Facebook Makes you Stupid

Over the past few years, Facebook and other social networking sites have been changing our diet of sensory input. While there are so many things I love about this technology, it is, of course, a mixed bag. As I moved around quite a bit, I have friends strewn across the globe, and I appreciate the ability to converse with them effortlessly. However, the ease of access to and constant barrage of people's untempered thoughts has been changing the way I see friendship and my friends. Our ease of access to each other has, to a degree, devalued friendship. Familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt.

Seriously, I should know better.

I have recently unsubscribed to all of my friend’s newsfeeds. I continue to be on Facebook, probably as much as I was, but in a different way. This was an effort to make communication more meaningful, as I need to take some action to see individuals' status updates, however slight that effort may be. Even in this limited capacity, Facebook is still radically more convenient than any other socialization facilitator the Earth had previously seen.

Overall, this has been pretty helpful. My general mood has improved, and I no longer feel obligated to spend the first hour or so after waking up every day making sure I’ve read every status update that occurred while I slept. I check my friend’s pages when I want, and, when I get pissed off by looking at one of my more radical friend’s feeds, I have no one to blame but myself.

Even with this online reclusiveness, I am still privy to instances of hideous displays of dumb-fuckery. Frankly, Facebook is beginning to resemble a Petri dish full of virulent new strains of stupidity. One of the most baffling tendencies that struck me today was the desire for people to proclaim that they have nothing to proclaim.

"Dear Diary, this page left intentionally blank."

"Hello friend, you have said something that doesn’t matter to me in the slightest."

"For the sake of posterity, I wish it to be known that I am uninvolved with this information."

It's as if someone states "Hey, I have a plate of delicious sandwiches," and someone runs from another room to tell everyone they aren't hungry. Poster is utilizing Facebook well by offering useful information to his or her friends, and then someone replies with utterly useless bullshit.

The phenomena of people who simply wish to hear the sounds of their own digital voice is a novel innovation
of idiocy. In this climate of devalued communication, people don’t seem to embrace the fact that no one gives a shit about what you have to say unless it aligns with what the observer already believes. We only want to hear statements that reinforce our own opinions, and, even if we usually respect a person, if that person deviates from our closely-held dogma, we will rail and scream at them until they agree with us or lose the will to argue.

If you are positing a null position, it becomes painfully obvious that you are simply trying to remind people that you exist without providing any reason for those people to give a fuck about that fact. You are reminding us of exactly how profoundly useless you are. You do yourself a greater disservice than the people whose informational waters you are polluting.

Stop it.

Now, a lot of people might call me a hypocrite on this matter, and I will admit to Facebook pollution. I post a lot of videos, news articles, quotes, and stupid pictures. I post almost all of them from other friends or from reddit. I in no way believe that doing so makes me seem incisive or on the cutting edge of modernity. The crap I regurgitate is nothing new, and is, almost exclusively, NOT original content. (I am fantasizing about changing that, though, hence the reworked blog.) The fact is, I see cute, funny, enlightening, or upsetting things on reddit, and then I post them to my Facebook so that I may engage my friends in conversation about the topic de jour so that I don’t have to talk to the increasingly terrible people on reddit.

Much as my reduced tolerance for idiocy has caused my partial withdrawal from Facebook, my general contempt for redditors has grown unchecked. Were my disgust and disappointment to manifest in physical form, I would explode into some hideous Akira-monster and envelop Neo Tokyo with my hate-fat. Seriously, who downvotes a puppy?