Withering Glance: Why we like/hate Facebook

Rick Nelson and Claude Peck dispense unasked-for advice about clothing, etiquette, culture, relationships, grooming and more.

CP: When it comes to the Fbook, I fear we are moving apart. While I visit the site about as often as Lindsay Lohan gets arrested, your posts, updates, wall hangings and etceteras are proliferating at an alarming rate.

RN: It can't be that bad. Compared with most of the Faces in my feed, I'm very nearly a shadow participant. And your Friend count far exceeds mine.

CP: Don't you find the posts mostly uninteresting, vapid, repetitive, posed, postured and self-absorbed?

RN: Except for mine, of course.

CP: Your Minnesota-architecture-history updates are highly educational, possum. But let's face it, they stand apart as having actual content, as opposed to the umpteenth snapshots of yawning cats, sunsets and artisanal lattés.

RN: I'm glad you approve of "Teardownapolis." I'd turn it into a book, but Larry Millett beat me to it by about 20 years with his brilliant "Lost Twin Cities." But back to Facebook. Why so blue?

RN: It could have been worse. They could have been dead. Sorry, just a little social-media humor.

CP: It's enough to make me ponder a total shutdown.

RN: I'm told that quitting heroin — and "Downton Abbey" — is easier than dropping Facebook.

CP: It's an addiction that hits millennials hardest, afflicting their psyches, guiding decisions and inhibiting natural development.

RN: Which is why I prefer to keep my page relatively impersonal. You know, just links to Balanchine videos, iPhone snapshots of crimes against design and my terse version of the obituary. They're the online equivalent of what my ex and I used to do, pre-Internet. When one of us heard that a celebrity had died, we'd rush to phone the other and deadpan something like, "Lana Turner [pause]. Dead."

RN: I prefer to think of it as a breaking news service. What's the worst thing that could happen by going cold turkey on the Fbook?

CP: I suppose I fear becoming like the Little Match Girl, my frozen nose pressed against the glass as I watch others network socially in the flickering flames of envy-provoking badinage and artificial bonhomie.

RN: In other words, every day that I spent in junior high.

E-mail: witheringglance@startribune.com