Musings Regarding Social Media
2241 hrs, at home.
I'm sitting on the couch, having just finished watching the last of today's LEC matches, when Thunderbird pinged to tell me I got an email from Google.
It turns out that they're shutting down Google+, and as part of that shutdown my account will be deleted in April. They provided instructions on how to back up my data, which is nice of them. Since joining Google+ in 2011, I posted exactly 3 times. The first post ever, immediately after joining, was this picture:
I think that sums up the entirety of my Google+ experience pretty well. Credit to Google for identifying that Facebook was dominating the market and trying to disrupt things. Pity they failed so spectacularly though. I mean, if I'm going to give my personal information to an evil, faceless corporation, I might as well give it to the company that already reads my emails, right?
This brings me back around to my previous post about how technology -- especially anything on the web -- seems to become obsolete eventually. I'm impressed at Facebook's ability to stick around as well as it has, though even its cracks are beginning to show.
I am not a terribly active user of social media. I'm what you might refer to as a lurker. I'll sit back and skim what other people post, occasionally clicking on an interesting link or commenting on a photo. But I never click any of the emoji-oriented reaction buttons -- in my entire tenure on FB I have never intentionally clicked the "Like" button on anything.
I'm that guy in William Gibson's novel "The Difference Engine" who, upon first seeing a billboard with some sort of headline, shakes his head and asks "Is this what society has become? Where are the sources, the analysis, the actual information?" Twitter -- one of the platforms which I have never registered, and am honestly unlikely to in the foreseeable future -- distills that attitude quite nicely. All the nuance and subtlety of the world obliterated into 140-character (or 280-character these days) dopamine hits designed to maximize profit for somebody who isn't you.
Maybe I'm hitting my old curmudgeon stage of life early. But you can't look at the state of the world and specifically the tone and quality of the debates around important issues like misogyny, homophobia, trans rights, climate change, hyper-consumerism, etc, etc... without wondering where we went wrong.
People on the far right tend to romanticise the 1950s -- probably because of the nearly unchecked power of the white, Christian American man -- but to some small extent I pine for the old days too. I look back through the nostalgia lens at the technocrats who ran things, and I'm jealous that my parents and grandparents got to live in a world where experts were respected and their input was actually used to shape public policy. These days expert opinion is seen as one side of a debate, where the other side is misinformed at best and intentionally ignorant at worst.
Would I want to go live in the 1950s? No. I like my world of modern conveniences. Like the internet I'm using right now to share these musings. And advancements in medicine. And not being on the literal brink of nuclear war -- though, thanks to the people in charge these days, I may yet get the chance to experience being an adult in the middle of a nuclear-fueled cold war between superpowers. Oh boy!
Hopefully as a culture we can break our addiction to short, easily-digested blasts of (mis-)information delivered via radio wave to every device with a screen and learn how to think critically again. Maybe reaching that point will take Facebook and Twitter joining Google+ in the dustbin of history.
We can only hope it happens soon.