http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/technology/shunning-facebo…038;st=cse
]]>It is laughable how many people in the world don’t recognize this as an eternal verity, however many people got into the same home, inn or castle bed in the middle ages (amazing how people in the old days could ignore snoring! not to mention smells, coughing, presumably even sex).
Americans in particular are living in a fantasy world where they think developed personalities can live in (metaphorical) houses with all the windows and doors wide open to the street, and Facebook’s sweaty Mark Zuckerberg exploits this to the tune of $80 billion (is it now?) . Why are Americans so naive? My theory is that it is because the culture is so commercialised now and so media fed that the individual personality doesn’t get much chance to develop any more even in childhood, which is now subject to sugar commercials even for tots. Individual personality needs individual scope to develop.
Facebook and Twitter offer shallow illusions of personal connection which amount to nothing much compared with even brief personal contact in real life. Why is everyone so excited about it? It seems to be because that’s all they have these days. Virtual life is all a lot of kids growing up in the suburbs and cultural wastelands on the US hinterland have available to develop their individuality. Long live New York, where people do without cars, even, because accessibility to other people and real live events including even the sidewalk is available without owning one.
Yes people can do without privacy if all they are are shallow sketches of their potential selves, but it is a trend which hopefully will not survive very long, or humanity will not survive it in our current form. Even today as I say middle class people in the US typically seem to have to get to their fifties before they develop even a semblance of the individuality of expression that the rest of the world developed naturally by the age of five or seven until recently, though they are all becoming Americanized too, commercially speaking, it seems.
Anyone who disagrees with this may not have met the kind of people I am talking about, but you can see the difference in travel shows on TV. Compare Globetrekker with Rick Steve when they visit a country or city — Rick Steves will chattily and superficially line up all the consumption goods for you to taste with the culture as a consumption good too, whereas Globetrekker with feature some cute girl exploring the same material expanded to interaction with all the people in playful friendly and not too serious fashion where often the individual character they meet is as much a subject of attention as what they sell.
These are two worlds folks and one is Facebook and the other is the village in which we naturally live and my feeling is that the former will be conquered by the latter, because humans don’t change needs and desires in 100 years what they have built up over thousands. We all need to be as individual as we can be to be happy and that means a high level of protection from those who do not accept us completely, and we cant pretend that they are our friends just because stripped of all or virtually all social signals they work as “friends” on Facebook.
Nothing wrong with trusting other people to be as openminded and generous as we are but as they say, keep one hand on your wallet when among strangers.
]]>