So it’s come to this. A new name for the old Facebook company. F Book will still exist, but with all the proven irresponsible social consequences, it will remain only for the aged including me and my generation. How kind of the kids at FB.
A corporation, on the New York Stock Exchange and valued in the billions and billions of dollars, that has to change its name and rebrand itself is in B.I.G. trouble. Yet I, a tech novice but observer of people, could see a problem with social media way back in the early 21st century. I came late to Facebook, my first social media venture, maybe around 2010. My husband got on the band wagon and told me all these old buddies and classmates and long lost relatives he found or who found him through Facebook—of all places, cyberspace. It was neato! We saw many siblings, split up as children, who found each other on Facebook. I don’t know anyone whose heart wasn’t softened by this miracle for all lucky enough to be living in the tech age, the high tech age. Still … I was hesitant. Seemed like we first had to give millions of strangers too much information about ourselves, this before stolen identities became a reality.
Behold, the internet
My first realization of something called an internet and email was watching a gritty cop show called Homicide: Life on the Street. On an episode airing in the mid-1990s, the police detectives had to use the internet to lure a criminal suspect, a very clever person. The one guy in the squad room who was the computer nerd got on the World Wide Web (oooooo!) and started typing whatever his tech-challenged colleagues told him. One detective started using profanity to communicate to the perp. The computer nerd said the internet only uses polite language. Wha?!
Through the turn of the century as everyone got online, commencing to email faster than the speed of thought, internet language and imagery reflected the coarse and crass more than the refined or well mannered. Americans at that point in time had long been more DeNiro than Jimmy Stewart. Then social media came along, and anything goes! People like to chat and gossip, and they like sharing anything off the internet they find funny or suspicious with like-minded friends. Plus, a lot of people like to type whatever idea pops into their little heads, like kids.
Today the internet has saturated the collective consciousness with lies, half-truths, nontruths, misinformation and disinformation. IDK. When did the internet become evil?
The internet is only as evil as the people who post on it. For years, perhaps from its inception, Facebook maintained the sanctity of ‘free speech.’ They guaranteed all users the right to their free speech, even hate speech, and therefore refused to censor anything or anyone on its platform. The bottom line was money. Facebook somehow makes money. It’s never sincerely been a free space for the masses to debate and challenge ideas in a moderate low-key style. It was supposed to be about getting together like on the phone or at a party.
People who study the human psyche know lots more people respond to negative information than positive. More shares for the rumor the Obamas are divorcing than the pix of a cute baby tasting sugar for the first time, at least on Facebook.
A cyber mile away
I wasn’t surprised that Facebook would fade away like everything else. It is simply evolution, and tech is about evolving every few months. The smart money is on that principle.
Sure, it was warm and fuzzy finding old friends and relatives from long ago, old teachers still around and kicking, old acquaintances and former neighbors we haven’t thought about in years. So we got in touch and can visit anytime we want. We don’t need to physically see these people. We can visit virtually in the 21st century!
But … then we all did something we knew we weren’t supposed to do: talk politics and religion. Those two subjects are not to be discussed at parties and social gatherings. We forgot we were on social media. Perhaps the feeling was it was unreal. Social conversation is supposed to be polite not intense, ending in freestyle cussing fights and rifts.
God help us, we Americans take our politics seriously, as seriously as we do religion. Many like-minded people, through Facebook and other social media platforms, formed tight associations. Many ‘unfriended’ people when they discovered extreme differences in political and societal ideologies, one way or the other. Through Facebooking, we found out a whole lot more about each other than we ever wanted to know. We were better off not knowing everything about each other, weren’t we?
We were once so happy just to know one another. Totally oblivious to our neighbor’s true beliefs and ideals whether alt left or alt right or old-fashioned Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative.
We’re ready to draw guns now, are we?
Words, typed or spoken, can destroy. How many people wish they could take back some things they’ve said? That was human nature before email. And nothing posted is truly deleted.
We live in such an advanced age that many of us can’t keep pace.
But a slow down is a-coming. Since we could not control ourselves, our big mouths and quick keystrokes over our deeply-held political opinions and social media businesses continued to permit irresponsible free speech that culminated in deadly attacks—SINCE TOO MANY AMERICANS CONVINCED THEMSELVES THEY NO LONGER KNOW WHAT ‘TRUTH’ IS—our government will control the internet and social media for us.
We don’t have the right to believe whatever we want. That is the epitome of ignorance. We have the right to know the truth, and it’s EZ to find, easier in this day and age than any time in human history. Truth takes time to prove. In researching truth, we have to be objective. The internet itself is objective: granted, polluted with lies and rumors but also facts and substantiated verifiable truth, information at our fingertips.
Facebook, social media and the internet are what ‘we the people’ have made it. We should be ashamed. But a lot of people have no shame. Another revelation brought to us on social media with millions of likes.