I know it's unpopular with some people to listen (or pay any attention) to smart people, but I get a lot of it. While those who choose to ignore people whom they consider elite (usually after calling them that name and others and otherwise dismissing what they have to say even before considering it) yell pretty loudly, I don't pay much attention to their shouts and, instead, often end up thinking about things in a new way.

The last couple weeks I've heard things about Facebook that make sense to me and let me look at it differently than I had.

Instead of seeing it just as way of being insulted by people who sought me out for friendship, trading "likes" with others I have no hope or chance of meeting, or letting others know what's caught my eye on the Internet or what I'm thinking about at the moment, Facebook also serves the valuable service of letting people know that I'm still alive and have survived whatever latest calamity the desert has decided to throw my way.

It's also, first and foremost, a business.

And that's where it's sorta the opposite of most of the things I think of as businesses, by which I mean stores. When I go shopping, I buy something that someone has made and while I lose money in the process, lots of other people get some. The people who actually made it get some, the people who employ them get some, the people who advertise it get some, the people who deliver it to the store get some, the people who employ the ones doing the delivering get some, the people who work in the store I bought it in get some, the people who own that store get some, and probably others I'm not thinking about.

I buy a shirt, a whisk broom, a chair, or some groceries or whatever, and other people make money on the deal. I'm a consumer in this case, and the product I buy is the product.

But capitalism works in other ways, too. Sometimes, such as when I'm watching TV, it gets a little more complicated. For one thing, I'm paying someone to provide me those channels, a service, but the channels I watch get most of their money from advertisers. The channels spend some money producing the shows and then sell to advertisers some time to try to convince the people watching the show to buy whatever is being advertised. So, yes, channel or network makes its money by selling my eyeballs to advertisers and, well, that makes me the product being sold.

With a few exceptions such as HBO, that's the business model. The networks sorta let you watch for free, but make their money by selling the audience for their programming to someone who's interested in selling you gold or car insurance.

And that, increasingly, is how Facebook is working. While I think of it as way of showing people what my dog looks like lying in the sand, Facebook could care less about that. What they've decided to do is to make me a product, not a consumer, and to make their money by selling my eyeballs to those who think I might want to buy a matchmaking service.

When I use or visit Facebook, I'm not a consumer, I'm a product. And, yeah, I have very mixed feelings about that.

In addition to the usual privacy concerns and distracting ads, I have some other problems with Facebook.

One of them, or maybe two, is of my own doing. Since I don't want the handful of people who follow me on Twitter to be left out, nearly every of my Facebook postings is a tweet that is also sent to Facebook, which means they're invariably very short and heavily edited to fit into the 140 character limit. Being me, I have much more to say than comfortably fits in that limit, but I try.

Also, I don't want to be one of those people with several dozen updates a day so I spend more time biting my tongue (and fingers) than is probably good for me. And, although I tell myself that I don't need to say it just this minute but can save it for later, I rarely do. This means much of my wisdom is known only to me, which is a tragedy.

Then there's the point of this entry: pictures.

I guess it's the nature of Facebook that what most people share are pictures, pictures of all sorts of things, nearly all of which are better than any pictures I take. A lot of those pictures are in fact cartoons, many are videos, and nearly all of them are fun to look at.

But I have little confidence in my ability to take photos and it's also sort of a pain for me to upload them. Just about everyone now has a smartphone or some such device that makes sharing photos easy, but not me. It's not that I'm necessarily cheap, but last time I checked, there's little to no coverage where I live. My old flip phone works okay, but 3G or 4G coverage is iffy, at best.

Also, I'm cheap and am saving myself some stress by my decision not to keep up with things. It's kind of refreshing, for a change, to be able to ignore a whole bunch of business and tech developments, just to look at them dispassionately and not feel bound to keep up or ashamed for not doing so.

But I'm not sure that's the point.

I'd be more than happy to share pictures of where I live and the places I visit except for a couple difficulties. One, I don't go out and visit very many places and even fewer of those could be considered interesting. I'm fairly certain just about everyone has seen what stores and supermarkets look like and the ones up here aren't any different than the ones everybody else goes to.

And, I live in the desert.

What that means, among other things, is not only is the landscape bleak and, to most people, uninteresting, but it only very rarely changes and even when it does, it almost always does so very slowly. Pictures of nature are always popular, but mostly if they're of something neat to see.

There may or may not be wildlife up here. Other than birds in the morning and evening, just about every creature that calls this place home has learned a valuable lesson: if you're exposed or can be seen, you die. If the desert sun doesn't get you, something else will.

So, while there may be many interesting creatures up here, I only very rarely see them. No flocks of rabbits, no epic migrations of turtles, not even any armies of snakes, rats, or other rodents. When I have managed to see something larger than my fist, it's an individual something and, most likely, soon to regret being so visible.

This area just doesn't support great or even noteworthy numbers of anything. Maybe it's a veritable hive of activity during the night, but that's when I'm usually inside with my dog, Minardi, whom I try to shield from scorpions and rattlesnakes.

I could conceivably take pictures of the birds I see every day, but not any good ones. For some reason, they flee as soon as I show up with my camera as well as not being anywhere I can see during most of the day. Besides, everyone has a pretty good idea of what crows look like and the Internet has much better pictures than I could dream of taking of mourning doves or roadrunners.

I do see plenty of ants, but again, they're not much different than the ones you see. I think sometimes a dragon fly buzzes around in the evening, but it may just be something that looks enough like one (a flying insect about as long as a finger) that I call it that.

So, everyone on Facebook wants pictures, not words, and not only do I feel more comfortable writing, but there's not all that much for me to take pictures of.

So, in the end, I don't have much worth sharing.