Facebook and Twitter are turning my mind to mush

“James Norton is goggling in horror at the squirrel that chewed through the screen in the pantry and is now eating one of his Fig Newtons.”

“James Norton cannot for the life of him remember to throw his used boxer shorts down the laundry chute, thereby putting his marriage on palpably thin ice.”

Mental note: Don't compare a baby to a big cinnamon roll

I can’t post anything serious – about news, politics, or science, for example – without someone, usually one of my uncles, popping up and pointing out that whatever it was somehow conclusively proves that global warming is fake.

And I can’t playfully mock other people’s updates, for fear that they take me seriously, or their grandparents take me seriously, or someone takes me seriously. If they do, I suddenly have to spend 45 minutes apologizing and backtracking just because I suggested that someone’s new baby looks like a big cinnamon roll.

The result is that I create and receive a constant flood of trivial information that is constricted by social norms to the point of being useless. We fear that anything we say, do, or depict ourselves doing online can be captured and distributed to whomever we would least like to receive it. And rightly so.

Friendships are slipping away

But the result is that we don’t really know our friends anymore; we know their masks. I have a “mere” 300 friends on Facebook, but many of them – no offense, “friends”! – are people I barely know.

Even the friends I’m very seriously attached to in real life sometimes feel like they’re slipping away, despite their electronic proximity – only an in-person visit to or from them really bridges the gap. The occasional vacation photos reveal very little. Facebook has stopped seeming like a way to connect, and has started feeling like a way to wean myself off of needing to connect, toward a life that is principally if not solely comprised of life online.

And that’s terrifying.

But maybe it shouldn’t be!

Maybe the sooner we can all be reconstituted as heads floating in oxygenated saline solution attached to cables with a really great connection to the world’s best gaming/social networking/imaginary shopping portal, the sooner we can stop worrying about all that other tiresome stuff – war, the environment, world hunger, the quest for knowledge, the meaning of life, etc. – that’s always getting us down.

Facebook is helping change us into a new, lesser species, a devolved pack of near-savages that would rather send text messages about werewolves than grow tomatoes in a garden or eat an entire civilized Sunday brunch without once checking email.

And I intend to quit it. At some point. In the near future. Before it’s too late – but hopefully not too much before, because there’s this great video of He-Man singing “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes that everybody needs to see.

James Norton is the coauthor of “The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin” and the founding editor of The Heavy Table.

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