"The unexamined life is not worth living."
--Socrates
"The only thing that ever consoles man for the
stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing
them."
--Oscar Wilde
I. Social Media and the Ego
The following status
updates from our friends at facebook were taken at random but anonymity has
been retained for their sake:
“What’s good though?
Where’s the beer pong at?”
“Biggest Jello Shot”
“Good night!! Im so
happy!! Oh wait!! Im just faded!! Lol good times!!”
For the sake of
brevity, only these three status updates will be shared because, you can be
assured, there are many more like them. Now, there may be a general propensity
towards posting about liquor and getting “faded” because yesterday was St
Patrick’s Day and there’s the whole socially accepted excuse for drinking. So
be it. I must stress that there is nothing wrong with revelry and liquor;
humans have been brewing alcohol for as long as we have been around (a long,
long time). Every human civilization, from Ancient Egypt to isolated Japan, has
independently come up with their own form of alcohol based on the resources
available. Besides, getting drunk is great. But that is not the point.
My point is this: if
we assume that facebook is a vehicle for people to express their wishes and
desires (because believe it or not people have willingly traded privacy for
attention-garnering; more on that later), then status updates provide a window
into the minds of these very same people. If the overwhelming majority of
people make status updates along this train of thought (Im so faded), then it
can be reasonably argued that these wishes and desires lie at the forefront of
people’s concerns about the world.
To put it bluntly,
our society is all kinds of fucked up. Humans are the only ones that can solve
these problems. Given the technology of the 21st century, we have
within our means the potential to solve many of our biggest problems. However,
the biggest, most crippling setback comes not from any external source, but
rather our own egos. Facebook has, within a few short years, succeeded in
reprogramming the egos of millions of people to be even more self-absorbed and
more attention-garnering than ever before. On any given day a person’s news
feed will be flooded, absolutely flooded, by demands to affirm other friends’
self worth. Moreover, with the advent of the smartphone and other similar
devices, people have the potential to access unlimited amounts of information,
but instead is used almost exclusively to access facebook and to satisfy the
egos of millions of self-absorbed humans. The consequences of such actions
cannot be entirely known at this point in time, but it can be reasonably
speculated that this trend will result in a populace utterly unmotivated to
pursue any endeavors outside of the personal sphere.
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| Disgusted by post-St. Patrick's day pictures |
But first, let us
examine the phenomenon of facebook and its seemingly meteoric rise to power. According
to the article “How Facebook was Founded”, “The site was an instant hit. Now, six years later, the
site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, visited by 400
million people a month”. These figures are from 2010, so it can only be assumed
that facebook’s traffic has increased since then. Facebook was founded in 2004
by Mark Zuckerberg amidst a slew of allegations of fraud and such, of which we
will not discuss as such details are ultimately irrelevant. Now, in 2012, it is
evident that facebook is as pervasive as the smartphones with which people access
the site. But what is it about facebook that draws so many people? While there
are no reputable sources to cite as explanation for facebook’s appeal, it is
relatively obvious why facebook is so popular. In a nutshell, facebook is all
about the user, the self. You are free to post anything you want for friends to
see. You can customize your profile page to feature anything about yourself and
advertise to the outside world, even tweaking the privacy settings so that
certain people can see things and others cannot. While it lacks the level of
customization that Myspace featured (remember Myspace?), through various
re-inventions of the site (much to the chagrin of users) facebook has allowed
users to express themselves in increasingly revealing ways.
Therein lies the problem: facebook has allowed the ego to
indulge itself in ways never before anticipated. In a way, it is the ultimate
expression of individualism, and as we live in a state of “freedom”,
individualism has been trumpeted as the triumph of democracy. However, it is
necessary to examine a cross-section of an individual’s news feed in order to
analyze the nature of the things that people post as status updates. While the
aforementioned status updates had to do with alcohol, it is by no means limited
to just that. Other status updates feature such riveting discussions like what
the individual had for breakfast, complete with picture representation, what
the individual did last night, (again, complete with visual representation),
who the individual is with (tagging + visual representation), &c.
