On Facebook and wasted time: a plea for the future of a great social technology
I guess I should get off Facebook, at least for the purpose of writing anything. I think its function is partly to cause people like me to waste their time. This is because it is a platform designed partly to give people who like to say things a place to do so, with a guaranteed audience of people who can read it (though they might or might not) that is small and inconsequential.
The advantage I find is that there are constant provocations to reply with an opinion. The disadvantage has to do with the fact that the opinions I am replying to when I state my own are usually (though not necessarily) of little consequence.
Facebook gives people a kind of "social network." It allows for both of what I take to be the two main kinds of social interaction today: (a) sharing and participating for the enjoyment of being-with others, and (b) engaging in discussions on topics of genuine interest and (potential) consequence.
It is like a classroom discussion at a not very good college. It is like such a discussion where there are a few bright pupils or seminar participants and others who say things that are dull or do not care.
Addiction to it could drive a person like me to becoming an semi-idiotic pedant. The pedant only says things that are obvious, at least to everyone but himself, and does so ponderously as if they are important. The idiot speaks only to and for himself.
I think it is good to speak to oneself. Thinking classically was that. I also think that philosophy, a discipline that I both find interesting and enjoy, does often drive people to think about things that most people would consider obvious. This must point to a characteristic liability in the field.
I could have become a professor, and did not. I did become a writer. Facebook gave me a platform that I generally used to develop thoughts that, when I considered that they were any good, I would further develop perhaps, and post on my blog, which also has few readers.
The alternative for people like me is probably to keep a personal journal and become habituated to not speaking to most people, because most people do not say things that I would find very interesting, since I find interesting mostly ideas, artworks, and discussions of them, and otherwise, talking to neighbors, including those on Facebook, may be a way to not be lonely and/or bored (I find it interesting that on this platform and places like it these two things may become assimilated), but otherwise, is either a waste of time, or something useful only if it has some other purpose.
Facebook is not a town hall. What if it were? Could a democratic social movement transform it and things like it into places of meaningful and consequential discussions among the citizens of the world speaking one or more shared languages that all of us (people in the world) at least potentially are? What would that require? The technology is not to blame; it is a great one in what it makes possible. It is being used to link people in inconsequential groupings (also limited in size) which only have one definite and intended purpose: to use the things people say, connect to, and "like" (or notice that they dislike) to sell them commodities that they presumably may like because of similarities (of almost any kind) with other things they have liked (or shown interest in) already.
I find that talking to an audience of whatever composition, and saying things that to me are intelligible, this is not the same as just writing in my personal journal. Sometimes I think more clearly this way. I realize that it is really only a bit more than a prop.
Meaningful discussion with thoughtful friends do sometimes happen.
It is not for me a total waste of time. But it has wasting time as one of its in-built liabilities.
It would be far more interesting, and useful, both, if it were organized differently. The internet provides a new public sphere. The form it will eventually take may well be subject to changes, and be now uncertain.
Imagine what we could do with such technologies. If they were less (or not at all?) driven by the desire for profit.
When ideas have market value (or "exchange value"), their utility is such that their meaning tends to be effaced in their purely exchangeable and monetary valuation.
At the same time, the world of ideas and the world of the arts have neither of them ever been reduced to mere monetary exchange value (and surplus value or profit). Consider: while academia is now arguably being destroyed (it has partly been) by commodification, and in various ways, including the running of most public and private universities in this country on a corporate business model, no one has ever quite reduced the book market or the market in art forms like cinema and painting to mere monetary value. These worlds are driven by money and profits, and hard to envision without it (though this could be done withe more involvement of government agencies or even worker cooperatives, as was partly the case with the film industry in Poland under Communism, which was so fruitful partly for that reason), yet the value even of artworks at art auctions is still dependent on the valuation of artworks partly by curators, critics, and other experts in not or not only the business of art but also its meaning and interest. The meaning of an artwork or a statement is not reducible to the addressee's appreciation of it, though that is at least in principal important in the sense that with no addressees who could appreciate it (whether they do in fact or not), it would have no meaning. No one bought many of Van Gogh's paintings, but that is not important in deciding their value. They have value as art works because someone could find them to have a meaning. This meaning is disclosive or revelatory. It says something, and it says something, typically that those who appreciate what it says find important and unusually so, about the world that those people live in. This is why so many of us like art of whatever kind. We may think it helps us live in the world, maybe by understanding who we are or what the world and the people around us are like, or something else that is useful to understand. Art relates meaningfully to the not-art character of the world we live in and the way we find ourselves living in it. It is terribly important for this reason and has only become more so.
The world we live in is terrible, and many of us desperately want to understand better how it is, what it is like, how we can make sense of it, how we can live in it, and even what we can do to make it more good or whatever. This is one reason why (the other perhaps being only the anodyne reason that we all like to be entertained and not bored) why so many people love and need things like television, cinema, and pop music (and not only newspapers). Clearly, discussions among fellow citizens of the world we live in -- about news events and their meaning and artworks and theirs -- are of great importance, too. There is too little talk about them. Social media can make possible both things. There could be some kind of grand town hall.
As with most promising technological inventions, the profit interest has both driven their development and popularization, and limited their usefulness. It tends to limit them in ways that result in the lives of a great many of us being more frustrating and less creative, interesting, entertaining even, yet not only that, than at present.
I would like to both see the social media become public utilities and somehow promote the idea that the artworks most of us (in the half of the world that has some leisure time and some access to information technologies and through them, arts and entertainment; vs. the other half that are peasants and often miserably impoverished, sometimes victims of wars and organized barbarism) so much need and love -- become objects of discussion. I am a critic, and I believe in critical discussion. I find that almost no one else does, and that includes people who love the same artworks.
Perhaps as the world reopens I will go off Facebook completely, or, more likely, try to wean myself away from it and towards better venues. I have learned some things in the interim, including by interacting with people who don't like to argue. I will never understand that. The philosopher in me, the Jew in me, the radical in me, the art lover in me, and the talker in me, who has spent more time lately writing to an empty "whoever" on the internet than arguing with fellow drinkers in pubs, cannot like that. I wish more people liked thinking out loud. If it seems to you a vice, I admit it can be. It isn't only that. Nor, of course, is writing as I do worth being downgraded as a mere confession. You know how this works: the accused person on the witness stand finally breaks down and says what he really feels and wanted, and this Rosebud, as it falls from his hands, supposedly proves that he is guilty of the crime. Nonsense: only in a common law business society that has little place for the life of the mind (outside the provincial wildlife preserves or reservations that are our colleges and universities?) do people only talk about what they are tragically guilty of. Indeed, the life of the citizen of our world is tragic, comic, can be narrated, can be theorized, can be discussed, but that would only be a crime if your job in life or role as citizen is just to keep quiet and mind your own business. The good things in life in our world are often found provided by private or publicly owned organizations, but a life is not a business. As God is not in the places and times of the world, but place and time in the divine, so too business is in life, as long as its activities are organized as they are, but a life is not a department of a business.