Why I should have a public meltdown on Facebook
-but am instead writing this story on Medium.
Am I okay?
That’s a relatively reasonable question to ask with a title like I have above. Asking “Are you okay?” is the same as asking “How are you?” where you don’t actually want to know the answer but you feel obligated to ask it. Maybe you do want to know or you already know the real answer and want to read their body language and response to parse it out. Thanks to social media we don’t really even have to ask that question.
I recently saw a friend’s post about how he’s been doing great since he moved to a town where he didn’t know anyone and was isolated and had been doing pretty horrible for a long time, but with some random events and a bit of effort was able to find his way into a thriving place. It got me and several others to reach out. He told me it was great hearing from so many people that were supportive, which is great yes- I won’t deny that, but why does it take a desperate post- or inspirational post- on facebook to trigger that communication?
So, if you’ve not gotten it yet. This is about social media. I loath the thing just like everyone else, but I really don’t want to bad mouth it for the same reasons everyone else does. Yes, it harms us in very serious ways. Yes, it’s bad for our self esteem, yes it’s awful for democracy, there’s no argument that it’s helped spread misinformation and destroyed the fourth estate. My beef with the damn thing is it’s so fucking impersonal.
I’ll keep this brief. For a website that has a main goal of connecting people, the way in which it facilitates those connections is through broad messages out to the entire world and reminding you to generically tell your friend you’ve not talked to for seven years happy birthday. If Facebook wanted to actually help improve relationships and build a better world, it could start by being more genuine.
I lied. I do want to discuss the way that it really fucks up with people. I’m going to talk about another friend that I have. I’m not going to name names, but they post constantly on Facebook like they think it’s Instagram. I think they maybe want to be an influencer. Yes, they are pretty and seem to have a charmed life, but I just don’t know what they’re doing posting all the time. I should give them kudos for posting original content but when ninety-nine percent of the posts are flawless photos, I question if they’re actually experiencing any of it in the moment or if they’re just living on the awe from the people seeing the posts on their page.
They’re successful, and that’s great for them. I’m jealous straight up, but what they are posting is popping up on my feed because it’s got a picture and people are responding to it and I’ve clicked or viewed the posts and stories that they’ve put out there. It’s the algorithm that pushes interaction. It’s all a manipulation that’s unhealthy, but we’ve reached a point that algorithms control all of our interactions. Really the answer is to just get off Facebook but how would I then share this?
Now, continuing my abuse of Facebook interactions, I will now recount the story of another acquaintance that relates to my title.
This acquaintance didn’t post anything with an image. They posted a rant, much like you could call this. What else is an editorial or opinion article than a diatribe of thoughts on a subject matter but one person’s rant? However this rant spanned over a number of posts over time and touched on religion. These posts appeared in my feed surely because there were so many reactions to them. I can only imagine the number of friendships burned by those posts, but the reactions begot more eyes. It was a dumpster fire but people read them because they saw what was going on because Facebook’s algorithm recognized people cared aka: responded.
So, based on that, it would make sense to just write everything to posts on Facebook, and as long as everything I post has some level of controversy, everyone will see it.
Seeing as how I’m not insane and I actually want to have a career writing, I’m not going to do that.
I also have no interest in writing a bunch of stories about how it’s easy to get a following on Medium by doing five easy steps and post it behind a paywall. (That’s for you internal readers/writers that found my article.) I’m happy that works but are you really saying anything new or helpful by doing that?
So what do I do?
I will write and post here and hope it gets read.
If you’ve managed to read this far, I could ask you to make a comment, or like or clap, or subscribe- all those things that mean everything for statistics but are really just algorithmic functions to fuel the machine. I won’t do that. I want to do something meaningful.
What I want to do is remind you when your writer friend asks you to read something, and you say you will, please follow through and read it, ideally in a timely manner. It will mean the world to them. Give them feedback. That’s the lifeblood we live on. It also gives us warm and fuzzy feelings and encourages us to keep going. When people say they’ll read something and never get around to it or comment about how it read, it really hurts. And if you can’t read it because you’re busy or you won’t get to it for a while, just say that. We understand it can be a big commitment.
If you got to the end of this, it does mean you read it. I appreciate it. Thank you.
