ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

Facebook Blues

Should I be feeling guilty if I fail to click on like
when I'm scanning Facebook pages of my friends.
Do the threats of all the bad luck that's sure come my way
say I don't care if persecution ends.

If something takes my fancy with a picture or a post
and I answer with a comment from my heart.
Does it mean I'm a crusader or just bored with how things are
Does it mean my world will shortly fall apart ?

What protocol dictates the way these things are handled
do I have to like the things my friends all eat ?
Why do they tell me all the little things that happen every day
when I try to keep my timeline nice and neat .

Should I click and just delete the things that clutter up my screen
so my own posts shuffle once more down the page.
Pictures of their growing children that I've never even met
things that happen as their family comes of age.

Do they think the same thing as they scroll their page as well
are my posts just boring things that come and go.
Do they even read them ? Do they delete them same as me
Ah well I just suppose I'll never know.

Bob Pacey (c)

Love It!

An interesting reflection on modern life Bob and what is important and what is just white noise.

Heather

I share what is worthwhile, and ignore what is puerile.

But you are so right about the photos of food, and the apparent need of some people to post every single moment of their lives. It drives me insane.

Nice one, Bob

On a diet Neville?

No good without an itemised description Neville !


And don't get me started on cat fanatics


Yes Allan yes Allan Yes Allan I agree


Bob

Bob, people are searching for the personal, in a world that keeps telling us that we are the product of the impersonal.
That's why I believe in the power of poetry to reveal the personal to us.

So facebook is poetry ??

I didn't say it was

Bob has depicted Facebook as something ridiculous and meaningless. It may well be in a way, perhaps he is right.

But I wonder if there is something else in the phenomenon of Facebook (or such things) that shows how people today are looking for a connectedness that cannot be found any more in our culture. The urban society anyway, perhaps there is still some connectedness in some small country places.
I wonder sometimes if the plagues that ravage our society arise from sheer loneliness and separation.
Could Facebook be today's version of Henry Lawson's Faces in the Street.

Poetry, I think still remains one of the ways humans can bond together in a shared experience of all those little thoughts and mundane aches and pains and giggles that make up being a person.
I don't think it is the big picture that makes us, it's the little things.
Does Facebook give a bit of structure for expression of those bits and pieces. So maybe in a sense Facebook is a sort of substitute poetry.

If you know what I mean.

Sorry to sermonise but I watched some things last week on people suffering mental illness and it got to me.