The Book of the Faces
A month ago I opened a new Facebook account in anticipation of the eventual publication of The Raven and the Hart. It has been a slightly strange experience without being quite as fraught as using my old account which was deleted. The main difference this time around is that I simply ignore a lot of what appears on my timeline. In this I have been well trained by Twitter, particularly during the early stages of the pandemic, when I actively, and brutally, edited some posters and posts out of my timeline – something I continue to do. I’ve been applying similar principles to Facebook.
It helps that I have a reason for being there: engagement directed towards, in the long run, marketing. That doesn’t mean I don’t try and make the best of it, and it certainly doesn’t mean that my activity is cynical and instrumentalist: there is genuine pleasure at reconnecting. It remains the case, though, that were it not for Facebook’s reach for marketing purposes, I would not ever have considered returning to it. Having an overriding purpose helps me to grit my teeth and get on with it, especially since I’ve taken care actively to exclude some things from my timeline so I only see them if I go looking. Even so, I’ve still had a couple of weird interactions with ‘people’ who are either bots or whose accounts have been hacked.
I said somewhere recently that the main Facebook page is OK because I can control it with the ad-block features of my primary browser (Brave) and third-party apps like Facebook Purity. The mobile app, however, sucks like a sucky thing in an ocean of sucks. Not only can I not control the newsfeed, which is algorithm drive, I can’t eliminate the ads either. Despite Facebook’s claim to target the ads with unerring accuracy, in fact they are mostly irrelevant to me – possibly because I lock down ads and tracking elsewhere as much as I can. In any event, I make it a strict rule never to click on an ad on Facebook. Of course accidents will happen, but I remember them because I curse myself for my fat fingers. Interestingly, deep in the crypt of Facebook’s settings is the ability to see ads that I’ve ‘interacted’ with, and there are entries there that I can be certain that I’ve never interacted with, unless you count scrolling past them.
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As for the forthcoming book itself, I have applied the outcome of the sensitivity review and also have a cover design. This week I’ll be sorting out prints of the current text for a final review and also sending out e-copies to readers for their final comments. I’ll let that drive decisions on the actual publishing schedule.
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We’ve taken the plunge and booked flights to visit Amy in Michigan later in the year. Fingers are now crossed that ‘world events’ don’t intervene to sabotage the trip.
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