In an idealized world, the purpose of Social Media web sites would be to allow the average user to keep their friends and family member abreast of their real-world status and accomplishments, while simultaneously keeping track of the status, welfare, accomplishments, and needs of others they know. What has happened instead is that these windows out into the world have become decorated with a completely faux image and invented accomplishments. When we make a post on our pages, more often than not, we post in a way calculated to, more than just inform others of what we are experiencing, evoke a particular response often from either a single individual or a small group of individuals. When there are exclamations of accomplishment on ourstatus pages, the vast majority of the time, they are false or imagined accomplishments, the harvesting of a perfect crop, the serving of a new recipe, a new high score in a pattern matching challenge.
The time spent reaching these arbitrary new levels, cultivate these virtual crops, cook these digital meals serves to extend already busy days, decrease already rare communal family time and undermine the worth of accomplishment through learning. After serving a perfectly cooked digital meal, I do not, in fact, have any better grasp on how ‘Impossible Quiche’ is actually made, even if there is a exclamatory post on my Facebook wall proclaiming that I have just cooked that very item and everyone is welcome to come by my restauraunt and enjoy a serving. After harvesting a perfect bunch of roses, and receiving an award of achievement for mastering the growing of roses, I still have no clue whatsoever where I should pnat roses around my actual physical house, when I should plant them or how I should tend them.
In the end, all of the time taken in the real world, to tend things in virtual worlds, has a real cost. It weakens familial bonds, decreases real opportunities to learn, master, cultivate real things, and wastes real resources and real time for virtal gains that can, at any second, be negated by the manipulation of a single database table on a single server somewhere unknowably far removed from your own real time and place in the world.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Social Media websites such as Facebook. They have the potential to provide immediate information regarding the status and situation of friends and relatives. It provides a central forum for the immediate dissemination of important information, a fast method of contact that often is much more current and connected than the most recent phone number many of us may have programmed into our phones, endures far beyond homes, email addresses, phone numbers, familial units, & etc. If used to it’s potential, Facebook offers everyone the opportunity to stay connected with all their friends and relatives in a way that is probably more immediate than any other method currently available.
At the same time, the uses that Facebook is put to, the denigration of the platform in such a way that the vast majority of our “Communication” is nothing more than the self-advertising of various apps and quizzes and causes and websites, the focus and purpose of Facebook has been lost. If all you want is a place to play games, and you don’t mind giving up that time from personal relationships, then this writing is of no relevance to you. If, on the other hand, you find that you come home from work in the evening and check your farm before you tell your spouse and progeny hello, then maybe you should re-evaluate the purpose of Social Media and how it relates to you as a flesh and blood person as opposed to a online persona.
Remember, at some point in your life, that “Great WiFi Cloud In The Sky” will drop your connection. When that day comes, will you prefer that your loved ones remember you for your physical presence or for your beautifully tended and fully stocked Farmville Farm?
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