At the end of February, I decided to do something that was a greater sacrifice for Lent than I normally do: I gave up being on Twitter. I didn't delete my account (though I did ditch the app on my phone), and I had a couple of visits there (sometimes a link from a news article took me to Twitter; I watched a Dave Matthews livestream from his home and tweeted how much I liked it; my website automatically shares a link whenever I publish a new essay), but for the most part, I did exactly what I said.
Here's the thing: I'm not Catholic. I have a few acquaintances, mostly from my quidditch days, who are Catholic. That isn't to say that I've a lot of claim to the tradition. Like much of my understanding of Mormonism and the culture of the Church, I recognize that Protestant--and, sometimes, even Puritan--influences have dictated what my religious experience encapsulates. My choice to participate in Lent had more to do with a desire for a kind of religious solidarity within my own tradition: The safest sort of religious experimentation that a person could do. The impetus is actually years old: I was talking to Dan Harmon, one of my quidditch buddies, who was came to my school to talk to my creative writing students about screenwriting (which he had studied in college). I took him out for lunch once the school day was over, and he readily agreed to eating pizza, which he'd given up for Lent. In subsequent conversations, it turned out that Dan wasn't Catholic, he just liked participating in these sorts of religious traditions. (I don't know what his current stance is on any of this, as I've lost contact with almost every vestige of my quidditch life.) That inspired me to try the same thing, using my Mormonic upbringing to conceptualize it in a way that made sense to me. To that end, I decided that, if I was going to do something for Lent, I would need to give up something that I would genuinely miss. For Dan, he gave up pizza; for me, I gave up Twitter. See, I have a hate/tolerate relationship with Facebook, but Twitter is a different animal. In Twitter, I feel as though I'm getting glimpses of other parts of the world. Yes, there's the center of a Venn diagram there: I follow certain people because of mutual interest. Authors, book agents, fellow teachers, dinosaur lovers, and comic book geeks inhabit my Twitter feed. (I also, quite begrudgingly, follow all of my representative legislators, though none really uses the platform for much of substance.) I also have made it a point to include LGBTQ+ and people of color in my timeline to give me an additional dose of "I didn't know that". In other words, Twitter helps broaden my view of life and living, with a lot of interesting things going on. And, boy, there are a lot of things going on right now. COVID-19's ravaging of the world is worth talking about, and the solidarity and commiseration that happens on social media is definitely one of the best parts about this crisis happening when it has. We've all had a good laugh at a post that was shared by a friend, neighbor, or whoever that perfectly recreates our own feelings. It's times like this when social media is at its best. Giving up Twitter, then, was a really hard decision. I made it before the crisis escalated to the point that our country's leadership could no longer deny it, and I think that was a good thing. It meant that I had already made the decision, so I didn't have to try to rationalize whether or not to commit. I'd done so; only thing left was to keep the course. At first, it was pretty difficult. I'm quite used to Twitter and would jump on during loading screens of video games, when I had a random thought to share, or just because I was bored with the conversation happening around me. Its ubiquity brought me comfort and I definitely dealt with a type of withdrawal. What helped--and what, I think, is the point of Lent--was that, during those first few days off the platform, every time I considered what I wanted to do and had to reject the "Go on Twitter" impulse, I had to think why I was missing it. End result? Participating in Lent meant that I thought about Jesus a lot more than usual. I'm convinced this is the intent of Lent, as it was a more authentic sacrifice than almost anything else at that moment in my life. I could have given up wearing a man-bun for Lent, but that wouldn't have mattered at all because I don't normally wear--or even much care for--the man-bun look. And though Twitter can have great value, its largest contribution in my life was to burn time trying to learn something new amid the constant stream of thoughts and words, 280 characters at a time, scrolling across my screen. Losing that but replacing it with the thought of "Hey, this reminds me of Jesus and His sacrifice that's coming up" made a difference in my life. The downside of this, however, is two-fold: One, I learned that I still need/want to scroll through social media. Two, that itch wasn't lost as much as transferred…to