A Few Comments About Social Media
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 and information 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.
During the last American election things simply escalated out of the realm of reality. I felt that whatever good social media had to offer was lost with the blitz of lies, and distortions involving the candidates. The sad thing was the level to which people absorb this bogus information as fact. At one time, a simpler time if something was written or appeared on the “News” or spoken by Walter Cronkite it was equal to the Sermon on the Mound.
Today, not so much.
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 Fox News as being a credible news source when in fact it is an entertainment network and does a marvellous job of that in a totally irresponsible way. But now I show my biases.
I appeared once in the Fox 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 Fox 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 have been told by my daughter there is a name for what I do…trolling.
I have been banned from Facebook four times now for my arguments, you can’t call them debates, with the Republican far right. I can’t debate with the extreme Right because that depends on reason, logic facts and all those annoying details that relate to actual reality.
I have engaged in some dialogue with the extreme right in terms of those for example who think that the pandemic is a myth generated by the left wing press and promoted by politicians in order to orchestrate a global political take over called the Great Re-set. These people include the anti maskers and anti vaxers and believe in their on brand of science. If these people in fact controlled the world it would be a flat world with polio and any disease that could be cured by a vaccine. They walk amoung us.
I was banned most recently for calling American students partying on Florida beaches during COVID stupid and irresponsible for not masking, social distancing and the rest and then exporting their Covid maladies back to the rest of America. I said the biggest export product now out of Florida was Covid-19. That got me a week ban from Facebook.
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. There is no virus. Masking is tyranny. 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.
Well I wrote that a few years ago but social media including Facebook started out as a gentle naive gossip source and social hook up link and has now morphed into a cosmic mis-information monster that can reformulate thinking and model democracy along protypicitcal lines none of us ever e
nvisioned even a decade ago. Governments seem slow and weak to keep up with these trends let alone be able to control or direct them in any meaningful way.
Fact check!
