Social Media and Humanity
It really takes the Facebook experience to a new level when you’re asked to record your number of daily likes and comments in a journal to be graded by a professor. That’s what I had to do this past winter when I took a class called Web and Social Media, one of my electives for library school. It was an immersion into the world of Web 2.0, social capital, and things like Google’s ‘social search’ and social data mining — all enlightening stuff.
Our assignments were to compose creative Twitter posts and keep a Facebook diary, and we were to come out of it social media savvy. I dove in and let myself have free reign, enthusiastically buying into the so called ‘power of the hive mind’.
Within the first month I was addicted. I didn’t just post on Facebook and Twitter for the class assignments, I hyper-posted like no one’s business. I shared impersonal mash-ups and videos, tweeted like crazy (probably gaining social capital with no one but an audience of bots) and commented on posts by people I never talked to in real life. I laughed deliriously while creating memes of Liza Minnelli, posting away into the night.
Once I shared a long rambling post about my favorite band at 4 in the morning to an online audience of three — three lurking souls with fellow zombie-like presence who I doubt ever saw it. Another time I thought it was a brilliant idea to go around the library where I work with my phone and take pictures of books, LOTS of books — to post on social media! The other librarians humored me on that.
Thankfully, after the class ended so did my meaningless posting. Then something else happened: I was struck by two powerful and conjoining events. I got really sick for a few weeks, and I discovered a brilliant book titled You are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier. I don’t want to revisit being sick, and I won’t, because it was miserable. But I will say that it caused me to retreat from Facebook for a good three weeks, and it did offer me some serious reflecting time right as I was halfway through Lanier’s book and absorbed in his ideas.
In You Are Not a Gadget, Lanier argues that social media sites, by the nature of their design, reduce humanity to bits and fragments:
“Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.” (You Are Not a Gadget)
Facebook didn’t bring a care pack of food and fresh squeezed juice to my apartment when I was sick, my neighbor did. Facebook didn’t call to check on me, my sister did. Facebook didn’t give me their trusted doctors’ phone numbers, my co-workers did. Facebook didn’t bring me 3 bags of DVDs to watch, my mom did. The point is there was nothing on Facebook that could have remotely entertained me or lifted me out of the funk I was in during those three weeks in the way that real people did.
There is a Buddhist quote I read once that went something like: if you are shopping and you see something that you just have to have, wait — stop for a second and just see if the next breath is enough. More and more whenever I feel like oh I should post that picture, or I should post about that funny thing that happened just now, I take a second and think about it. I imagine how that picture would look printed out on matte paper in a nice frame in my apartment, where real friends who have earned my vulnerability can see it instead of companies competing for my data and “friends” who I never see in real life.
I ask myself if that funny thing that happened just now might not seem as funny tomorrow, or if it might be funnier when I write about it for my own amusement, and save it as a word document and read it again in a few weeks.
I am no Buddhist ‘breathetarian’, and I’m sure I will still have compulsive moments from time to time — we’re not all perfect. Plus, I admit, it’s fun to check in and see what people are up to and comment on their posts. But I hope as we move into the future, the compulsion will be expressed less as consumable ‘content’ and more as creative offerings with some real depth to them.
We’ll see what happens.
