I have never used it or Twitter, and other than a brief battle with bots on Linkedin, my experience with this virtual cesspool of Progressiveness called Medium represents the extent of my social media engagement. I was quite proud of myself for not having my face booked until I returned home from my sister’s wedding and learned she had plastered my tuxedoed mug all over her own Facebook page. Of course, my other siblings, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews also proudly cut and pasted the very same wedding photos to their Facebooks.
I freaked out and rapidly fired off a couple of emails to my sister and brother that included a polite request to scrub the digital duplicates of my likeness. After reading their replies:“Why Steve? They’re great pictures of you” and “WTF Bro?”, it occurred to me that my expectation and plea for privacy had alarmed them.
My suspicions were validated soon after when my mother called to let me know that she was “concerned for me.” She had convinced herself that I was hiding from something or someone. I have no Facebook, no Twitter, no GPS, no cable TV and no apps installed on my ‘smart’ phone. I live deep in the woods in the heart of Appalachia with eight mildly aggressive hounds that will bark at a leaf blowing in the wind.
My physical address is accessed from a quarter-mile gravel driveway that connects to a street with no name and no marker other than the orange, spray-stenciled, five digit USPS route and box number on the side of my blue-gray mailbox. Through the similarity of font, color and format, they could easily be mistaken for the state issued prison ID numbers worn by the inmates that pick up trash along the highway nearby.
I’m now viewed as the family fugitive living on the fringe of the grid and off the “Book”. I’ve learned to keep my head on a swivel at family and social functions so that I can shield my frontal facial features from the facebook paparazzi in attendance. My hope is that when our fourth branch of government finally perfects their third party software that will convert Facebook into the world’s largest facial recognition database, I will still register a null response.