Facebook. I'm not a fan of Facebook. At all. Yes, there are some positive things about the website, and it could even be a good tool for improving the world. And, of course, the vast majority of people who read this essay will have become aware of its existence via Facebook. (I get the irony, folks.) Anyway, Facebook (as an entity; not individuals utilizing it) is not really improving the world, and it likely never will, but hey, at least there was potential at some point. As it stands, I don't like the platform for a number of reasons. Some are petty and nitpicky (I hate the fact that it doesn't automatically post the most recent posts--the fact that you can switch things around, only to have it change depending on the device you're using only makes it worse), while others are larger (Facebook is better at ads, especially the way it culls posted information to sell more stuff that I don't really need…and, yes, Twitter does this, too; they're just not as good at it). But there's one thing about Facebook that really grinds my gears: I know (almost) all of these people. That may sound counter-intuitive, as that's the entire point of Facebook. But Facebook is like dancing in a car at a red light: You think that you're pretty much doing your dance by yourself, only to realize that everyone you went to high school with is sitting in the car next to you, watching you with mixtures of embarrassment and interest. If a person on Twitter dislikes my hottake on something, I can block them and move on with my life. Detritus is as detritus does. But on Facebook, many of the responses to posts come from "friends" that I've accumulated over the years. Blocking or unfriending them comes with strings; there's a diplomacy, a politics involved with no longer being a part of someone's Facebook life that isn't as apparent in Twitter. If I don't like following a celebrity or an author because she says something stupid, then there's no real loss there. Facebook, however, changes the dynamic. If someone I know says something stupid, then it's in my face, again and again (because of that idiotic "Top Stories" default). Under normal circumstances, I can roll my eyes and choose not to engage with Facebook at all. I get my itch to scroll scratched elsewhere. But this year's timing between Lent and the COVID-19 crisis has meant that I couldn't scroll through Twitter whilst waiting for my video games to load. Instead, I was on Facebook a lot more, which meant that I was exposed to bad ideas more frequently. (And why is it that the worst ideas of your friends are the ones that show up the most often?) When it finally got too much and my distaste for the platform reached its zenith was when a friend from my mission posted memes and comments criticizing, downplaying, or entirely dismissing the quarantine. Now, I am no defender of America's response to the pandemic: We had a lot of warning that was ignored from the top down, and we still have a false-hope narrative that disregards science and history to try to mollify people. Until a vaccine that is tested, proven safe and effective, and ubiquitous, my family--with our half-hearted son--will be endangered by any premature "return to normal". Choosing to let our son out of the house is actually a life-and-death decision that we will have to formulate going forward. America has lost over 20,000 people at the time I'm writing this, and it's probably higher due to underreporting of numbers. Our lives permanently changed when 9/11 saw a tenth that number die--COVID-19 is going to radically alter America and the world. So when friends--not internet strangers or possible troll/bot accounts, but people I've broken bread with, been in their homes, took classes with in high school or college--spread idiocy like, well, a virus, it gets beyond tiresome. It gets dangerous. And it isn't just that someone else might read their meme and think, Hey, the quarantine is stupid! Sure, that might happen, but the danger comes from the further spreading of disinformation that is too easily shared. For example, I heard someone talking about a handful of different COVID-19 related stories: Almost all of them were either false or unproven. It's as if people are unaware that Snopes exists. Being exposed to that is damaging to my mental health, because the message I hear from falsely optimistic people, or those who don't actually maintain appropriate distances, or who go to the airport to welcome home missionaries in direct defiance of Church and state requests is a simple one: The life of your family is irrelevant. Living with an at-risk member of the populace means that I can't, in good conscience, head to the store with a mask on and think all will be fine and dandy. Living with an at-risk member of the populace means that I could be a vector of disease. As I told my students, half-hearted people don't get to survive pandemics. The only way to save my son's life--again--is to lockdown my home and take every