The projected concept behind social networking websites is very appealing to me. Yes, you too can maintain your professional and personal relationships as easily as posting a sentence on someone’s profile! Friendships repaired in three seconds! Lost lovers reunite in two! It’s simply a result of the current age of instantaneousness.
I wonder when we got so busy. Somewhere between the innocence of childhood and the illusionary demands of adulthood, maybe. I say illusionary because I think as a society, we made a lot of them up to combat bad self-esteem. I don’t have to answer the phone every time it rings, I don’t have to buy something every time I see an advertisement, and I don’t have to be connected in every network. I’m getting very tired of the generalized belief that I should.
Take Facebook, for example. The appeal was huge, it swept the nation. I was caught up in it too, bribed by the wealth of information at my fingertips. I still use it, but not for the same purposes as before. I remember the day I first saw the ad on the sidebar that advertised something I had listed under my “Interests”. And like that, I came to the realization I’d been so naively ignoring: I was only a statistic in a targeted demographic, a non-human, consumer database blip. But that’s what’s so genius about social networking— we willfully submit ourselves to it. I have yet to see any real returns on my time investment in Facebook.
AdBuster magazine featured an article titled “Facebook Suicide” that I found interesting:
“By turning members into consumers who involuntarily advertise to their friends, Facebook hoped to extract profit from social interactions. However, by commercializing friendships, Facebook has irrevocably destroyed its image. Now a vanguard of the anti-Facebook movement is developing out of an increasing disenchantment. No longer a fun, harmless place to hang out, Facebook has become just another commercial enterprise.”
-Micah M. White, The Global Movement #77
No comments:
Post a Comment