Our generation cannot get enough of social media. It is an addiction that grips our society and defines our times. Today more than 1 billion people have a Facebook account and our world is more connected than ever. But Facebook can be a dangerous drug.
Today it is nothing to sit on Facebook for hours on end. We can scroll forever through a sea of content that brings us instant updates from the lives of friends and news from around the world.
The memes are funny and puppy videos are cute. The articles are interesting and we are a click away from distant relatives whether we are at home, in class, riding the bus, at the bar or in the library. It seems like a flawless system, but it’s not.
Facebook is as addicting as it is designed to be. Every time we like a post or click a link, our preferences are recorded and weaponized against us to grab our attention from the moment we log on.
Facebook’s servers know us better than we know ourselves and use our data to keep our eyes glued to the screen. Companies pay huge amounts of money to advertise specifically to consumers they know will buy their product because Facebook knows what we want.
The reason a free website is valued at $407.3 billion is because it can sell our attention span to the highest bidder. It knows we will only log off for a short while before we begin to wonder what has happened on Facebook since we left.
There is so much information flowing through the website that we need algorithms to sort through it all and show us what we will be most interested in.
This not only feeds the addiction but also gives a preference to content from sources that have similar beliefs as ours. This makes different viewpoints seem more foreign than they are.
It’s easy enough to unfriend someone who is vocal about beliefs that contradict our own, but when we do that we are ignoring the fact that there are different sides to every issue and become more entrenched in our opinions.
As we scroll comfortably through ideas that confirm our own, we grow wary of people with different viewpoints. The world becomes more polarized and fewer people are willing to talk openly about issues that might get political.
With so much content flashing before our eyes, it can be difficult to determine what is real and what’s not. On Facebook, all news articles appear to be equally legitimate and we are on our own to determine what’s factual and what’s fake.
According to a recent study at Stanford University, fake news articles were clicked on and presumably read 760 million times before the 2016 presidential election.
Misinformation can lead people to do bizarre things. One example was the so-called Pizzagate scandal, when a man stormed a Washington pizza place with an AR-15 because he read online that the restaurant was the center of a child pornography ring run by the Clintons.
Turns out it was just a normal pizza place.
Facebook is a platform for anyone to say anything they want regardless of how true or biased it is. While it is a fantastic display of First Amendment rights, it’s also a breeding ground for conspiracy theorists and nut jobs.
Nonetheless, we continue to scroll whenever we get the chance. It’s so easy and convenient to pull out our phones and see what’s new on Facebook that it’s hard to imagine a world without social media.
We will probably never go back to the days when we had to meet someone at a certain place at a certain time or when we would stand empty handed as we wait in a line.
But that doesn’t mean that we need to be constantly entertained by social media. Society functioned perfectly well for centuries before Facebook and people were no less happy in the dark ages of ten years ago.
Today it seems like we need to be constantly connected to maintain social ties, but we don’t. As we grow more obsessed with the online world we will become disconnected from the real one. Log off.
Peter is a junior majoring in journalism and English. What are your thoughts about Facebook usage? Please send comments to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
