What's up with Facebook? and more.

Noticed that your Facebook pages are more boring lately? I seem to be getting less from my friends and more purely commercial stuff, particularly commercial stuff that my friends like. This is annoying; just because I like my friends doesn't automatically mean that I am interested in the stuff that interests them, or vice-versa. It seems that Facebook is becoming more commercial and less social, and the social function was what attracted people in the first place. I read an article a while ago called 'Facebook, I want my friends back', about Facebook's increasing commercialisation and yes, its happened. So I guess we'll just have to go back to phoning people to find out how they are, or having lunch or coffee or going out to dinner - real friendships rather than virtual ones.

     I've just finished reading a book called 'A profound secret' by Josceline Dimbleby, about her great-grandmother's passionate friendship with Edward Burne-Jones. May Gaskell was locked into a miserable marriage with a difficult husband (nothing new there). Her relationship with Burne-Jones was never physically consummated but provided her with great support and understanding throughout the middle part of her life. The author's interest in the subject was prompted by a painting of Amy, May Gaskell's daughter, by Burne-Jones, that she remembered hanging in the family home. The painting reappeared years later in the collection of Andrew Lloyd-Weber, a passionate collector of Pre-Raphaelite art.  Dimbleby went searching for the connection between Burne-Jones and Amy, and came upon a cache of letters written by Burne-Jones to May.  It was an interesting book, but not totally satisfactory. With my 21st century dirty mind, I had imagined that the "profound secret" was that Amy was Burne-Jones' child. No. The profound secret seems to be that May hated her husband, who mistreated her in unspoken ways. And Amy died young, days after returning to England after the death of her husband, a husband she hadn't seen in two years, as she was living in Ceylon. So her marriage was no success, either. And it's possible that her death was not of a broken heart as family legend always stated, but was either suicide or the anorexia that is associated with opium addiction.  So the facade of the happy Victorian family crumbles into dust. But the letters remain; if May and Burne-Jones had Facebook they would have been lost forever. Perhaps we should take up letter-writing again?