Using Facebook for good instead of evil
Her name was Lola She was a show girl
Have you heard that the adults have taken over on Facebook. Yep, the kids are gone. They've moved on to Snapchat or Instagram or whatever is the new hip social media site. Hmmm...maybe this a circle of life thing and they've gone back to AOL or MySpace?
I'm not sure why this happened although I have an idea. Back in the olden days, Facebook started as a way for college students to communicate with each other. Pretty cool idea. Someone at Harvard could virtually hang out with someone at UCLA without leaving their dorm rooms. Yeah, that was pretty much the end of face to face interaction but we didn't know that back then.
Then the adults got involved...always a bad thing.
I admit I signed up for Facebook as a way to see what my college aged daughters were doing. Yeah, stalking but pretty sure I wasn't the only one. The next thing we knew there was bonding and reconnecting with old friends from college, high school, grammar school and maybe as far back as the womb. Forget about what our kids were doing, we were now hanging out with people we had left behind decades ago....and it was fun...still is.
As Facebook evolved, people have found other uses for it. It's become a forum for people to promote their causes and beliefs. I look at my feed today and I find threads about Trump, both for and against, Guns, both for and against, and even a person or two pimping his/her blog (who would do something like that?).
It's led to a lot of heated discussions and arguments. People are Facebook defriending real life friends. No wonder Generation whatever left and moved to the next big thing.
But every so often, Facebook can be used to accomplish something special.
Last weekend I was in Arizona, escaping the snow and warming up. When I returned on Tuesday, I was catching up on my Facebooking. I noticed this thread about a missing dog and it was being shared over and over and over. More than twenty times. It took me some time to figure it out but the missing dog was Lola and she belongs to my brother and sister-in-law. Small world!
I don't know the details but apparently Lola escaped from her invisible fence and took a road trip to the city. No idea why she did it. Maybe she just wanted to hear some blues or get some culture not available in the northern burbs. All I know is a network formed on Facebook, trying to find her.
One of my friends shared the post and she had no idea I was Lola's uncle. A couple of other friends sent me messages asking if I was related to the dog. It was amazing watching this network grow trying to find a dog they had no connection to. The power of Facebook. The power of social media.
The great news is Lola was found a few days ago and is home now. I don't know all the details but she made it Melrose Park, wherever the Hell that is. Apparently her chip was programmed to a woman who lives there instead of my bro. How that happens, who knows but that's a story for another day.
The real story is Facebook works! People bonded together to solve a problem. What could have been a disaster had a happy ending. Facebook good triumphs over Facebook evil. Kids on Snapchat, you can come back. It's safe. Facebook peeps, you can start refriending your political enemies. Yeah...yeah...I know neither is likely to happen.
So that's the Facebook good news story of the week. Until it happens again, we can go back to Trump and guns and oh yeah, I have a blog to pimp. See ya on the dark side of Facebook.
Lola L O L A Lola
Song lyrics in italics from Barry Manilow (I know..I know) and The Kinks (much better)
Related Post: My 100 year old aunt is on Facebook
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