Can we please stop jumping to conclusions about the social networks?
Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, recently expressed to an audience at Stanford University his regret and guilt for having contributed to creating the social network, saying it was “ripping society apart”, and even recommending that people stop using it.
This type of conclusions on the effects of social networks on society strike me as premature, given that they continue to evolve. That said, watching teenagers share content, along with syndromes such as Fear of Missing Out, some people’s desperate need for a dopamine hit in the form of approval from their peers are worrisome or disturbing, but basically reflect: a lack of criteria that is the result of a lack of education. We are dealing with the first generations that have grown up in a world where social media is everywhere, a world in which we carry devices with us at all times that keep us permanently connected, share content, texts, photographs and videos of all kinds, access news with value judgments… and all of this thanks to parents and educators abdicating their responsibility on the basis that young people born into the internet age somehow came equipped with the skills they need.
Well, they weren’t. If you think your children know more than you it is simply because you haven’t taken the time to understand a technology that now shapes the exchange of information in the same way as the mass media did in previous generations and that is not going to disappear, regardless of what some former Facebook executives say. Young people are not the problem, it’s parents who gave up on understanding a technology with virtually no entry barriers: it wouldn’t have taken much effort.
Are you worried that your children post explicit photographs of themselves? Maybe you should have taken the trouble to educate them about how the world works, giving them criteria, as happened when children were taught to behave in public. Judging social networks by their current state, when not even a generation has passed since their mass adoption, is simplistic. So what is the alternative? Back to dopamine injections controlled and administered by the mass media, to the times when you were only important if you appeared in a newspaper, on the radio or on television? Are we going to uninvent social networks? Ban them? No. Social networks are here to stay and are part of the social fabric, although for them to function properly we need to educate ourselves as a society rather than rant and rail against them.
Of course, social networks have generated problems. Mark Zuckerberg still seems to be unaware of what he has created or its long-term effects. But just because young people share stuff they shouldn’t, and not-so-young voters are influenced by fake news doesn’t in itself mean social networks are a bad thing, and instead simply reflects society’s failure to learn how to use them. Usage protocols lag behind the technology, that is a fact of life. It’s easy to succumb to the temptation of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: obviously, there are parents out there who will simply prevent their children from using the social networks, probably creating adults with even less idea about how to use the social networks than the present generation does, if that were possible.
Recent converts have a tendency to be holier than thou and to preach to the rest of us, as though we were all headed to hell in a handcart. Chamath, with all due respect, take a hike.
We’ve been here before: back in the day, the prediction was that my generation, which grew up in the 1970s, would end up dysfunctional because our parents allowed us to watch too much television… well guess what? It didn’t happen. And the same applies to social networks. Does bad stuff happen on the social networks, are we seeing undesirable behavior patterns? Of course we, as was to be expected, given the power of the social networks and the scant preparation most parents have given their children on how to use them.
So instead of over-reacting, instead, let’s adapt schools, teach our children how to use the social networks, work harder to prevent abuse, and establish criteria that will allow us to take advantage of something that is here to stay and will be an active part of society.
(En español, aquí)
