Shut It Down (Just For A Week)
Article by Derek Hunter in "Townhall":
Imagine if you could time travel back to the year 1989 and,
aside from telling yourself to buy certain stocks at various times, you
tell people about the technology we have in 2020. What do you think
they’d think about everyone having access to all the world’s information
on a small touchscreen phone in their pockets? They’d likely think
everyone has gotten much smarter and people were more in touch than ever
before. As we all know, they’d be horribly wrong.
You’d
have a hard time explaining to them that the phone part of that phone
would likely be the least used feature on it. It’d be difficult for
people, used to waiting until someone got home before actually being
able to talk with them, to understand why people don’t talk anymore.
Trading speaking for texts would seem stupid. But it is what it is.
After a little while, they’d likely understand it.
What
they wouldn’t understand is social media. Not because the concept is so
bizarre, but because the impact would have them looking at you like you
had an arm growing out of your forehead.
“You mean you
can connect with far-away family, long lost friends and nearly everyone
on the planet, and all people do is whine how unfair everything is,
complain that they’re a victim and try to get people fired?” they’d ask,
and would be justified in doing so.
Social media is ironically named because nothing has
done more to make people anti-social. Whether so many people were jerks
before and just didn’t have the means by which to express themselves on a
mass scale, or whether access to that mass scale turned otherwise
decent people into cancel-monsters, doesn’t matter. The result is the
same.
When people were able to go out to dinner,
concerts, etc., they spent more time filming the band than watching it
so they could post it to their Facebook page, or snapping pictures of
their meals and sending them to Instagram. Because if you don’t post a
picture of your dinner, did you really have it?
Social
media has exposed something in many people’s brains that access to the
accumulated knowledge of our species can’t override or distract from.
The desire to get a reaction, any reaction, from something people post
gave birth to the “social media celebrity,” as sure a sign of the
apocalypse as we’ve ever seen.
When you write about
social media it inevitably turns to bias from the companies. I get it,
and have been the subject of it. Naturally, as Conquest’s Law declared,
“Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will,
sooner or later, become left-wing.” Absolute power corrupts, after all,
absolutely. All these companies have moved further and further to the
left, shadow- or outright-banning conservatives at will.
What to do about that is an argument for
another column, but it’s irrelevant to this one. This is about what
they’ve done to many of us, or at least too many of us to be ignored.
These
websites, whether responsible or not, have become hubs for the worst
parts of human nature. It was always there, but they gave it a home. Now
miserable people spend their days hunting for scalps and scrambling to
find any way to twist something said into something that can get someone
banned, fired or both. It doesn’t matter who the person is or what
their politics are anymore--social media is fast becoming a pool of
starved, frenzied, cannibalistic piranha.
Maybe that’s all they’ll ever be, or maybe it’s all some of us are capable of being. But I don’t think so.
So
I propose this to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and whatever else is
out there that I don’t know about: take a week off. That’s right, take a
week. Spend some time with friends or family, or do whatever it is
you’d do if you had the time. Shut down for seven days. You can do it
for maintenance for an hour or two in the middle of the night, so surely
you can do it for a week.
It would force people to be people again, if only
temporarily. We need a reminder of what it is to be a person, a decent
person, and interact with real people (even socially distanced).
It
would also force the worst people to live with themselves for a while,
to marinate in the rage-fire fueled by instant feedback from people
they’ll never meet but hate anyway. It’ll make narcissists, desperate
for attention, think about what they’re willing to do to get that
attention. And it might make people use their phones as phones again, to
call people and have conversations, even if they’re only about how they
miss trolling people.
A voluntary week off wouldn’t work. I’ve seen enough
episodes of “Intervention” to know forced cold turkey is the only way to
beat the habit.
After that week, switch back on and
see what happens. Maybe nothing will change--maybe people will only have
seven days of vitriol stored up and unleash it. But maybe they won’t be
such jerks, even if only for a short while.
The culture is addicted to this garbage. The heads of
the social media sites are leftists, and left-wing radicals use them to
coordinate their actions through the site. But couldn’t we all use a
week off from that, too?
So, how about this: the first
week of September, flip the switch off. From the 6th through the 12th,
find something else to do. Allow no tweets, no status updates, no
pictures, no videos, nothing. I doubt this will happen--there’s too much
money to be made--but just imagine it. It would be like traveling back
in time--back to when people spoke to each other, paid attention to the
moment and didn’t give a damn if anyone else knew what they were doing
or what they thought about it or anything, and if they wanted to know
they’d have to ask. Living like humans again, if only for a week. Just
imagine it.
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