On July 5, 2009, ORU author Hal Friesen closed his facebook account with the following notice:

I am deleting my facebook account, because I am strongly opposed to the way information is disseminated and presented. It encourages the type of interaction I greatly dislike, and discourages meaningful relationships, in my opinion. There are exceptions but these do not outweigh the informational issues.

I send him an e-mail saying I appreciated the sentiments. I use facebook mostly because of Catherine T. Vogt, these days. She's made me find a reason to enjoy it. Until then, like most of the web 2 sites I've tried, a heavy sense of "me me me" prevailed with little "us us us". I've found a way to use twitter, as well, by posting a line a day from successive pages of Part 1: The Courtesan Prince, but this was a sort of "I'm lost" reaction to the challenge of making a meaningful connection in a storm of one liners. It made sense to me so I did it. But, like Hal, I sometimes feel unsatisfied with bite-sized conversations. And like him, it's the meaning that's lacking. Work seems to be all about surveys and five-point-scales and where-do-we-rank and how-many-votes ... that's bad enough without wading knee deep in popularity contests to refresh the emotional/artistic side of my life. Maybe just like science, quickie communications are not good or bad but what you make of them. Hoping to "play" a bit with Catherine and others on the facebook page for the ORU. But completely respect people, like Hal, who engage on other levels. Hal has written a second Nestor story for the upcoming anthology, Opus 4. Like his first one, it exemplifies aspects of story-telling no video game can, because it's not just about the action but the philosophy of being a unique human being in a world that doesn't go out of its way to make the meaning of things obvious to anyone.

Labels: facebook, Hal Friesen

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