Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
I could link to any number of articles describing the anger at Facebook, but I choose another email. Quartz has a daily email called Obsession. Just this month they’ve done shipping containers, Legos, paperweights, ramen noodles, and appropriately, email. Thursday was Quitting Facebook. Some frequently mentioned themes from the “Reasons to stay” section:
😢 FOMO: Of course, there are the marriage announcements and party invites, plus baby clips and dog pictures. But more broadly, the platform has become a virtual town square. Leaving would mean fewer updates about your community: What’s the most pressing problem to the people in your hometown, or home country? How do your friends and family interpret what’s going on in the world these days? How are these communities changing?
🍕 Actual connections: Facebook is still the best place, in towns big and small, to share information about toddler playgroups, women’s circles, pizza pop-ups, and movie nights — and to connect with other people with interests like Wok Wednesdays, mycology, ultralight backpacking, and machine embroidery.
For many, the social network has become a virtual town square and neighborhood organizer. I contend this is because a virtual neighborhood is what Millennials, at least, know. But.
Older adults remember a neighborhood, how it functions. We know analog ways to share information about playgroups and movie nights. GenX is teaching our children. We can teach others. And if we have forgotten, well, our memory will get a jolt on June 8th.
Not since another limited release premiere in May of 1977 has a movie so fit the mood and the emotional need of the American public.
So when I say that Facebook is dying, as I have been, I mean that don’t think it can outlast this coming moment. The American public wants to connect. It wants to unite, at least where it can. It has simply forgotten how with the distractions technology provides. We got sucked into our screens and their algorithms before we knew how to cope with them. Now we know better and we are looking to reorient ourselves in our real worlds. And along comes a soft-spoken man to remind or show us how we’ve done it well in the past.
And before anyone protests that I am making a ridiculous argument, thinking that a show could have a significant effect on a booming industry, search up what happened to the aluminum Christmas tree industry when Lucy Van Pelt delivered one line to Charlie Brown about getting a fancy tree, “maybe one painted pink.”
This piece originally ran in my Sunday Collection email, March 25 2018. Republishing here before I — finally — see the movie this week.
