I've come across a terrific billboard picturing someone’s hand holding a phone with a cartoon drawing of a frog resting on it.  Have you seen it?  Next to that picture is an outstretched hand holding a real live frog and the only word underneath simply says UNPLUG.

Most of us remember Hal Holbrook’s famous quotation from the movie Wall Street.  “Man looks into the abyss and sees nothing staring back at him. That is when he finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.”  I don’t think he ever considered that he would be talking about us peering into facebook.

This week the news is reporting that one in three of the people around the world are now connected to  Hal Holbrook’s abyss.  I sure hope we all find our character.  Sadly, no content, no works of art, no great novels or precious music is being created while the masses are connected to this multi-billion dollar enterprise. We are too busy looking at ourselves inside a great big nothing full of narcissistic snapshots and empty space.  I am not judging; I am just as guilty.

The book has become a metaphor for true narcissism and what irony to have a “face” in the name as we stare into pools of our own reflections. What is truly amazing, is that if we listen to each other communicate even in an unplugged face to face scenario, we now hear people speak as if they are posting their opinions rather than conversing.  This way they can remain in a schizoid world of their own.   In some dumb arrogant way they no longer converse, they post.  Clever quips go back and forth instead of true conversation where actual listening occurs.

Content is gone. True sharing is gone and what remains is a sad reality that we are all sitting there alone inside the illusion of a connection.

We’ve all heard the old cliché that there are two hundred and fifty channels on the television  and nothing to watch.  The Ancient Mariner predicted that one, just as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein predicted Oppenheimer and the fall of science with the splitting of the atom in the hands of a spiritually devoid culture.  The Matrix prophesizes to us the same result of the bookface.  We will be so plugged into that reality, we will now become the net and those left in inner earth will be brought to something resembling T.S. Eliot’s wasteland.  On the other hand ,was T.S. Eliot along with The Who maybe unknowingly describing the bookface?

When someone is violently connected to their iphone and their bookface page, they are removed from present reality.  They do not know where they are.   They are lost in a vacuum of content-free nonsense. They  are gone . They are not present in the space that they are inhabiting, they are in bookface land and no one can bring them out. My son says you can almost see them dive in with their feet sticking out just so they have a way back.

Do you crave conversation and the human sharing of emotions instead of a post? Do you notice the complacent and self-assured group of people that you have to endure in everyday life as they post away emanating an attitude that those not technically up to task are inferior. Never does it occur to them that they may just be un-evolved mammals attached to an ipod.

Here’s the best of this. As I notice the new generation coming, it seems that they are not glued to the bookface anymore. Many simply use their phones for average purposes and reasonable necessities. They don’t give a $#%%& that you are eating pizza at Sal’s Bar and Grill and that you later will be driving your new Land Rover to the beach.  Zuckerburg might want to grab his sixteen billion and run, because this new generation may not find his invention all that  interesting.  But Zuck may profit from the already addicted, who although having stopped getting high from the book and are craving something more, would be ecstatic if he could invent for them a device to help them morph into a smart phone.