You’ve obviously heard the bad news.

No, Not the unrest in Libya, not the genocide in Myanmar, not Zimbabwe with it’s insane inflation rate. Nobody cares about that stuff

I mean the BAD news.

Facebook has once again slightly changed its layout!

I know. I know. It’s difficult. But you’ll get over it.

…

…

No…

.. No I lied. It’s not difficult actually. It’s the opposite of that. The service you use for free just gave you a free upgrade. the product is now better, and you are clinging to the memories of an imagined past. Facebook has made consistent improvements since it’s inception, and each one successively has been regarded with scorn, followed by indifference, followed by unspeakable loyalty resulting in a feeling of betrayal when it is changed again.

This is what Facebook used to look like.

When they changed it from this, I was a part of the conservative holdout. They wanted to remove the exclusivity and allow profiles to everybody (including my mom) instead of just college students.

I was convinced at the time that this would lead to uncontrollable spam and alter the Facebook culture in a way it could never recover from. And it’s not like the world needed another general audience social network, we already had MySpace! 

Well now, having graduated college years ago, still logging onto facebook every day I’m pretty happy Mark Zuckerburg didn’t listen to me on that one.

The next revolt concerned the new addition of a horrible feature everybody hates called “the wall” which has at this point completely eclipsed profiles s the reason you log onto facebook. I mean who actually browses around their friend’s “info” pages for fun anymore?

then they subjected us to apps.. which was of course, awful…. Except for the good ones…But there was this learning curve whereby we had to learn to block the apps that were abusive, and before we figured how to do that we got a lot of Farmville Requests. Like, a lot.

And then Chat. Everybody hates chat still right?

 

You always think that the last version of Facebook was the “good version” but you keep forgetting that that’s what you said about the last version before that.

We do the same thing with the world. Where we get upset every time there is a starlet who is famous for no reason or a school shooting we wish it could all be like it used to be. But we fail to ask the important question “When was that?”

People talk about the 50’s like that was a golden age when men were men and women new their place. Actually the consensus in the 50’s was that women had become altogether too uppity following the war when they had been permitted to hold jobs, and were starting to think they were equal to men. Black men could not use the same bathrooms as white men, other races were parodied or not acknowledged at all and everyone lived in fear of nuclear annihilation by the reds (unless the polio got us first)

Prior to that we had the war (and the holocaust)

Before that was the great depression

And the “roaring 20s” remembered as a time when young Americans hung out at Coney Island, forgotten for having invented organized crime.

Go any farther back than that and you die of food poisoning before the publication of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”

 

I for one say we should all sit back, relax, and enjoy the present as it turns into the future one day at a time. Clinging to yesterday wouldn’t help bring it back even if yesterday was better.

…and it wasn’t

 

 

… Seriously what the hell was “random play”?