Freeconomy Blog
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23 Apr
Are we becoming a generation of Twits?
| 7 comments |
twit [noun]: a foolish, contemptible person.
Social networking websites seem to be the latest evolution of the internet. There are a few but Facebook and Twitter seem to be emerging as the leaders of the pack. I was reading statistics the other day and apparently there are now 200 million people on Facebook – that's one in every 35 humans on the entire planet. Its extraordinary. Another 2 million join every week. Last week we had one of the most ridiculous races since the rat race between some American celebrity and CNN to become the first – lets say Twit – to have 1 million followers of their daily chores. Oprah Winfrey apparently had 100,000 followers within 2 hours of joining that particular site. Facebook and Twitter are fast becoming the new television – I have plenty of friends who proudly exclaim that they don't watch TV yet think nothing of frittering away the hours of Facebook.
Okay, so I hear so say 'Is this not a social networking site?'! Fair point - I suppose in some respects it is, as one of its main goals is to link up like-minded people who need each others help. But in most respects it is completely different. Whereas Facebook's objective is to keep people on-line, reading their adverts, for as long as possible each day, the raison d'etre of the Freeconomy Community is to get people meeting up with like minded neighbours in their own 'real' local community. It is an on-line tool for what is essentially an off-line idea. That's why we limit the number of messages you can send to any single member to three each month, encouraging people instead to arrange to meet up in their local area before that limit is exhausted. That's also why you can only see the people within a maximum of a 10 mile radius. It is also why we have refused to build an on-line chat room, our rationale being that if you want to chat, go and do some gardening together, or something equally constructive. I'd despair if I thought people were spending their entire evenings on this website – every minute on this is a minute less experiencing real life. So please only use it to enhance your 'real' life and to make 'real' friends locally.
The next thing I can hear you ask is 'Well, what is wrong with Facebook and Twitter anyway?'. Lets see – where to start? Facebook have recently announced how it is going to make a multi-million dollar profit this year. The strategy – a spin-doctored version of selling the details of it members to corporations so that they can advertise to you as accurately as possible. They will use a very smart piece of software – which takes the keywords you use when messaging friends and posting your thoughts – to tailor specific adverts to you. Twitter will do the same eventually, they're just not at that point in their business strategy yet. What's wrong with that you say? The main reason that corporations advertise is because they belief the revenue they receive from increased sales will outweigh the cost of their advertising. Simply put, they want us to buy more. Now given that it is likely that we are only a decade away from severe, irreversible climate change, the last thing we humans need to do is buy more. What no politician – on what is effectively a 4 year contract – is courageous enough to say is that we actually need to buy less and more local. Of course we don't have to buy the stuff these advertisers are trying to sell us, but it obviously works, otherwise they wouldn't continue to do it. We really can be a bunch of zombies sometimes, mindlessly doing what the billboards tell us to do without a moments thought about its 'invisible-to-us' impacts down the line. Why do we let profit hungry corporations tell us who we should be and what we should look like?
Facebook also enables the authorities to see who is connected to who. Given the erosion of civil liberties over the last three years, you'd have to be very naïve to think that various government agencies, such as MI5 and the Police, never use it as part of their investigations; they need very little reason to legally access your account. There are a lot of theories that Facebook is really the project of the CIA in America, and whilst I have absolutely no evidence on that, I would almost be surprised if they hadn't their finger somewhere in that pie – they are smart people and Facebook, from their perspective, is the perfect tool. People have lost jobs because their employers have been observing their daily lives through Facebook. So if you are an activist of any sort it really isn't very smart to have a Facebook account – the Terrorist Act 2005 can even be used against activists whose only desire is peace!
One of my biggest concerns is the rise of the term 'Facebook friend'. It seems that one of the main goals for people who use it is to have as many of such friends as possible, for what can only be some sort of self-esteem enhancement I'd imagine (which may be useful given that most of the adverts are designed to make us feel inadequate). I originally was a member of Facebook but quit when I began to receive messages from people the world over, many of whom I have never met or heard of before, asking me to be their friend. I'd love to be everyone's friend, but only in real life and not as some sort of modern tick-on-the-bedpost for someone I'll never meet. I also know people who email each other on Facebook when they are in the same room together. I know, it really has gone this far!
