Facebook - The School Principal of Life?

By TRB

I am not one of these "never trust authorities" people, although I am from that generation. I Iike to hold out and give things a chance before I come to any conclusions. So there are several ways to look at this article. Facebook could just get rid of me. That would be fine, except that I would have to write about it - often. No threat, just what a journalist does when he or she suspects that an institution - like Facebook, for example - has become too rigid and authoritarian, dishing out punishment to its enthusiasts for breaking rules, which in some cases, are themselves suspect in their logic and rationality.

I write a column every day of the week including weekends for the Cape Cod Daily News, it is usually picked up by Forbes Online, USA Today, The Dallas Morning News and Google News.

Facebook in recent years seems to have become too big for its own britches, It is almost as if the people over there believe that their sheer size makes them right. When in fact, most people who deal with large institutions will tell you that they are so large they are barely if ever right.

So maybe three things can happen here, Facebook can continue in its ways and simply throw me off. I, as someone who writes and publishes a column would then be free to concentrate on just what it is about Facebook that seems so anti-democratic and really thoughtless in many of its decisions with individiual users. Facebook seems to be saying, Heck we're so large now we can affod to lose millions of them. Can you? How many million? What if you lost them all?

The other thing that could happen is that someone at Facebook might actually help me with the problems I am having on my Facebook page, problems I believe they are creating.

And the other, the third response could be no response.

Let me go to first base and explain this. I am a writer and an investigative journalist. Just last year myself and a mere handful of other journalists derailed a candidate's Congressional run when we discovered he had worked as a police officer and might possibly have enabled his partner, who was a pedophile to get away with one or two sexual assaults on underage girls. I did that story using my pen name because there were times I was literally in fear that someone would try to kill me or to destroy my property, which was located right down the street from his. Incidentally, he is now the "special sheriff" in my county.

I have used pen names my whole career off and on. In fact if you look up TRB in Wikepedia you will find that I am the TRB who is a writer living on Cape Cod. Facebook even has a few pages on me in its own system listed under my real name. If you knew my real name, you could use the Facebook search engine and open the Wikapedia page.The problem is I still work and a dangerous group of people in this country don't like what I have to say at all.

Through the years my writing has had helicopters in the U.S. Army grounded until their tail rotors could be inspected, It has closed chemical companies, particularly one in Holbrook, Mass, which not only closed the plant but caused the Super Fund to be available faster. I am the first to write a children's book ("Hidden Dangers") on toxic waste and how children might discover and report it in their play areas. The Citizens Clearing House for Toxic Waste published it and it was illustrated by artist, David Omar White (1983). I have caused countless devlopers to lose their access to build near wetlands. I have help make it possible for the elderly and poor to receive subsidized rents and have units put aside for them in suburban housing complexes. Needless to say, if people in my community knew who I was, I would not be well liked. There is already some suspicion out there.

But back to some of what I have done with my life. The great American journalist William Worthy and myself are the first to teach a course in "critical journalism" in the country. Noam Chomsky, Ben Bagdikian and others also helped Bill and I with the design of this course .Noam even lectured at it. Now, colleges all over the world offer a course just like it.

At one point in my life, I was the most awarded military journalist in history. Maybe I am second or third now I don't know. I just wanted to establish that whatever Facebook may think about me, I didn't just climb out from under a rock.

I forget when I first understood that something was wrong with Facebook. Then it suddenly came to me one night - this constant encourgament, almost harrassment to locate your old friends, What? Who does that? I don't know about Facebook, but I do know that I don't want to go back to high school or college and hang around with those folks again. They have already been part of my life. Now they are part of my memory, where I wish to leave them. Nor do I want family members on my Facebook page. They are in my life enough as it is.

So who came up with the idea that we would all walk off into the sunset on Facebook with our now grumpy and overweight high school buddies, our stupidly judgemental college friends, who would probably want to stop at the first watering hole, and our families, hard as hell to tolerate even on the one day put aside for them specifically every year. Thanksgiving.

Are we supposed to desire a permanent Thanksgiving with our families on Facebook? Did a large number of Facebook planners really sit aroud and talk about this? And no one raised this obvious flaw? Were these former advance placement people? I was, and the first thing I would have asked was "And just why do we want these people back in our lives after we have spent so much time getting them out?"

Life just does not work like the makers of Facebook supose it does. For example, millions of people probably join Facebook to meet new friends, not old friends.

So Facebook apparently doesn't like my pen name, and believes I should risk danger to myself, my family and my property by using my real name. Now I don't want to believe I am being harrassed by Facebook. Two days ago my chat room suddenly stopped working, I have never had a way I could send messages from my profile, which everyone else has.

So what have I done on Facebook? I have over 20 close friends out of the 140 that are now on my page. I asked for and received the friendship of maybe 100 female models, not because I am looking for a girlfriend, but I thought it would be an interesting page. And it is. You've got the models, you've got their boyfriends, their careers. Just remember, that when you put together a community of models from all over the world - which is what I have done - they make friends with one another first, and I imagine they learn a lot about their profession and how it works in other lands. I have even made friends with many of them. They care about their jobs and their lives. They are smart good people.My point is that "Playing Facebook" is a misnomer. If you have a page you have responsibilites: to kick off anyone who is harrassing your friends, to get rid of anything that looks like graphic pornography, or sexually suggestive photos of underage girls. You have to use "you tube" a lot, practically becoming a DJ at night so your friends can enjoy themselves and the Facebook experience.

You do all of this and all you ask for in return is to be able to use your pen name, which has been accepted by Forbes and USA Today, even the India Times. They don't make a lot of money from your page. It is the hundreds millions of pages that makes the money.

I sincerely do not know why Facebook will not accept a journalist's pen name as an actual name. While I have had a Facebook page, I have written two articles about Facebook, both of them positive. This is the first time I have critcized Facebook. I don't want to start trouble. I just want to use my pen name, which is simply TRB, not "Trb Jones." There is even a guy on my page who calls me "Jonsey" now.

Great.