Our love/hate relationship with social media
Like most people, I have this love/hate relationship with social media.
The platforms offer immediate access to breaking news and interaction among users. I don’t know how many times I have first learned about breaking news on social media before even the television networks could latch onto it.
As a confirmed news junkie, I find this invaluable.
But, I also see the downside — the lies, the bullying, the manipulation that have become a part of it all, whether through posts, tweets, or images.
If we want the good stuff, we have to suffer through the bad stuff.
But is it worth it?
We’re still not sure what caused the massive shutdown of Facebook and other social media sites last week. Nobody’s talking, really, and there is a lot of suspicion, especially from the tech wizards who speak in the language of code and sophisticated networking. While I’m not some conspiracy theorist, I do admit that I am more than a little skeptical about what really went down when we were suddenly cut off from our little worlds of social interaction, upon which we have become truly dependent.
But the impact was there, whether you are the typical social media user who spends an average of 135 minutes a day hooked into the networks or the business heads who use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other media to pimp your product.
The outage left us with a feeling of disconnection to varying degrees and had an impact on the economy because of lost marketing and advertising that feed dollars, euros, and yen into the world economy.
We were all somewhat shocked when we learned of the Russian who had such a profound effect on the 2016 election. Perhaps we were not very tech savvy, or perhaps we were a bit naive. Still, there are those who still take whatever they see on social media to heart as hardened truth.
But there was another shockwave that bolted through our fragile little world when an attack that killed at least 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand was live-streamed on Facebook last week. Seventeen minutes of hell were recorded and found their way onto not only Facebook, but also YouTube, Google, Twitter, and other sites. I am sure that somewhere, somehow those horrid images are still available online.
And there is nothing we can do about it except brace for the next time this happens, the time after that, and the multiple other times sure to occur beyond when the crazed try to post higher kill numbers or provide even more grisly carnage to feed the beast.
This was, without question, surely something Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg never envisioned when he launched this little project in 2004 while attending Harvard.
But as an idealistic young college student, he hadn’t experienced enough of life to understand the darkest side of humanity.
There have been calls in the past for some sort of controls over social media, some editing, some filters to remove posts and links that are at the very least offensive and at worst displays of man’s continued inhumanity.
To do so, however, would be to place us at the mercy of those with the power to censor our thoughts, our conversations, and our interactions — a terribly dangerous thing to do, especially during these times. I mean, in those terms, if the free press is the enemy of the people, which it most certainly is not, then what are social media?
As Facebook so accurately puts it, it’s complicated.
Social media are tools, of course, with limited controls, and it is up to us to decide how to use them, up to us to make the individual moral and ethical decisions. Still, we cannot help but become undone by the lies and bullying that stalk us when we punch in.
We often lose our reason, our calm, and our intellect when we roll with the waves of angry emotion.
The thing is that it is not social media that are broken, it’s us. Just think of all of those who witnessed the attack on innocent lives in New Zealand, whether through live streaming or archived video.
What kind of individual would actually sit in front of their computer or tablet or phone and witness that sort of thing?
Maybe it’s a tinge of conscience, maybe it is a convenient way out, but as long as we can point the finger for such behavior at others, it is easy to deny our own responsibilities to humanity.
Social media had a certain purity in their earliest days.
They were meant as a way to share our experiences, our thoughts, our achievements to a broad audience of family and friends all at once and rapidly.
We became reliant on them to help us reach out, whether through video chats or immediate messaging. I mean really, when was the last time you actually picked up the telephone and had a conversation with somebody? When was the last time you sat down and wrote somebody a letter?
That intimacy is gone because it is so much easier to go into Facebook and open the chat window to exchange a few words on the fly. The personal interaction is lost when a message that really needs to go no further than between a few close relatives or friends is plastered in a comment thread for all to see and critique. The 500 or so people you know on Facebook don’t really need to know all of your business, do they?
That intimacy, which was the source of us being considerate of others, is gone, opening the door to the rude, aggressive, boorish behavior of so many, whether they are preaching politics, religion, or lifestyle.
I hate that social media have been weaponized as a way to berate, embarrass, and humiliate others whose opinions may vary from ours.
I’ve lately seen normally calm, compassionate, passive people become ogres, whether in the form of grammar Nazi or, sadly, a full-blown Nazi.
So the tool that was devised to make us closer has actually pushed us apart.
And while we can hate what has happened, we should not hate the technology because, after all, we are the ones using and abusing it.
I love that I can get on Facebook and share a face-to-face conversation with my daughter in California.
I love that I can use the chat feature to get a pretty quick answer to a question.
I love seeing pictures of my grandkids immediately after they are taken.
I love that I can be a part of social media communities that engage my personal interests, from guitars to music and cooking.
So it’s complicated.
Even when it shouldn’t be.
Peace.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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Ed, good to see ya in the Independent. My comment, I will not sell my soul to Facebook. Glad JW made it so you can comment herien w/o a Facebook account. 1) Your data is theirs. $$$$ 2) Exposes you to cyber crime 3) call me on the phone , congruency way better 4) waste of time and built on addictive algorithms 5) I dislike Zuckerberg, megalomaniac. 6) How many times has FB been breached by hackers, or data carelessly compromised by 3rd parties. 7. Last but not least, better to be anonymous these days, OR IT IS ON YOUR PERMANENT RECORD.