What’s Common Isn’t Always Common
The biggest myth is common sense, since what’s common to you may not be common to me. Some important tips for the digital life:
1) If you get an email telling you to tell about your friends about something, don’t. It’s probably hyperbole to begin with, if not outright false, and is probably part of the 73% of spam (http://bit.ly/zbzoHI) that takes up our Internet. But even if it is true, the better forum is Facebook…
2) …and even then: if it’s an online petition, a cause of some sort, there’s no need to invite all your friends to the “TBD Awareness Signature Drive” “event” that starts at midnight and ends in two weeks (Five Best Evite Services: http://lifehac.kr/yPCjhF). (Although that is a devious way of tracking who supports your causes.)
3) No need to test your friends via your status, either: we all know that only “3%” of people will “repost this,” but trust me that my ability to click Share does not define my level of philanthropic support. (Facebook Causes: http://bit.ly/x7HhbF)
4) For that matter, please don’t test our friendship via statuses: if you need me to Like or repost some survey as an indicator of our friendship, maybe we’re not really friends. (Cornell study says we went from 3 truly close friends to 2 in a quarter century, even though socialization is higher than ever: http://abcn.ws/wCFnop)
5) Pop-up’s aren’t your friend. Telling you that your computer’s “infected” just may be a form of foreshadowing, because if you “click here to Clean” you will most certainly get infected, and then you’ll be asked to pay a $100 ransom to boot. (In fact, you can’t even click the X to close the window anymore, gotta do it this way: 1-minute instructional vid: http://bit.ly/wseAI9)
And sometimes the advice given is the advice that should be taken, so here’s one: If you’re taking Facebook seriously, maybe you need to take a break from Facebook.
I don’t agree. Saying that technology-based tools are ruining society is like saying the telephone and automobile ruined society. Similarly, is it the gun that kills or the people pulling the trigger?
Facebook and its ilk are the modern equivalent of the Western Union telegram…fulfilling our innate desire to connect with people regardless of whatever barrier currently exists. Geography was the biggest one for a long time. Fiberoptic, near-light-speed global communication largely fixed that, alongside commercial air travel of the 50s, just like intercontinental shipping in the 1800s.
What’s ruining society is a lack of awareness of our place in the world. That, too, is slowly being solved by the Internet and its seemingly unstoppable democratizing effect.
The universe abhors a vacuum, as my father often reminds, and until we are all of one hive mind (ha! it may one day be…), there will always be a vacuum of information between what you know and feel and what I know and feel, and by extension what our representative governments and social, corporate, and political organizations know and feel.
The good news is that, for the first time, philosophers are not the only ones with the luxury of time and comfort in which to discuss these deep social questions. The luxury of our society is not the commoditization of everything but the commoditization of time.
Most Americans have the choice to watch television for eight hours a day. That’s 480 minutes every day to do something other than fight for your life against the immediate threat of plague, criminals, debt collectors, and the harsh natural environment.
This is an extremely new state of affairs. 100 years ago it was unthinkable. Now, you’ve got third-world-poor countries like Kenya, Morocco, and Lesotho showing thousand-percent increases in wireless Internet penetration. (http://bit.ly/wx3CGp)
Huge growth in wireless access…arguably some of the most innovative wireless penetration models that the first-world doesn’t see because the first-world has hard-line access the third-world does not.
Like all things new, it’s easy to forget “how it was.” As above, so below. Revisionist history happens on the global scale because it happens in each of our minds to account for the thousands of semi or sub-conscious decisions that result in deliberate but not-necessarily-conscious action.
The scientific study of conscious will goes back a couple hundred years on this, revealing that we develop a uniquely human ability to justify actions that receive no justification unless specifically asked for. (Why are you reading this post? Why are you interested in why you are reading this post?)
Less abstractly, these tools are not ruining society inasmuch as they are challenging our traditional sense of what is social and what is not, and are requiring us to hold the mirror to ourselves even closer than before.
After a hundred years of being able to hold our feelings at a distance — because we’ve been able to create a bubble of safety through consumerism and workism — we are now facing a decade (I dare say, a new century) of forced introspection because the Internet does just that.
I playfully challenge your intellect and your gut: Why do you feel that Facebook and social networks are ruining society?
Facebook and social networks alike are ruining society. Thoughts Mr. Maturo?