I sat down at my living room table yesterday with a bowl of soup and a glass of milk as my healthy lunch. As I do most days, I flipped on the television to find some sort of sitcom to watch during the half hour it takes me to enjoy my meal. The television clicked on and, as it always does, started on NBC.
I happened to catch a few minutes of some news program that must run during the lunch hours. The particular segment I caught was some attractive woman doing a quick rundown of some headlines, appropriating about thirty seconds to informing her viewers of the news and then giving her own opinion on the subject. The first headline I happened to catch in its entirety was regarding Facebook.
As I’m sure most of you know, a little while back Facebook implemented this new Timeline interface for profiles. Nobody had to switch to it and people generally didn’t like it, but it was a new option. According to this NBC news program, a few weeks from now all Facebook users will be forced to switch to this new Timeline interface, whether they like it or not.
I don’t really care at all about Facebook’s Timeline or what it does with its users. I use Facebook and I certainly don’t like every change they have made. The fact of the matter, though, is that I have nothing to do with those decisions and there is nothing I can do it about it short of deleting my account. I’m definitely not a fan of Timeline but I’m sure I’ll get use to it.
My issue is that Facebook changing its user interface classifies as news. I understand that almost the entire world uses Facebook and that the information is relevant to pretty much everyone. But is it really news? Does it really deserve a minute or two on a news program? I’m extremely curious to know what this Facebook news edged out as far as importance or relevance goes.
I’m not going to get into a giant rant about the media and news programs as that is meant for another day when I’m focused on that particular topic. Instead, I’m using this story to segue into a piece I wrote during my senior year at St. John’s University.
The piece was written for a Fiction Creative Writing class and our instruction was to write a monologue in the voice of another person, real or fictitious. I chose to write in the voice of Spider Jerusalem, the main character of Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, one of my absolute favorite comic series. The piece kind of exemplifies and shares some of the thoughts I have about the media and the government and how people see both entities, and this recent Facebook news bit reminded me of the piece.
I hope you all enjoy it. If you like it, or thought I did a terrible job imitating Spider Jerusalem, please let me know.
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