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| Self-explanatory |
Have you begun noticing the trend yet? The focus is
overwhelmingly on the individual, so much so that the individual feels it
necessary to compromise his privacy in order to seek affirmation through the
currency of likes. Before facebook,
the word like has never been used as
a noun, as a thing with weight and substance. It was almost always used as a
verb: “I like you”. But now, it carries weight as a concrete object: “OMG my
status got 15 likes!” This, I believe, is the primary drive that compels
individuals to display such things to the public that would have otherwise
never been divulged decades ago. It is the currency of likes that causes the feeling of affirmation of self-worth. Likes symbolize other individuals
affirming your existence, giving you attention, making you feel like you are
worth something. Every human craves attention; it is only natural, and facebook
skillfully manipulates attention-seeking behaviors and rewards these behaviors
with likes. Comments are also
welcome, but have the potential to be ruinous as well pleasant, and while
comments encourage exchanges between individuals, they are limited by each
party’s ability to communicate. In other words, likes are individuals’ ways of showing attention to one another,
but comments can be used to insult or otherwise show derision as well as other
forms of negative attention.
In this way facebook serves as a tool to seek attention with.
However, as with all tools, facebook is inherently neither good nor evil
.Facebook is; that is, it exists as a tool: a highly specialized and
sophisticated tool, but a tool nonetheless, and the responsibility is always on
the individual how he chooses to utilize the tool. In contemporary society
facebook has been used to connect people over large distances, or reconnect
people who might have otherwise spent their entire lives separated. Facebook has
also been used to promote attention-garnering behavior, and is used primarily
for that end.
I briefly mentioned earlier that status updates provide a
window of sorts into the mental processes of an individual. Facebook asks you what’s on your mind, which people are
all too willing to share. I must stress that people provide insight into their
state of affairs completely of their own accord; that is, no one is pressuring anyone
to post stuff about their lives. It is an entirely voluntary action. What these
status updates reveal about an individual’s thoughts and mannerisms and
character is more telling than people would care to admit. Coupled with a
customized profile page, a person’s facebook account provides a relatively
accurate composite of the individual’s likes, dislikes, ambitions, station in
life, personal beliefs, &c. You need only glance at a person’s last couple
of status updates to gain a relatively succinct insight into the person’s point
of view.
What does a look at these individuals’ behaviors reveal? Precisely
what I have illustrated in the preceding paragraphs. It reveals a populace
which throws privacy and discretion out the window in favor of a mental state
which constantly seeks to affirm its own self-worth in the acceptance and
recognition of other individuals. In other words, it propagates the behavior of
“attention whores”:
“Look at what I did last
night! Look at who I was with! I’m going to tag a million of my friends so that
my other friends can see what I was doing last night so that they don’t think I’m
a loser. I’m going to post where I am for breakfast so that others can be
jealous that I’m eating out at <insert fast food joint here>. Validate
me, citizens of facebook! Validate me!”
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| Kind of like that |
It can scarcely be denied that there exist people in the
example provided that treat facebook as such; a [personal] diary open for the
world to peruse. This sort of behavior cannot, in all honesty, be judged as
despicable; yes, I know that my former sentiments may have given that
impression, but I am also a human and I cannot judge the actions of fellow
humans. I am free to wallow in the depths of the abyssal void which threatens
to swallow all of humanity, and I am responsible for my own actions. It is not
for me to judge another’s actions as good or bad or whatever shade in-between. However,
I am fully at liberty to criticize the actions of such a person as in the
example provided and I feel more than welcome to point out the utter stupidity
of the whole thing. But I won’t, partly because not everyone who uses facebook
adopts the persona of the attention whore, and the average person looks upon
the attention whore with equal parts disdain and pity.
Of course, the attention whore can rightly be placed upon the
extreme end of the continuum of facebook users. However, everyone else fares
not much better. As I have stated before, news feeds will always feature the
same mindless dribble of people seeking various degrees of attention. Status
updates will almost invariably involve the individual and his ego somewhere in
there; if not in this particular post, then it can be reasonably assumed that
at some point in the future the individual will seek validation for his
self-worth through subsequent status updates. If I look in my personal news
feed I can observe this phenomenon relatively quickly. It follows the pattern
of attention-garnering I have been stressing and reveals the inner workings of
an individual’s mind; suffice it to say, the results are not impressive.
