Nov 1, 2020
Why Silicon Valley’s For Robots, And Facebook Isn’t One Of Them
In an age where social media connects us with some 3.81 billion people worldwide, Facebook is a behemoth. However, all of them jam-packed on a two-dimensional social network that seems to care about their three-dimensional interests; things look awry and bleak for humans and their individual freedom, aka humanism. But, it’s more awry than miserable as we spawned big tech giants with a thirst for market dominance. Moreover, Facebook controls over 64% of social media consumers.
Remember when newspapers were the staple in the morning. In a few years, you won’t see them anymore, as Facebook is taking over the news, and soon the funny papers will become a nostalgic trinket. I bet you’re asking, “dost my ears deceive me?” Maybe, I should open a new Facebook account to stalk my friends — understand their childhood aspirations (get to know them.)
“We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.”- Jeff Buckley
A Harvard Study in 2018, correlated the link of dopamine with Facebook usage. What it came up with did not come as a revelation, but an epiphany. Our reliance on likes, engagements, and messages on the social media platform is comparable with addicts because this “reliance” is fuel for more attention due to RPE (Reward Prediction Errors.) Basically, a reward prediction error is a difference between a reward received and one predicted for receiving. It is one of the reason why “Facebook Fame” damages your nucleus accumbens.
Emotional stimuli’ interconnectedness with watching bite-sized videos and reading tabloid articles is hard to ignore. Facebook has somehow managed to engage billions of users to devote their time to something which does not bring them closer to their friends and family. Instead, it builds their social media presence, thus entrapping them in a cob-web of dopamine-fuelled pseudo-intellectual crap that makes them feel essential to society.
“By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.”- Mark Zuckerberg
For a few of the perks of Facebook, we have ignored all our freedoms. Hence, we have forgotten the efficacy of our humanism. But I said it is more awry than bleak, so there is no air of dystopia here in this post. But, Facebook is notorious for driving ads smack-in-the-middle of a cute baby video. After all, Facebook is a platform for businesses now and has been since 2007. Facebook will always target a burgeoning youth to get on our nerves. But, we cannot be insouciant towards the strides in human and technological progress because it does. We cannot keep asking Big-Tech to give us hand-outs when life gets too harsh for the human race.
Both of these lucrative avenues go hand-in-hand, and Facebook does an incredible job of giving us what we need while we complain about it doing everything for us, making us lazy. As discontented, we may be, I can vouch for a future where we are more connected than ever, even on a meta-level. But, fame isn’t my cup of tea, so I’d rather have that terse video chat I have grown accustomed to as a millennial. No matter how many times people say I am addicted to Facebook, I know Silicon Valleys in the world are making our lives easier and Facebook keeps us together, despite how dismally 2020 dismantled our lives. After all, Facebook isn’t the hero we deserve; it is the hero we need.
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