Click Bait!

Oh, My God!  The Jolie-Pitt Divorce is getting Ugly!  Nobody saw this coming, but we’re all going to watch it go away, aren’t we?

Oh, My God!  Look at Tiger Woods with no shirt on!  I wonder what he’s advertising?  Have women forgotten that he’s a dickhead?  When you have that much money, does it matter?

Oh, Look!  That lake is mysteriously disappearing!  Wait a minute, haven’t we already seen that?  Like, about a dozen times?

Oh, Look!  The DEA has listed Charlotte’s Web as a Schedule 1 drug because a company wants to monopolize it!  Wait, No!  That’s wrong, the story was a lie!  Gee, what if Facebook looked it up on Snopes before they ran it, rather than leave the work to the readers?

Oh, Look!  Over on the side of my Facebook page!  3500 people are talking about Earl Thomas!  4,000 people are talking about Sarah Michelle Gellar, and two hundred and forty thousand of them are talking about Elton John talking about George Michael!  Don’t any of them have anything better to do?  How does Facebook know who we’re talking about?  Oh, Look, there’s More!

Ooh!  I must do this quiz, to find out how smart I am!  Oh, Look!  There’s a puzzle!  A Survey!  Why is it 2:00 in the afternoon and I’m still in my bathrobe?

I don’t have time for this shit.  Especially since it is becoming all too obvious that George Orwell got it all wrong.  The dystopian world he pictured in 1984 did not look beyond the TV screen and see the Smartphone waiting to give us even more Big Brother than we could have imagined.  Beyond that, they’ve found a way to make us like it!  Here, click on this, Like that, Share that with your friends!

This is no dreary world of shortages, unhappiness, and gray concrete.  This world is full of color, and sound, and action, right out of Shakespeare: “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing!”

Meanwhile, the planet continues to spin on its slightly wobbly axis, the bombs continue to fall, and people continue to die under them, like always.  And, of course, we’re paying for everything.

We’re picking up the tab for those bombs, and the jets out of which they drop, and the training of the people that fly them and do the dropping.  We’re paying for all the click-bait on Facebook, too.  Every time we get sucked into an attractive headline, or a picture of an attractive person with much skin exposed, somewhere a cash register dings.  The cost of those ads is called “overhead”, and is rolled into the price of the goods.  Quite often, if something is advertised on Facebook at a discounted price, it turns out that is a rip-off, the actual identical product can be found on Amazon or elsewhere for half the so-called “discount”.  So, the corollary rule to the one that says the Lottery is a Tax on Those Who Are Bad at Math is this:  Facebook is where friends go to find a product that brings them joy, but they want to pay even more!

I like to use Facebook to keep up with the friends and extended family, see what the kids are up to, what milestones have been born or celebrated.  I also like to use it to share my own stories from time to time, at the risk of inviting comment or criticism.  What I don’t like is when a useful app like Facebook becomes an avenue to distract me from the truth, or tell me lies, or feed me bullshit, or cost me money.

What I realize is that it’s up to me to control what shows up on my page.  When one of my friends continually dumps bullshit or fake news on my timeline, they get unfollowed.  When ads pop up that annoy me, those companies get blocked.  And above all, I recognize Facebook for the ultimate time waster that it is, and never, ever click on the bait that appears, the pop-up ads, the sponsored posts.  Each one spawns a dozen.

The other thing is that, scattered among the click bait and fake news, there are posts from real people telling the truth about what is going on in the world.  And that is the other thing that Orwell did not see, that instant electronic communication can also enable massive change in the world, can keep us talking to each other and sharing our truths.  It gives one the hope that a revolution in the sense that we can decide as a people to stop dropping bombs on each other, and that the world does not consist of us and them, that the shared best interests of all humans include peace and freedom and a right to happiness can come about because we all share the truth as it happens, and we don’t have to kill each other to do it.  That’s where our friends come in.  We trust each other to speak the truth, and share it when we find it.

I think, at the end of the day, that is what it’s all about.  :-{)}