Reason why I shouldn't be on Facebook (or online in general) #932

On Facebook it's very easy to "tag" someone in a note. (Not as easy as it should be, but that's another story.) One simply clicks on the field on the right of the screen and types part of the name of a friend ("friend") and then select the desired name when it appears. Mere seconds of effort there.

When the note is a meme (as they tend to be) the purpose of the "tagging" is to elicit the tagged party to create a note of his/her own with his/her answers to the question(s) that are going around. Ostensibly these answers provide some kind of insight in to the personality of the "friend," which, I suppose, could serve to strengthen the relationship if both parties bother to put sufficient effort in to composing the answers.

However, the term "Facebook" and the phrase "sufficient effort" seem incongruous, do they not? Is not the point of the social networking site to be pleasant and relatively effortless?

I'll let you know right now: You will learn one thing about me (which, if you've read anything here previously, you should already know) from this post: My brain is not well-suited for Facebook (and by correlation, for the internet in its entirety). That is all you'll learn.

~

Anyway, a couple months ago I was tagged in a Facebook note with the following description:

"…you are supposed to write down the top 25 songs you cannot live without. The ones you can listen to over and over and never get tired of. They don't have to be in any particular order. These are the songs that make you laugh, cry, think of an old friend, whatever the reason. …" followed by the chain letter-type instructions to subject 25 others to this task.

Initially I dismissed the gesture as "quaint"; the tactic holds no sway over my actions any more (to the extent that it ever did, in my early days on the site). I'd ignored other such tagging in the past, and it seemed likely the same thing would transpire here. However, with this one I found the notion coming to mind every once in a while, and then one evening I had the computer on and iTunes running (to update my iPod) and I started looking through the tracks to see which jumped out at me (so to speak) for such a list of ones I never got tired of.



Here I must interject that the way I listen to music is not that I get a new album and listen to it over and over until I'm sick of it. I listen once or twice, and then that's sufficient for a while. I specifically don't make myself weary of the songs, so whenever next I hear them (likely in a randomly generated playlist in the future) I am pleased to hear them again, not inspired to press the forward button. This technique was never intentional; it's merely what my inclinations have made my pattern, and it's one that has worked for me for years.

I prefer not to burn myself out on given tracks, and as such the prospect of listening to specific ones repeatedly is uncommon. There may be some of that initial novelty a song that makes me want to hear it again when it's still new to me, but over time most songs fall back in to the pool of ones that I like to hear, but generally once is enough.

I should also mention that my library includes over 26,000 tracks (and growing); in order to not allow much of that fade into obscurity I need to keep cycling new stuff out and some older stuff back in. And because I never grew sick of that older material back when it was new it still holds a certain… freshness (for lack of a better word). (Again, I'm trying to make clear that I am not like regular people in this regard—or in most, for that matter.) In short (this is short?), for a song to make such a list is quite an honor (at least from my perspective), as that means they defy the usual pattern that serves me well the rest of the time.

Now, that said, let's get back to the act of looking through the library to see what deserved such status.

I sorted the library by artist. At first I considered sorting by song title, but that proved to be a little too daunting; I still tend to think of the library as not merely a bunch of songs but as a bunch of songs by these artists. So I started with artists in the A's and began jotting down the songs that at a glance I knew were "right" for inclusion.

I had 25 by the time I was in the D's. I abandoned the artificial restriction of 25. I grasped that 25 was a nice, digestible amount for people to read, but my attitude was this: If I'm going to bother to do this, to go through tens of thousands of songs and really consider which ones were deserving of inclusion, I wasn't going to pretend that there were only 25 out of 26,000 that I liked that much (less than .001). Eventually, over the course of a couple weeks I squeezed in little pockets of time to complete going through all these songs I've amassed over the last few decades of collecting music.

And then I had a list of 225 songs that comprised the first draft. So, no, I still wasn't done.

~

Somehow I got the impression that the person who had tagged me did not spend multiple hours over the span of a couple weeks in composing his list, nor did the others who had been tagged and had composed a list of their own. (Eventually I did ask him about his time investment, and his reply: "Oh, about five minutes.") Of course, by this point I was no longer complying with the "rules" of the meme, so perhaps it's inapplicable to compare what I'd done (at that point) to what others had done; I was off on a separate mission that, at best, could claim to have been inspired by what that meme intended.

In short, I was overthinking it (which is precisely why I tend to avoid attempting to comply when I'm tagged).

My brain has a mind of its own.

~

So where's the list? Ah, dear reader, I've taken up enough of your time for now. Let's save that for the next post. But don't consider yourself "tagged" in any way; I make no such demands. Well, I do make you read this far. Very un-Facebook (and un-internet), I know.

Which is what I told you above.

~

(No, it's not my conscious intent to drive away all the people who thought adding me as a friend was worthwhile, but I would be a fool to dismiss the possibility of that happening.)