FACEBOOK AGAIN
Years ago Facebook started out connecting me with friends I’d lost contact with, a way of creating community, and it was marvelous. Human connection is a wonderful thing. A rich social life is supposed to be essential to my making it into very old age. Facebook was helping.
But the purpose of Facebook and Instagram is to make money for the shareholders. To do that people have to be persuaded to look at advertisements. To get people hooked on advertisements you have to target individuals through algorhythms that link people to the things they might be interested as the lure.
The film I saw on prostate health yesterday was aimed at me. A 14 year old girl would never see it, she would see ads on ways to eliminate pimples, which I would never see.
This manipulation is possible with this new technology, the Internet, that appeared about 30 years ago. But I am realizing that it is not the technology, the Internet, that is at fault. What the technology allows is for people to connect with other people in all kinds of new ways. It is the human desire to connect with other people and to persuade them that you are right and worth listening to, that is the heart of the problem. It allows people to connect with people in a way that is sometimes life affirming but it also allows people to lie and to cheat and to spread conspiracy theories. It is human nature that is the problem, not the Internet.
More than that, the misinformation that is spread may not be misinformation at all to the person who spreads it. They actually believe what they are saying. Trump isn’t lying when he pictures himself as Jesus, he is telling us the truth about who he feels he is. He is not lying when he says that sleepy Joe Biden is the worst president that ever was, he is telling what he thinks is the truth. He is not lying about being a genius, he believes he is.
The guy in a doctor’s suit who is the team doctor for the Boston Celtics is not lying about his concoction which will shrink my prostate, he is convinced he will make my life better and is simply being rewarded by making a small profit on the special concoction. Neither he nor Trump are con men. They are sincere.
But this creates a great problem for me. Who am I to believe, this guy or my own doctor who prescribes saw palmetto for my prostate, a substance that the TV doctor says is useless.
Which one is spreading false information. And how am I to tell? Maybe I will refuse to be conned and won’t believe either one of them. Where will that put me? How am I to decide between saw palmetto and the TV doctors concoction? Pretty soon I will give up on finding the truth and will believe anything that feels right to me.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 