C.G.Ayling

Tag: social media

  • on Social Media

    Social Media had so much potential… it promised faster, easier, more robust, and vastly more interactive ways to communicate with friends and family.

    What happened? What happened to destroy its promise? What turned Social Media from social, to selling? When did people decide punching “messages” from their own little pulpit, or selling whatever it is they want to sell was worth discarding any semblance of social for the hard-sell? Greed for fortune, fame, glory, or notoriety has co-opted the promise of Social Media.

    Not only is there virtually nothing social about so-called Social Media anymore, but it has now transitioned to teaching people terrible habits.  Social Media encourages people to mask what they truly believe in order to present what they think others want to hear.  It is the worst possible form of political correctness, the form where we never reveal what we really think for fear of losing ground in some completely imaginary popularity poll.

    “We don’t agree” can be taken one of two ways.  It can be the end of a conversation, in which case nothing new is learnt and therefore both parties lose.  Or it can be the beginning of a new conversation, in which case both parties learn another point of view, and therefore both parties gain. In a conversation, “We don’t agree” need not be about seeking consensus at all, it can simply be about conversation itself.  However when we are speaking at an audience, as we invariably are in social media, we aren’t having a conversation.  What we’re doing is standing on a pulpit, while hoping our audience will think us praiseworthy. What we’re doing is talking, while hoping everyone else will listen and not talk themselves.  What we’re doing is feigning sincerity in order to sell our viewpoint, or our product.  What we’re doing is presenting ourselves as a “brand”, not as a person.  What we’re doing in Social Media aren’t very social behaviors at all, are they?

    It is said true leaders lead from the front, they don’t push from behind.  And I say that for conversation to be conversation, it must be with one another.  We don’t necessarily have to see the person we’re conversing with, but we do need to be talking to them, not talking at them.  So-called Social Media is more about a marketable audience than it is about social friendship.

    Social Media also teaches us to present a false face not only when we speak, but also when we pretend to listen. It teaches us it is good to be surrounded by friends or “followers”. It teaches us to not only anticipate, but also to expect reward for the most inane comments we make.  It teaches us to interpret “likes” as “listens”.  And possibly worst of all, Social Media teaches us to feign listening by “liking”.

    Social Media teaches us we are perpetually surrounded by an avid audience who applaud our every word…

    When was the last time you stood in a circle of your closest friends and they clapped whenever you spoke?  When was the last time you stood in a circle of friends?  Indeed, when was the last time you stood with a real friend?  Do you even recall what standing with a friend means?  It doesn’t mean “liking” everything they say, it means being there for them, it means telling them to stop when they open their mouth to change their feet in public, it means laughing at their terrible jokes in private, it means delighting in the outrageous together, it means saying shocking things secure in the knowledge nobody else will ever hear.  Now contrast those behaviors with standing with your Social Media friends.

    Social Media is about counting your character’s worth by numbering your “followers”.  How many real friends do you actually have? It might shock you to learn the average person in the USA today has just two, yes, count them TWO, real friends. [1] It should shock you to realize that number is down from three just twenty-five years ago.  Thanks, Social Media, for causing a thirty percent reduction in real friendship, while giving us an exponential explosion in virtual  acquaintanceship.  Not!

    How many of your supposed social media friends know anything about who you really are?  How many of them do you think actually care?  Here is a clue. Maybe the same number as you have real friends.  Maybe, but more likely a couple less…

    Social is precisely what “social media” is not.

  • Facebook “Friends”.

    Perhaps because we harbor fears of being different there is something deeply gratifying in finding someone whose thoughts align with our own. I recently found someone like that, an author using the name P J Fox. For this I thank David Grigger, who happened to mention @PJFoxWrites on Twitter. Among the many interesting posts on her blog is one about Facebook Friendships, you should pop over and read it.

    Since friendship is important to me I have written about it before, indeed I’ve even written a poem about what friendship means to me, which I’m fairly sure is different to what friendship means to you.

