Facebook has done a very sneaky thing. It has found a new way to suck me into its world in a way that is so addictive that I can spend an hour or two there before wrenching myself away. Their new trick is to inform me when someone in my extended list of so called friends makes any kind of post or reel or even comments on someone else’s post or reel.
This last way of sucking me in is the most insidious. I am informed that someone I know well has made a comment, someone I have lost contact with is suddenly on line. But when I click on the connection, the post on which they have commented is about someone, a friend of theirs, whom I have never met. In fact it is very hard to find the comment that sucked me in. It might simply be the fortyfirst comment and then be only a heart emoji. But once on line like a fish in a pond, I am hooked, I am offered a reel about someone in shorts skiing down a steep moutain and skidding across a large pond and then back on land and up a snowcovered hill. And before I can even register, another reel pops up of a woman being dropped screaming from an airplane and getting tinier and tinier before disappearing from view by which time I am watching a huge aircraft carrier being exploded in a fireball with the planes on deck dropping into the water. Before I can even wonder if this is real or an AI fake I am on to the reel of a hilarious comic making fun of the silent letters in the English language, the silent K in knife being an example. By this time I have turned to mush. It is too late to save me and before I know it an hour has gone by and lunch time has past but I don’t care because I am watching an extended film by a guy in a white suit, good looking and very sincere, supposedly a doctor of the rich and famous, who tells me not to trust my own doctor and suckering me into buying a concoction of natural herbs of his own making that will shrink my prostate and give me a new life.
All of this, plus a number of advertisements, because I was curious about a comment that someone I know has made.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 