The perils of social media

An experiment gone haywire

This is a story about a small experiment I’ve embarked upon lately, one that at first manifested itself as a technical problem with my phone where I couldn’t connect to the internet.

Honestly speaking, this experiment has been brewing for quite some time now. You see I’m very interested in human nature, and more importantly, human interaction. With Yaser Bakr holding the audio front via the poignant “I Hate You Path”, thought I’d humbly weigh in over here. (Post publication update: Yaser’s post is now by request only, contact him on Twitter in case you want to hear it).

For me, what originally set this off was a news items that grabbed my attention a few weeks ago, stating that US Venture Capital firms invested $29.36bn in startups in 2013, with software taking the lion's share with $10.96bn, followed by biotechnology with $4.5bn.
What bugged me about this investment bubble in software, is that I’m failing to see it advancing humanity anywhere. Read an article a while back and something in it really struck me, "modern media technology...creates a dependency without ever actually addressing a need."
Will investing in Facebook, Twitter or Path result in cures for cancer, cystic fibrosis? Will they find solutions for hunger and poverty? Will they make water available for those who don't have it? Will they create sustainable clean energy for all? No, but end of the day, investment firms have payback periods and returns in mind, and are after the quick buck. Investing in research-based start-ups is viewed as a speculative cash drain, with no guarantees of success/profit in the short to medium terms. Tells us a lot about the state of the currently practiced global capitalism.
I've been questioning the real "power" of social media for a while, and the only thing I've arrived at so far is the power it yields over me, rather than the way it empowers me, because end of the day, if we're using it for free, then we are the products.

To further narrow it down, the time we burn on those networks is the real product; our time, which unlike money, once lost, can not be regained.

Instead of us being limited to a bunch of emoticons, stunting our emotion and social development, why aren’t we investing this time in real world relationships? Ask yourself, why are you on this or that social network. Some use it to vent, some to spread wisdom, some to attract attention, some to self promote, some to entertain, some for self validation, and so on and so forth, pick your poison.

Back to my experiment, where I started observing how people were interacting with my (both carefully and carelessly placed) posts, how the genders gravitated towards different kinds of posts. Alas this is when I realized my little “experiment” had to stop. For ostensibly in my head it was all so very innocent, I was just “observing” my friends’ behavior, all the while ignoring my own. And this is where I had my first realization, I’m a person who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what’s happening in people’s lives, if they want to inform me they can call me or invite me over to tell me. Why had I become consumed by this, what was this monster I was breeding? My mind doesn’t even register or deal in gossip.

Secondly, and here is where I overlap with Yaser, is the matter of privacy, and to me, oversharing, or post diarrhea. Which again begs the question, are we truly investing our precious time wisely if we’re on the time-sucking machine Path the whole day?

Then came the third realization, my psyche was being affected but the roller-coasters I saw on my timeline, and at times, my empathy and compassion sensors would get jammed.

And finally the forth, is about the dire affect this is all having on our ability to self express, IN REAL LIFE. I’m a huge George Orwell fan, and he really put it beautifully in his novel 1984:

Don’t you see the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expresses in exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

…every year, fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller…

The above only represents things that I am aware of, and God knows what further revelations are in store, ready to rear their ugly heads once their time comes.

I was experiencing all this when suddenly, my phone couldn’t connect to the internet any more, and I went offline for a few days. Here I arrived at one of the most shocking revelations of all; in those two or three days offline, the people who bothered to ask about my absence could be neatly counted on the fingers of one hand. Remember the story of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and his Jewish neighbor? How the neighbor used to throw garbage and filth every day on the Prophet’s doorstep, and on the one day he didn’t, the Prophet (pbuh) went to visit him to check that he was ok.

Are we experiencing an empathy crisis? Are we feeding our curiosity with healthy organic matter, or are we just feeding it useless garbage? My advice, if you wish to take it, is to balance it out, put that bloody phone out of reach, go for a swim, a jog, read a book for a change instead of mostly meaningless check-ins, or if you’re a terminal stage junkie, go somewhere without a signal. A small fact here to remember, just 10 years ago, humans were doing just fine without those social nuisance sites.

All I know is that we’re on a slippery slope, and I certainly don’t want to be amongst the first wave to fall into digital oblivion.