Social Media

a gripe plus more

I spend small parts of my day scrolling over websites like Facebook and others, but the users of Facebook are the biggest offenders to what I am going to gripe about next.

Why do folks feel the need to ask questions on Facebook, and relying on others to provide the information you’re asking, when you can simply google the question yourself and save everyone the time and effort to respond? And if I simply respond with that sort of helpful advice, I am ridiculed for it?

Years ago someone came up with a brilliant idea, a website that mocks you for not asking google, called “Let me google that for you”. It was a snarky way to try and educate people on what search engines are for. But alas, that site is no longer valid.

So, Facebook has become the new but less timely replacement.

For example, just this morning, a person on Facebook asked if a local highway was reopened, after several weeks of it being closed, with detours, to install a fish culvert. In this area of the state we’ve become fish culvert addicts, getting upgrades, cleaned or otherwise closing roads all over the place.

I had just asked google the day before about it, and it gave me a nice proper response that it is still closed, but due to reopen this morning at 7am. When I saw that question posted on Facebook, I asked Google again if the highway was open, and it said yes, as of 7am.

Among the dozen or so responses saying the same thing, I politely pointed out that the information could have been gained by googling it. My comment was not appreciated one bit.

To me, I equate it to wearing a watch, and asking someone else what time it was.

I’m occasionally guilty of this, not on social media, but bugging my friends, asking questions I should be able to find out for myself. This is how it usually goes…

Me to friend: Hey, brother, is petg filament stronger than pla?

Me thinks about it.

Me googles “is petg filament stronger than pla?”. Gets answer, yes, petg is stronger.

Me to friend: Never mind, I found the answer.

My daughter, bless her heart, has the patience of Job when I’m constantly bugging her about stuff in a game we both play online. But to be fair to myself, this particular game has the stupid habit of naming the same thing differently, confusing the heck out of me and I assume a lot of other people.

But I still keep thinking back to the days before the internet.

I still remember the days when I needed to drive across country to my next duty station, or school. Driving from Tacoma Washington to Biloxi Mississippi involved multiple maps - a 50 state Rand McNally map book, and a bunch of individual state maps, with major cities on the back side. I remember taking the time looking over the maps, and writing down turn by turn directions that I would have next to me in the passenger seat. I can’t recall how many times I drove across the country by myself and managed to make it to my destination. I always enjoyed those trips, hitting the open road, staying in cheap hotels, and listening to my cassette tapes, at least for the first couple days. Then it became a grind. And that was in the days of 55MPH speed limits. Ugh.

And then came the internet and mapquest. Automated everything I used to do.

Today, my car tells me not only when to turn, but what lane I should be in, anticipating several changes ahead. And with crowd sourcing it gets even better, telling me when a cop is around, debris on the road, construction areas, and even traffic slowdowns and estimated arrival times that seems eerily accurate.

The youth don’t know the struggle.

But as I’ve aged, the allure of driving for 10-12 hours at a time has quite faded.

It’s still amazing to me the technological advances that have been achieved just in my lifetime.