We need to talk about the means we use to try and push important issues. Facebook is a great place where good ideas come and die.
“We’re bringing awareness to this issue.”
You’re bringing awareness to a place where you’re sharing the same space with click-bait videos, fake news, selfies, memes, and ads to things you’re never going to buy. Your “cause” is a needle in a entertainment haystack. Attention spans are short. Your arena is being shared with mindless and thoughtless information. That is how Facebook was intended: “At work bored, what’s everyone doing?” “I hate school, what’s the point?” “Got a date tonight, anyone know a good sushi joint?”
Then it became this monster that feeds us information with variations of it’s validity. We pound our senses with crap and when something else comes along that’s deserves the attention it beckons people will still mistake it for more crap.
“We’re bringing awareness to this issue.”
Not everyone uses Facebook. And the people who use Facebook are your friends. And your friends know you and what you like and you know them and what they like. This is why we share things on Facebook. Because people will most likely agree with it. You’re spoon feeding people information who are already going to agree with you. So it becomes this circle, this spiral of talk that starts as a status and ends in the comments. Then just another thing people scroll by on their way to more videos of food being made and puppies doing silly things.
Not everyone uses Facebook. Forty-two percent of American’s do not use Facebook. That’s one hundred and twenty six million Americans who do not use Facebook. This is a significant bulk of society who will have no idea that a change must be made if the only talk about it is being held on a social network they don’t even have.
I do not oppose the cause. I oppose the method.
Facebook is a quick sand. A digital graveyard for ideas to come and die. If they come back it’s always for a short amount of time before they’re forgotten again. We’ve been on Facebook for ten years, guys. How many more complicated causes have to be simplified down to a status? I would think some of my Facebook friends would be brave enough to record a video of their face and voice sharing such an important message, but they don’t.
They share a status. Copy and paste. Personal anecdote. Repeat.
People need to see the faces and the hear these voices behind those pushing change. Facebook is a Novocaine for important issues and causes. Facebook is making people numb because it’s the same thing over and over again and over again. People need to connect with what you’re saying, they have seen a billion of your statuses, but how many videos of you talking about something you truly care about? Feeling what you’re saying and not just reading it? Understanding through your emotions?
Share your voice, use your face, use your words, give people something more solid to hold onto than just another status they’re going to forget.
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