MY PROBLEM WITH FACEBOOK CONFIRMED

 MY PROBLEM WITH FACEBOOK CONFIRMED

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 16, 2011

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Buddhism has an expression, “You cannot push the water.”  You cannot derail Facebook with good sense when nearly 600 million people find it addictively attractive. 

Yet, it does provide copy for cartoonist Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame, David Brooks the balanced and cerebral New York Times columnist, a storyline for television's "Miami CSI," a novel of Val McDermid, a currently popular film, and a study by an MIT psychologist, and this is just the first wave.

Our addictions, and Facebook is an addiction have no doubt about that, but why or where it is going is quite another thing. 

In our cut and control society, as intelligent and cognitive aware as we choose to think we are, we continue to fall into unintended consequences and have done so since we were hunters and gatherers with no idea what tomorrow might bring.  So, why should now be any different?

We embrace new ideas and new ways of doing things without a single thought of what we might be giving up never to experience again.  Not to be labor the point, but when we were hunters and gatherers, men when out and hunted and women created something approaching domesticity.  There was no such thing as marriage but a kind of communal sharing primarily for the purposes of survival.  It was a matriarchal society with a kind of law and regulation conceived and enforced by women.  We have gone through many iterations over the last 12,000 years to arrive at the current status, and we have arrive here as much by hook and crook and by any carefully weighed out and deterministic policy or strategy.  We like to think our forebears were less informed and sophisticated than we are, and therefore more likely to stumble forward, when we have been stumbling forward for all of those 12,000 years, only we have developed a vocabulary, and what I am doing here to make it seem as if we know what we are about, when we don’t have a clue.  We just climb the mountain because it is there, and we embrace the new technology for the same reason. 

We celebrate people – now mainly children – who create this technology and then make them $billionaires. 

We didn’t one day say, “Let’s create a celebrity culture that looks at problems of society skin deep and adore them as if they were gods.”  No, we do so incrementally, unconsciously, and clueless.  We stumble forward as if we have blinders on, and feel good about ourselves as we solve crises along the way never fully realizing we are dancing to a very old tune. 

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In the last hundred years or so, we have labeled our way forward as if they were road signs that were put up after we had already past such junctures: the “Roaring Twenties,” the “Jazz Age,” the “Lost Generation,” the “Beat Generation,” the “Hippies,” the “Yuppies,” Generation “X” and Generation “Y” and the current Generation “ZZ” or something like that.

Children, Eric Hoffer says, have created each age through their games and toys, and the wider society than adopts these games and toys as their legitimate means of communal living and behaving.  Why should this age be any different?

Anyone who was a parent in the 1960s and 1970s knows that the nuclear family, the central focus of the communal church, and parental control of children was thrown out the window, as these children became their own parents, as parents were too busy working to have time to manage a family.  The sit down family dinner became as common as women wearing last year’s fashions.  The classroom became a war zone, and education was reduced to social promotion and a license to do whatever without consequences. 

Small wonder that when we ceased to commune in communication, to relate in relationships, and to marry to enjoy sex that we would be attracted to a world of virtual reality where none of this mattered.   

Again, during the 1960s and 1970s, when parents were working all the time, and their kids were being their own parents, the family breadwinners looked around and saw the amoral lifestyle, the drugs, the partying, the provocative dress and insouciance of their siblings, and said, “Hell, let’s join them!  Why let them have all the fun?”  Parents became as juvenile or more so than juveniles. 

It was then that Playboy took off, and the pornography industry hid behind the First Amendment and social cohesion lost its civility, structure and confidence.  It didn’t stop with parents mimicking their children in dress and manner; parents didn’t want to grow old and so they refused to grow up. 

That was the general climate in the economically prosperous West when Facebook and all its earlier and subsequent versions showed up.

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Some years ago I wrote a book never published, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?  It is apropos to our times.  It takes a lifetime to realize we all create our own cage, and then occupy that cage, and defend it to the death.  We fail to realize it is a cage, but choose to see it as reality and truth personified, which it is not.  It is a cage trust me.

