“Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers”
I love the above quote because it illustrates how cultivated our social network lives can be. The way I present myself on Facebook is not the real me.
- Facebook Vs Real
- The real me is scared of change, the Facebook me wants a political revolution.
- The real me loves most of his family, the Facebook me only focuses on the family I don’t get along with.
- The real me is anti-social, the Facebook me is overly-social.
And I’m not alone in this in any way, I think a lot of us do it. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, but we never present our whole selves. And without our whole selves, we cannot speak from real and whole truth.
This is what my social network hiatus was all about; figuring out how I can stay sane while using these tools. As I’ve talked about many times on Facebook, I legitimately have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder, and Depression as diagnosed by my psychiatrist. This means that my brain can’t let things go a lot of times, so things fester and burn in my brain. How can I use a website that’s designed for quick sharing when nothing about my brain is quick?
A couple of things happened on this hiatus that has altered the way I will use these social network sites in the future. The first is that I watched Bo Burnham’s new Netflix special “Make Happy” which includes this beautiful monologue (please listen to the whole thing, but 2:50 is when he starts talking specifically about social media): Bo Burnham- Make Happy monologue.
The line “I know very little about anything, but I do know this: that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.” really resonated with me. Why do I need an audience? Why do the number of likes or comments on my posts matter so much to me? Why do I work for hours on a post to get the wording just right when this work will likely not be noticed?
The next thing that happened was I read Jon Ronson’s wonderful book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed which talks about how social media has created environments where we can shame individuals for making mistakes that wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago. Some people, in fact, have their lives utterly destroyed by a single poorly-phrased joke on Twitter. There is a section towards the end of his book that I want to quote because it really lays out what I don’t want to turn into.
“Feedback loops. You exhibit some type of behavior (you drive at twenty-seven miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone). You get instant real-time feedback for it (the sign tells you you’re driving at twenty-seven miles per hour). You decide whether or not to change your behavior as a result of the feedback (you lower your speed to twenty-five miles per hour). You get instant feedback for that decision too (the sign tells you you’re driving at twenty-five miles per hour now, and some signs flash up a smiley-face emoticon to congratulate you). And it all happens in the flash of an eye—in the few moments it takes you to drive past the Your Speed sign.”“In Goetz’s Wired magazine story—“Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops”—he calls them “a profoundly effective tool for changing behavior.” And I’m all for people slowing down in school zones. But maybe in other ways feedback loops are leading to a world we only think we want. Maybe—as my friend the documentary maker Adam Curtis e-mailed me—they’re turning social media into “a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing.”We express our opinion that Justine Sacco is a monster. We are instantly congratulated for this—for basically being Rosa Parks. We make the on-the-spot decision to carry on believing it.“The tech-utopians like the people in Wired present this as a new kind of democracy,” Adam’s e-mail continued. “It isn’t. It’s the opposite. It locks people off in the world they started with and prevents them from finding out anything different. They got trapped in the system of feedback reinforcement. The idea that there is another world of other people who have other ideas is marginalized in our lives.”I was becoming one of those other people with other ideas. I was expressing the unpopular belief that Justine Sacco isn’t a monster. I wonder if I will receive a tidal wave of negative feedback for this and, if so, will it frighten me back again, to a place where I’m congratulated and welcomed?“Feedback is an engineering principle,” Adam’s e-mail to me ended. “And all engineering is devoted to trying to keep the thing you are building stable.”“Soon after Justine Sacco’s shaming, I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risqué thoughts, that he wouldn’t dare to post online anymore.“I suddenly feel with social media like I’m tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,” he said. “It’s horrible.”He didn’t want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something off.We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.“Look!” we’re saying. “WE’RE normal! THIS is the average!”We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.”
dadlek 