I Was Going to Name this “Social Media Isn’t Social”

It’s easy to work with that premise.  If you’ve ever been on Facebook, you’ll note that the majority of the platform is about moving advertiser product and providing what seems a safe and protective bubble of congeniality for those that consume it.  Long story short, Facebook isn’t really about communication; there are no great manifestos being published and widely disseminated on the medium; indeed, those that are attempting are almost undoubtedly being deliberately censored.  It isn’t a forum for the free exchange and critique of ideas.  Simply, people use it as a means to make mostly ephemeral communications with people they already know in meatspace, and they otherwise treat it as a time sink replete with advertising, cute kittens, advertising, puns, and yet more fucking advertising.  Twitter isn’t any better; if anything, it’s worse what with its widespread and extremely obvious political censorship.  But the major social media is like this.  They want to entice with the opportunities such a platform could present before you’re so deeply invested in the platform that you can see all its unsightly sores that admittedly corrupt the entire medium.

Thing is, is real life social?  I mean, a great deal of the social rituals I’ve been taught since I was a kid consider the initial exchange of greetings and thereafter all the systems required to avoid offending your conversation partner.  And if you’ve found a good friend, one who isn’t off put by the ramifications of what you might say, that’s a wondrous thing, but perhaps that’s the very terrible point.  These social rituals exist because humans generally cannot get along with each other, and as such they prefer to wax and wane about the weather and the white-picket fence rather than endure the terrible shame of possibly having fucking offended someone.  But offense has been in the past and in the present a reason for most often unnecessary violence.  You can see where good manners comes from, keeps the barbarians from chopping each other to bits all the time, but it also prevents us from exchanging what we’re really thinking.

But perhaps we just know ourselves too well, and subconsciously we know that if we feel one way about other people then they certainly feel a certain way about us.  In all actuality, we aren’t one humanity.  We aren’t even a collection of nations or a federation of clans; we’re nothing but bits and pieces of a thousand different broken puzzles that occasionally brush against each other in the dark.

As such, we live constantly with bad faith.  When we smile and offer the right, we know it is because it is the right we fear.