We selectively choose information that supports our cage and disparate information contrary to its justification or anyone who differs with that rationale. 

We are all victims of second hand information, and therefore live largely second hand lives.

My problem with Facebook is the idea of “social networking,” which I see as an oxymoron.  It is not social but the antithesis of social.  There is little or no actual social contact.  It is not networking in the normal sense of the word, but electronic networking.  Social implies interpersonal relationships.  This seems doomed to history, as personal exchange is now mainly electronic. 

Sociologist Erich Fromm was of another era but his words seem to fit what I’m trying to say:

“It is the fact that man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on the powers outside himself, unto whom he has projected his living substance.”

It appears I am not alone in this dialectic.

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OTHER VOICES OTHER VIEWS

Gary Trudeau in his Doonesbury of the current Sunday (St. Petersburg Times, January 16, 2011) continues the episode of Roland Hedley’s tweeting.  His protagonist is unconscious of the world around him or the people in it.  Even when he retires for the night, he can’t stop tweeting. 

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David Brooks in the same issue on the Ed-Op page addresses the issue of civility in the wake of the tragedy in Arizona where a young man gunned down six people, and wounded several others including Congresswoman Gabby Gifford.  Brooks writes:

“The problem is that over the past 40 years or so we have gone from a culture that reminds people of their own limitations to a culture that encourages people to think highly of themselves.  The nation’s founders had a modest but realistic opinion of themselves and of the voters.  They erected all sorts of institutional and social restraints to protect Americans from themselves.” 

He goes on to say we have become narcissistic – Christopher Lasch’s book called the United States “The Culture of Narcissism” (1979) – and self-congratulate ourselves for the smallest achievement, such as hitting a home run, making a tackle in sport, or doing a good deed.  Brooks concludes we have lost our social connection, and the best evidence is that we have lost our modesty.

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“CSI Miami” (WTSPTV January 9, 2011) had a storyline that combines some of the ideas I’ve expressed here.  It is a fictional drama but often fiction gives us clues to reality.

A man is murdered and the CSI crew thinks it is because of a Facebook electronic liaison between a teenage girl and a middle-aged man who pretends to be a teenage boy.  CSI suspect a jealous teenage boyfriend of the girl, who views the exchange on Facebook, is the killer.

It turns out that the middle-aged man pretending to be a teenager has been enjoying this electronic tryst with the mother of the teenage girl.  Complicating the matter further, a total stranger who falls in love with the mother, whom he believes to be the teenage love of his life, is the actual killer.  He doesn’t know the girl, has never met her, and only “knows” her electronically.  Meanwhile, the teenage girl has nothing to do with the whole affair.  She is an honor student and citizen, and the only adult in the drama.  The mother and the murdered middle-aged man are the addicted ones to Facebook, looking to find a spark lost long ago in life.

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Suspense novelist Val McDermid's "Fever of the Bone" (2009) deals with a maniac that uses social networking sites to groom his victims, who are innocent of his chilling campaign, but attracted to his enticing words on a social network called "RigMarole.  Again, it is fiction but it shows how the most socially naive users of this media have no idea of its capacity to do harm in the wrong hands. 

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MIT scholar and psychologist Sherry Turkle has written “ALONE TOGETHER” (2010).  She has spent 30 years studying how people have come to interact with computers.  She has spent more than a decade writing this book, which shows how we have substituted technology to mediate social interaction.  This includes texting, emailing, twittering, Facebook as substitutions for face-to-face relationships. 

It is comical if it were not so bizarre.  Social digital transformation finds teenage girls and older looking for men using software to make themselves look thinner and more attractive on Facebook photos. 

Turkle doesn’t limit the scorn to teenagers or young adults, but to BlackBerry addicted parents who text their way through dinner, watching television, and even driving their children to school, failing to recognize the robotic character to their everyday life. 

The psychologist is a scientist and has not appetite for scolding.  She is simply pointing out how emotionally blasé we have become as once again technology is leading us rather than our harnessing, controlling and using technology to guide us into the future.

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We may not be able to push the water, but we can harness it if we wake up.

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