’ve been regularly posting on my personal profile. So in my future Facebook presence my personal profile is supposed to be purely a technical link for conducting and bringing together all those pages and groups that I administer. Not a controversial reality show freak. Lets see how it works out and how much time there will be left for the more creative things in life.
My piece of advice to you is – don’t let Facebook steal your time. It’s the most precious thing that we have in life. You can’t buy it with money.