    Friendship is so much more than an alert out of nowhere that someone now “likes you”, or likes what you’ve just said. Yet that seems to be what social media sites such as Facebook attempt to reduce this rare and special thing called friendship to.

    I can see that Facebook works for certain people. For example, my wife uses it to keep in touch with some of her family and a few of her friends. Note my choice of words, “some of her family and a few of her friends” – she specifically doesn’t accept friend requests from anyone who happens along. What my wife doesn’t use Facebook for is a marketing platform to reach a wide audience of people who, as easily as a mouse-click, can like her or the things she has to say.

    Friendship is so much more than allegedly agreeing with a single random thought. Friendship is so much more than the explicit expectation you will reciprocate for “likes” from someone you don’t know and will probably never meet by “liking” something they have to say in return for them liking something you said. Friendship doesn’t happen in a mouse-click, it just doesn’t. Friendship takes something the social media effectively steals from us, while simultaneously fooling us into think it is granting us. Friendship takes time.

    An attraction of social media, and I think this extends to most of social media platforms, not just Facebook, is that it tricks us into thinking, “I can say something personal to all my friends at the same time!” Obviously, this is an enormous time saving. Just think how much time it would take to call each of our friends and say the line we can so easily post to social media.

    There are a couple of fundamental problems with this premise.

    First, an issue that ardent users of social media seem to have completely forgotten… Something you shout to the world is in no way “personal”.

    Equally important, if you were to actually call each of your friends and tell them exactly the same thing… Well you would be extremely insincere, indeed if two of your friends discovered you’d told them precisely what you’d already told all your other friends they might even consider you to be shallow. Would they be wrong?

    Which brings me back to the most essential element of friendship. Friendship is personal.

    There simply isn’t a quick and easy path to friendship. Friendship takes time, energy, synergy, and commitment to build. Friendship is one-on-one – it is not one on many. Even in the smallest group of close friends, there are people who simply would not associate with each other if it weren’t for their real friends in the group.

    And that is OKAY!

    We are all individuals, we are all unique, and we should all accept that friendship is something incredibly special that we invariably share with a single, unique individual. Every friendship we have is as unique as the person with whom we share it.

    If, as so many of us are, you’re entwined in social media don’t mistake what can barely be termed an acquaintance for a friend. There is an enormous difference between the deeply satisfying joy and contentment actual conversation with your true friends brings, and the momentary, yet horribly addictive little surge of pleasure an alert informing you someone has “interacted” with you on social media brings.

    Perhaps that leads us to another significant difference between social media acquaintanceships, and real friendships.

    The stimulus of social media is addictive. All those innumerable little alerts social media constantly feeds our appetite for interaction mislead us into thinking people we will never know actually care about us. Not only do they not care, but us expecting someone we’ve never had a one-on-one conversation with to care is unrealistic in the extreme.

    Juxtaposed to social media’s addictive little “someone cares” alerts, along with its urgent requirement for a response in order to show we care back, is real friendship. Real friendship is not addictive. Real friendship places no demands on you in its regard. Real friendship is not established in a single mouse-click, and it is not so easily broken as with another. Once real friendship is established, time’s passage ceases to matter. Literally years can pass between conversations with your real friends, yet you can pick up precisely where you left off so many years ago.

    How much time can pass between “interactions” in social media? Hours? Days is pushing it. And as for weeks… well the prevailing wind of social media has completely changed by then, and “Sorry mate, but who are you again, and more important, what can you do for me?” will likely be the response you get.

    Now please don’t think I’m saying true friendships cannot form on social media. I am not.  However I am saying that regardless of where friendships form they require the same stimulus to growth and development.  Personal interaction, commitment, understanding, and most especially time.

    How many true friends do you actually have, versus how many acquaintances you have on social media?

    If you’re on social media at all, I know the second number is greater than the first. Often vastly greater.

    Now allow me to pose a question. Which number is more important to you? If you answer honestly, after anything more than superficial consideration of the question, you might learn something about yourself.

    I know I have, and furthermore I don’t think I particularly like what I just learnt.