II. The Great Kony
Debacle of 2012
Surely many of us have heard (or
seen) the Kony video that went viral a couple of weeks ago. In all honesty, the
effect is supposed to be touching. There is a crazy Ugandan warlord named
Joseph Kony who is kidnapping children and forcing them to become
child-soldiers and sex slaves, among other brutal things. The viral video was propagated
by the non-profit organization named Invisible Children, who, according to
their website, was started in the spring of 2003 with the aim of spreading
awareness for the atrocious acts of the man Kony, among other issues in Africa.
The actual effect the viral video had was astonishing—utterly astonishing. There
was a resounding backlash against the video and its supporters, and it was met
with an alarming amount of cynicism. I am by no means supporting or dismissing
the Invisible Children movement; I am merely stating the facts. There was an
overwhelming wave of negativity aimed towards the organization and the video by
millions of people. Guess where most of the anger was voiced? Facebook. Supporters
of the viral video were quickly toted by others as “slacktivists”—internet
sort-of-but-not-really activists, and were ostracized by many, many people. The
aim of the video was met with a solid of wall of scorn and criticism, with the
effect being that the movement lost a lot of credibility with many people.
Let us examine the facts, free of
the influence of bias as much as possible. Africa as a whole is a war-torn
continent, utterly ravaged by the blight of Europeans and their Imperialistic tendencies,
openly exploiting the natives of the various regions of Africa. The problems
affecting the African continent are too many to properly list in one essay;
which is to say one could write books upon the subject. Joseph Kony is but one
man, one Ugandan warlord with a sizeable influence upon impressionable youths. The
crimes that he is committing are atrocious in nature, and he should by all
means be stopped—not for some obscure agenda, but on the principle of stopping
inhumane atrocities.
Many people saw the Kony video. These
individuals’ subsequent thoughts on the matter were shared over all manner of
social networks, not just facebook. Again, what was the overwhelming response?
Well, I saw one type of response being repeated across the entirety of the
internet. Perhaps others saw different responses elicited. It is hard to argue
with solid examples. Below is a link to a website examining the Kony
phenomenon. Take a look at the comments sections and judge for yourself what
the appropriate response should be. Just remember that each response is an
individual; an entire universe unto himself, complete with unique forms of
thinking and reasoning based on his personal beliefs and values. His comment is
but another window into his point of view, similar to status updates on facebook.
I will say this though; if this is the response given to a truly philanthropic
movement, I would fear for the future of humanity even more than I already do.
III. Amuse Me to Death
We
have learned thus far that social media (not just facebook) is a tool used by
millions of humans to express themselves in ways never before experienced. Each
person is a universe complete with unique thoughts, beliefs, concerns, &c. The resulting expressions of individuals on
the internet by-and-large form veritable windows into their manner of thinking
and their present concerns. The overwhelming majority of individuals’ concerns
are self-centered and driven by egotistical impulses. People seek attention and
gratification for their actions, and social networking sites such as facebook
deliver that satisfaction through the currency of likes or other synonymous units of gratification. When spurred by
some well-meaning organization, individuals demonstrate a propensity towards spreading
a message throughout the internet in tremendous numbers, making that specific
message trend through various social mediums. In the case of Kony, the response
was vast but also featured alarming amounts of nay-sayers and critics. As a
result, the whole movement was compromised and has been attacked by many
people.
What
does this say about our society? What does this say about the individual and
his role in society? Humans have been given a choice in the form of the
internet and smartphones and the ability to access information with relative
ease, and that choice is this: do we choose to utilize our connectivity for the
collective good and propel humanity into the heights of a golden age unimagined
thus far, or do we use our tools in order to amuse ourselves to death and sink
our species into the depths of despair? Instead of bettering every possible
human being and lifting the overall standard of living in every corner of the
planet (which has never before been a possibility until now), we seem to relish
in our extravagant lifestyles and bemoan our petty concerns to a vastly
indifferent crowd of people. The fact that there exists a sub-reddit called First World Problems is a testament to
the stupidity of the entitled human crowd. Our prospects are not bright if this
is the society which we call our own.
I
implore you to reconsider your use of the internet. It is easy to assume that I
am scorning social media as a whole. I am aware of the benefits and potential
that the internet and social networking have for humanity in general. Again, we
have never before been connected in such a way. All I ask is that people stop
being such arrogant, egotistical, attention-whoring pricks.
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