In the not-too-distant future, new generations may ask us how things became the way they are. Things will be worse, and I am preparing my speech to tell them why. I will tell them about Facebook.
Facebook, and a great many other sites, were like a wall – a wall in a big empty room somewhere. One could go to this wall everyday and affix little notes to it. It was fun for a while. We said funny things to one another. We left funny pictures for people to find. We would write things to people, about people. We looked at this wall, and learned some things about each other. And even though we journeyed to this big empty room by ourselves, it convinced us that weren’t alone. It told us we were socializing.
We started copying interesting things from all over the web – Articles, pictures, blog posts. Sometimes we’d tell people how the articles, pictures and blog posts made us feel, but eventually we just started posting them without any meaningful commentary. And before we knew it, most of the little notes, the scraps we left on this wall of ours, if it could be called ours, weren’t written by us.
Our personal spaces on this wall stopped being self portraits, however clumsily crafted, and transitioned into something like a collage reflecting not our personalities or interests, but our merely our browsing habits. And then, inevitably, the wall stopped being anything personal. We posted information as if we were publicists for our favorite beverage companies, political machines, sports organizations and entertainment studios.
And it was a shock to those of us who noticed, that the people we shared this wall with weren’t our friends. We had become accustomed to being mouthpieces for ideas that weren’t really ours. Without thinking, we shared with the world thoughts that benefited impersonal revenue machines far more than any of us. And with that, our online personas became indistinguishable not only from anyone else in our demographic, but also from the cold and well calculated advertisements that forever screamed from the corners of this wall we thought was somehow ours.
The meaningless feedback loop generated by such systems reaffirmed opinions and outlooks beneficial to those in control. The mindless sharing and the emotionless approval of such served to streamline us. By immersing ourselves in the constant parrot-speech of those most like us, we were bound to become whatever stereotype existed for our particular demographic. It was a huge endeavor, but they paid for it. The corporations, the conglomerates, the studios, they paid for all of it. They’d have been fools not to. They thrived more than ever on our web-based minds, conditioned to crave all instant novelty.
Those in charge did something seemingly impossible. They convinced us that a billboard was a place for our children to play. They made a cooperate commercial into an alluring place for supposed social interaction. It was an expensive experiment, but your can believe us, they got everything they paid for.
