My dearest Clara,
Darkness has befallen our world here on the western front of information this Monday, October 4, the year of our Lord 2021. I’m afraid this may be my final communication, for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have all been down for several hours. We may be forced to talk to people in-person. We will likely all die from lack of attention. Tell my family I love them.
That tongue-in-cheek Ken Burns-style letter home was an attempted comedic response to social media giant Facebook’s blip last week. That outage left the world’s 2 billion-plus users without friend’s posts, without the addictive, dopaminepushing red dot notification, and without who knows how much misinformation pushed on these platforms.
It was pleasant, if I do say so.
Maybe we should schedule these outages, as do electric companies for routine maintenance, and call them “sanity outages.”
Our society spends so much time on Facebook, scrolling the familiar and the ridiculous, that some of us have lost touch with our community. Studies have shown that false information — the real “fake news” — is six times as likely to be shared than is legitimately sourced news we need to know.
Someone on another platform last week quipped after the outage: “Facebook stock is down 5%, Disinformation down 5,000% and white supremacy down 10,000%.”
While the company continues to brag about “connecting people,” it has seemingly ignored the darker sides of those using its apps. Drug cartels, human smugglers, white supremacists, and insurrectionists all use this platform to further deranged agendas.
Maybe it took us all coming up for air for just a few hours to realize how dependent we are on these apps. An iPhone can give a report each week of how long we were on our phone each day. Forbes Magazine reported that the average American spent 1,300 hours on various social media apps (and Facebook led the way). I would venture to say some of us are routinely disappointed in ourselves for spending so much time with this digital indulgence.
Thirteen-hundred hours. That’s 54 days — nearly two months. What could we do with that time?
Last week’s outages were coupled with reports in The Wall Street Journal from a whistleblower that says the company knows of its deleterious effects on our society — everything from manufactured outrage to depression in teen girls — yet does nothing because it would erode profits.
It’s called the “attention economy.” These companies try to see how much of our time they can monopolize with notifications, curated feeds, sharing and no small amount of outrage. “But it doesn’t cost anything,” we protest. Yet we e relinquish information about ourselves, which is then sold and curated. And while we may not pay out-of-pocket, our children, our country are paying no small price.
If we in the news media printed much of what is seen on Facebook, we could be sued for violating libel and slander laws. But Facebook claims to be simply a platform — a mere distribution board for other people’s thoughts. They never have to adhere to regulations other publications have to comply with. Yet Facebook — a nearly trillion-dollar market value company — “publishes” advertising for people and has been cutting into traditional media revenue for the past two decades. This is not good for our country, our citizenry and, most importantly, our democracy.
What could be gained by simply cutting back on our social media indulgence? More healthy sleep? More conversation over lunch instead of staring at our phones? Better mental health? Less anxiety and anger?
For a few blissful hours last week, we discovered how truly unneeded are Facebook, Instagram and related apps. And maybe we thought about these dopamine-fed addictions and began a road to recovery for our society.
Let’s hope so.
ken@fredericksburgstandard.com
