Facebook: Entertainment and Connectivity or News Source

A Few Comments About Facebook

I was corresponding with a friend and former staff member of mine from Jinhua, China who is now working on his Phd in Germany.  “Marty”, he said, it’s all happening on Facebook.  Our correspondence then transitioned from hotmail to Facebook.

I was friendless in this new cyber world.  Well, one friend, Terence.

I explored .  I wrote a partial profile, still not complete, then added a few pictures in agonizing slow motion all on my laptop.  Then I discovered the APP and downloaded it on to my Smart Phone and the whole process of sharing pictures accelerated.

 My first meaningful discovery was that Facebook was an excellent way to find people from my past.  I had lived and worked in Alberta, Germany, The Middle East, China and The Bahamas and had fallen out of touch with most of my colleagues.  Auto-magically I was able to make connections with many of these people. I still find this the single most valuable use and purpose of Facebook.  I now have regular contact to points around the world with former students and colleagues alike.

As a naive newbie to the world of Facebook at first I was overwhelmed with what appeared from:  jokes, “news”, political commentary, satire, humour, personal anecdotes, recipes, love, hate and just about everything in-between.

I did not know until recently what a meme was, but I soon understood that just because a picture of a politician, actress, sports figure etc appeared next to a quote, a statistic or an anecdote did not mean in any way that that person was the source.  Facebook is like Trump. It is not always a source of fact, reality, or even a foundation of truth.  I soon learned that If I did any fact checking at all about some of the lovely moral stories in the form of multiple-memes that they were quite often based on small particles of truth. I now take these as sources of entertainment and rarely share them.

During the American election the Facebook pages were often flooded with memes of Trump and Hilary.  As well as during the much shorter Canadian election the conservatives and liberal sides bantered back and forth. I found that although some of these presentations had an element of truth I generally view them in the category of propaganda, often based on half truths, generalities and misconceptions

The danger of Facebook is that many people get sucked in and accept Facebook as an actually news worthy source, that would almost be as ridiculous as crediting Foxe news as being a credible news source.  But now I show my biases. 

I appeared once in the Foxe studio audience in New York and I saw first hand how they groom and manipulate their studio audiences to say the “right things”.  When the Foxe staff discovered I was a Canadian, my wife and I were given seats off camera so we posed no danger of exposing their scam on camera, but I digress.

My nasty secret, but secret no more, is that I enjoy entering into discussions with American Republicans, or often Canadian conservatives, on issues concerning anything from universal health care, gun control (or the total lack of), American foreign policy, Abortion, Women’s Rights, Human Rights, poverty, The One Percent, street people, welfare, freedom of the press, Merrill Streep and the Golden Globes, The Middle East, Putin and hacking, the recession of 2008 and its American causes of greed and corruption, and I could go on. I am retired now, so I confess to doing this mainly for sport.  It is a blood sport which I enjoy very much. 

 I feel personal success when I generate over 200 responses to a comment I throw out to bate a red neck somewhere out in cyber space. The thing is its not just cyber space because the angry responses are real and they often frighten me in that people are so dark and lack human compassion.  

Street People are Lazy.  Bombing is the ultimate Solution.  Global Warming is myth.  Immigrants are a threat.  Muslims are all terrorists. We have the right to bare arms.  Let’s built that wall and make America Great... there’s a theme.

I may have to stop my blood sport because it seems there may be no cure to Tea Party- Red Neck- Bible Belt Hate.  I get the feeling if God is truly on their side we may have to reconfigure God or is this a God in their image...but another topic.

I fear strongly that social media will have a growing influence in shaping public opinion. People in general will look less often at credible sources of information.  Society will drift further from fact to anecdote, through memes, cartoon and personal comments.  We will be entertained along the way and in a passive way will be swallowing more and more illusion in our lives until before we know it a man like Trump could be elected president... hey wait.