Face: (noun) the front part of a person’s head from the forehead to the chin, or the corresponding part in an animal. Book: (noun) a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers. Facebook: verb or adjective? An action or description? No-one seems to know for sure; but the key feature of the nomenclature of this virtual reality world is to “like, dislike or poke” at whatever the claimed 1.2 billion users deem fit to judge as such.
In the week it was revealed that 300, 000 migrants (babies, small children, the elderly and youth) had fled to Europe from the war ravaged middle east (most smuggled out from their respective countries by those who embrace the dark side of entrepreneurship,) and an additional 72 of them had suffocated to death in a truck in Austria, Mark Zukerberg, the front man for his self-proclaimed brave new virtual world, celebrated the somewhat irrelevant claim that one billion users had connected to his online website. He also claimed that soon “the whole world will be connected’.
Forgive me Mr. Zukerberg, but prior to your foray into the world of ‘other people’ we had been connected. Long before the telegraph, telephone and internet people had devised the most ingenious ways to communicate and connect with one another-regardless of the ‘speed’ of such communications. The world was very much connected-more authentically so, I would argue.
First there was speech-the most innovative astounding way we developed as a species to connect with one another over half a million years ago- we went from grunts and groans (sadly back in vogue on Facebook and in online communications and in daily conversation with those who’ve lost the ability to communicate outside of the social media and twitter-sphere) to developing verbal communications which helped shape further more sophisticated, authentic ways of connecting with one another. Signs, symbols and writing also facilitated a wonderful and innovative medium to connect us globally. The oral tradition, smoke signals, ‘the bush telegraph’, cave paintings, architecture from previous civilizations (when ISIS doesn’t blow them up), letters, postal services and newspapers (still in vogue today), and the various developments of transport throughout history which have enabled us to communicate about ‘new worlds’ and to connect with them (often with the complex negative results which we’ve inherited today) have connected humanity.
So, Mr. Zukerberg it is somewhat disingenuous to aspire to “connect the world’ when the world is already connected. But perhaps we should examine more closely your idea of a connected world. It is a world reduced to “a like, a dislike and a poke”, it is a crude reductionist understanding of the needs of human beings to connect authentically, empathically, and genuinely with one another. Even the name ‘Facebook’ connotes a pejorative understanding of people and the way they’ve evolved to communicate with one another. Yet it is peddled by the wealtherati as a means to their end: to make money at the expense of the naive and vulnerable who yearn for meaning in the brave new 21st century world of the digital technocrats.
Truth be told it is difficult to authenticate the actual number of genuine users of the Facebook website. There are duplicate accounts, company and advertising accounts, spammers, and people who’ve set up accounts for their pets (oh yes, we’ve evolved to such a higher order of species that Cecil the deceased Zimbabwean Lion ranks higher than the poor and disenfranchised without a Facebook account).
Cellan-Jones (2012) estimated that there were in excess of 83 million fake Facebook accounts. It would be reasonable to speculate that in the 3 years since that report the exponential increase of fake accounts is anywhere between 90-140 million.
The world forgets that Facebook was founded on a betrayal of friendships. Its founder developed a network initially used to humiliate people-especially young college woman at one of the world’s most prestigious learning institutions. Has it changed significantly today? People require more than a “like, dislike, or a poke” to feel appreciated and valued. The founder of Facebook along with those who’ve embraced its dangerous compliant rules of hyper-visibility and the delusion that we can all be friends forget that there are complex social phenomena and mutual understandings, based on a moral and ethical understanding of what it means to be a human being. These include love, compassion, and empathy without which we cannot develop and maintain close intimate friendships and relationships. Such essential human qualities and attributes ensure that we can delineate between the importance of celebrating one billion users in any one day on Facebook, and the death of 72 war refugees (babies, men women and children) left to suffocate to death in a smugglers truck on a highway in 21st century Europe.