But, for me, these are not even the biggest problems. Firstly, these social networks, without a social conscience, encourage people to stay indoors, in isolation, and interact with friends in a virtual manner, instead of encouraging them to meet up in real life. This is extremely worrying. It's bad for the environment, terrible for real community and friendships, and is going to have a long-term effect on the collective self-esteem and our abilities to cultivate real relationships.
Secondly, exactly like television, they encourage the dumbing down of the masses, so that we all become even more apathetic to the enormous levels of unnecessary and avoidable pain and suffering in the world at any given moment. There are so many people and animals and rivers and oceans and trees in the world that need us to fight for their right to share this planet with us, and here we are using some ridiculous application on Facebook to kill the hours in the room that we call 'Living'.
Having said all that, I think the Freeconomy Community would be foolish not to learn from the excellent functionality and interfaces they employ. The style of this site, I have felt for a while, has appealed to people who will have leanings towards this philosophy on life anyway, and not so much to the masses. So we are about to begin work on giving the website a much smarter new look, a look that will appeal to people who wouldn't normally be interested in sharing just-for-the-love-of-it. We are also going to incorporate some of the amazing functionality they use to make it much easier for you to spread the word and get other people involved, across the world, in their own communities, and to make the website much easier for you to navigate. This, I hope, will help you use this on-line tool to have more impact in real-life terms. I'm excited about it, it is going to bring this community to a whole new level very quickly. Whilst we are working on it, don't forget to tell your friends about it in the meantime – this community only grows through word of mouth, thankfully we do not have a marketing department with a huge budget to do so for us. So please help us if you can.
Every time we use Facebook or Twitter or the like, we are supporting that model of business and contributing to its effects on the communities and societies we live in. Are you happy with that?
I don't want people to become 'Freeconomy Friends' through this site; I want them to become real friends, and people who share whatever they have with each other locally for no other reason than because they can.
THE FREECONOMY BLOG is written by Mark Boyle, founder member of The Freeconomy Community. If you want to respond, debate or ask questions, please just comment below; you will have to sign in first. If you would like to be a guest writer of this community blog, then email Mark @ saoirse@justfortheloveofit.org
Comment on this Post:
Alan - bristol comments ...
I totally agree with the 'dumbing down the masses' comment...im at uni at the moment, it has totally taken over everybody's life almost to the extent where people cant live without facebook which is crazy...myself included! it has this weird addictability! and yes becoming very bad problem for younger communities whereby people are forgetting how to socialise and interact in real life.
Its interesting to read another prospective on a generation obsessed by the "internet"! there are good and bad points to it, wealth of information available, and yes it wouldnt surprise if the cia was behind facebook!
Mark comments ...
Alan, yeah I completely agree - I see the internet as a transitional tool, something very important in our attempts to become more sustainable, healthy people, but at the same time it is depend on an industrialised infrastructure which is fundamentally unsustainable.
In response to Fool - ah yes but there is a difference between a wise fool and a fool. Which one are you?
Kieron comments ...
Facebook and Twitter are often used to communicate with people you can't normally go have a chat with though.
I can't wander into my living room and chat about animal rights, organic food, world peace etc. with my bald hippy flat mate, but I can on the internet (though not on FB and Twitter I guess)
I find that facebook allows me to keep contact with friends that I would have lost contact with because of distance. That in itself is a good thing.
On top of that it has lead to some IRL (in real life) meet ups between myself and them which may not have happened if we'd not made contact again online.
There is some truth in what you say, but it's not all bad.
Mark comments ...
Technical Update!
In the interests on inclusivity, you no longer have to be a member to comment!
As always, try to debate actions and not actors / actresses, we're all here to learn from each others experiences.