precaution that I can. And as much as I recognize the heartache and sadness that comes from not celebrating Easter as a large, rowdy extended family dinner, it also means that we don't have to miss going to the funeral of someone we could have otherwise protected. So, yeah. I'm not a fan of Facebook. That's where I see the most frequent eye-rolls and yeah-rights of the whole pandemic issue. Is Twitter a better place than its competitor? I honestly have no idea. I haven't been on Twitter in multiple fortnights. I will say this, though: The only way I get through this potentially months-long tragedy-in-waiting is through the help of my friends. And Facebook gives me a view of many of them that tells me that may be a false hope. I hate seeing that. I hate feeling and thinking that. Yet I can't shake the sentiment. I learned that, while giving up Twitter for Jesus was good for my soul, Facebook certainly wasn't. The hard thing is, there's still something that I desire from social media. I want…something that social media provides. If I can find a way to scratch that itch a different way, I'd probably be less stressed and worried. Maybe I should start an Instagram account… This story popped up in my timeline today. The story has been on the fringes of, well, everything else that's going on in our country/world, so not a lot of bandwidth is expended on it--at least, not in my circles. But the denials of Zuckerberg (and tech companies more broadly) about the way their platforms impact people's lives seem, at most, disingenuous and, at worst, devastatingly detrimental.
Here's my biggest beef with Zuckerberg's denials about Russian interference on Facebook: The entire purpose of advertising is to sway people. Whether it be something comparatively innocuous or desperately malevolent, advertisements are created to manipulate impulse and thoughts of those who read. (The strongest defense that I've seen against this, by the way, is deconstructivism, but the rigors of that theory can be difficult even in the simplest modes, to say nothing of the fact that deconstruction has been co-opted by the very thing it critiqued: Language.) We dress up this manipulation with benign words (which is, of course, it's own form of manipulation), calling them "brands" (as if the word branded doesn't stem from physically burning one's mark on an object or, in the case of livestock, animals) or "products" or "services". But the point is always the same: Using language to trick, cajole, coerce, or convince a person to think or behave differently than she was planning to before encountering the ad. Facebook's unparalleled success comes not from anything specific to the site, at least, not anymore. Communicating with others, sharing articles or ideas--there were plenty of other places online to do that before Facebook came out. Generating social connections, however, is not how Facebook survived. It was because people were there, so advertisers wanted a chance to "talk" to people where they were. Facebook exists as an advertisement hub--that people do other things there is happenstance. Without that ad revenue, Facebook wouldn't be able to have the numbers of users (as the article I linked pointed out, about 70% of America's social media happens on Facebook) that would support it were it not "free". And a subscription-based Facebook would likely fail, considering the way that we view what ought to be online. In fact, now that I've finished my time with quidditch, I visit Facebook about once a day: To upload a link to these essays. While I have a few hundred followers on Twitter, my analytics say that I get almost no traffic from that social media platform. It's almost exclusively through Facebook that anyone comes here. Though I'm not peddling anything for wares, I'm exchanging on ideas, and so I use the platform that has the people. This is why I think Zuckerberg is, to put it baldly, full of crap. He knows that advertisements sway people, and the fact that he was so cavalier about that during the election of 2016 shows the blindness our society puts on advertising in general. Our economy is awash in advertising dollars, which we only do because we know it works. Lies are always peddled during an election, but there were utter fabrications that circulated, unchecked, through the poorly regulated veins of Facebook's body. And, more than that, they were funded by foreign agents with the intent to subvert people's thinking and change their thoughts about the election. Facebook has, essentially, allowed Russians to have a say in an American election. That's the reality of it. That Zuckerberg and his ilk, who are now some of the richest people on the planet, deny that their business model could be used nefariously is insulting. When it comes to "free" platforms (this one included), it's important to remember that it's being paid for. It's so the advertisers can see you...not the other way around. |
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