The Annoyed Man wrote: ↑Mon May 20, 2019 9:24 am
I recognize the power of social media and used to be very active on it, but I have cut back my engagement in it by about 95% or more. I more or less walked away from Facebook over a year ago, and my life is better for it. I rarely even tweet anything anymore, and I had barely gotten started on instagram before I turned away from social media.
MY reasons for doing so fall into three basic categories:
1. Digital Security: For a bunch of techno-weenies, the folks at Facebook seem remarkably inept at securing their platform and protecting the privacy of their patrons. Twitter is only slightly better. And, the various platform providers' pleas about concern for our privacy are remarkably self-serving, as they’ll gladly sell your data for selectively partisan political purposes. I don’t mind seeing targeted advertising...after all, they ARE a business and are allowed to try and make money off of MY page views, same as any newspaper or magazine. But, I do not want my information either shared with or sold to 3rd parties - particularly that most grasping and intrusive 3rd party of all of them combined....the deep state's illegal and unconstitutional domestic intelligence gathering apparatus.
2. The Echo Chamber: There remains very little left of intelligent conversation on social media. One ends up either engaging with people who largely agree with oneself, or engaging with people whose life's purpose seems to be unfiltered cretinism. There is no
REAL exchange of ideas, and very little attempt at reasoned persuasion. In the anonymity provided by the internet, people seem to feel free to be as toxic as they want, and they feel free to say things to others that IRL would end them up either in jail or the ER, because they know they can get away with it. I’m done with that.
3. Censorship: I don’t mind if a platform provider wants to apply censoring filters - as this forum right here does - which filter out certain profanities or insults, because it can help enforce civil discussion. What I
CANNOT abide by is the censorship of ideas....particularly in the realms of politics, economics, the law, and religion/philosophy. THIS is exactly the disease infecting most of our institutions of higher learning today, and it is resulting in a
dangerously disintegrating corruption of social stability. It’s an incontestable fact that censorship on social media platforms ignores word filtering, and is absolutely partisan in favor of leftist politics, leftist economics, leftist legal theory, and leftist secularism.
In fact, social media might have been a less toxic influence on society if it had come of age 50 years ago, back when people understood self-restraint, had brains, and knew how to use them.
Today, all social media does is to provide a platform for people to display and boast about their shallow worlds, various depravities, and self obsessions - present company excluded, of course.
Yes, social media can be a powerful too. So can be manipulating the energy of the atom. It’s what we do with it that counts; and what we’ve done with social media is to build social atomic bombs.
I choose to (mostly) avoid participating in any of it. These days, I sometimes check in to Facebook to see what family members or close friends are up to. But I have very little to say myself on any of these platforms. Mostly, nobody's
listening anyway.
Who are you talking about? No one, I repeat no one, on this thread has embraced the behavior of Bonnen since he took office as Speaker. In fact, I challenge you to find a single forum member who has said anything positive about Bonnen as Speaker.