“Social Media,” The Ironic Tag
Social Jerks
Mark Zuckerberg was a social jerk. According to the book, The Accidental Billionaires, and the film, The Social Network, the college sophomore that blazed the trail of “Social Media,” had the social skills of a barbed-wire fence. Tactless, self-absorbed, and obnoxiously demeaning in his arrogance, he was sensitive only to the confines of his own brilliant mind.
The girl he was trying to date at the time of his invention, said that dating him was “like dating a StairMaster.” She told him, “talking to you is like talking to a computer, it’s exhausting!”
After repeated abuse from his CPU-like personality, she finally ended their relationship telling him, “you’re probably going to be a very successful computer person, but you are going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd, but that won’t be true,…it will be because you’re an ***hole!.”
This leprous condition of a nineteen-year-old woefully lacking in social maturity is what ended up changing the world and its approach to socializing. [1]
Social Adolescence
Crushed by her rejection, the young man fled to his Harvard dorm room that night, coddling his freshly nuked emotions. He retreated to beer and the refuge of the world he felt safest in, the computer world. It was there that he feverishly redirected his distress by creating a new website, “The Facebook.”
The origin of “Social Media” was not a reach for greater social proclivity. It was a pubescent reaction to the vexations of teenage dating. The course of modern socialization was reset by the same panic found in an acne breakout. It was youthful anxiety that redefined the way we socialize.
The tag could not be more ironic. “Social Media” is in fact the substitute for socializing.
Underdeveloped in his ability to interact maturely, face to face, in the real world with a breathing flesh and blood female, Mark invented an alternative outlet for himself. Unfortunately, it became the platform for all the socially underdeveloped and distorted. Within two hours, his new website received over twenty-two thousand hits.
Social Resentment
As he was drinking himself drunk that night, Zuckerberg designed a program to siphon off the poison from his freshly wounded ego and pour it back into the event that had dumped and stumped him. The specially gifted, are especially tormented when their special gifts can’t pinch-hit for their social impotence.
On his new website, he displayed girls for comparing and rating their “hotness,” and “not ness,” allowing anyone online to play games with their photos which he had hacked from the websites of various campus houses.
Simultaneously, the computer whiz-kid was blogging on his blog page, “Zuckonit,” comparing girls to farm animals, and childishly mocking the female that had just rejected him. He ridiculed her bra size, her family, her school, and her classmates, calling her names and making fun of her. He taunted his feminine nemesis in cyberspace like a brat on the 4th-grade playground.
Instead of learning his lesson in social growth, the teenage genius brought his juvenile anger to the altar of the “computer god,” and sacrificed the innocence of others for his own relief. Somehow the humiliation of others, widely published for all to see, brought consolation. The entire world was then equipped to do the same.
This new kind of virtual abuse irrationally compensates for social powerlessness. It’s now literally at the fingertips of anyone with a keyboard. The Trojan Horse that brought it in has the ironic tag, “Social Media.”
Social Menace
Cyber-stealth is currently piping out the greatest flow of social raw sewage and disinformation in history. The blood sport of cyber-bullying inflicts every human heartache up to and including murder by suicide. These aren’t just “kid games.”
The Tyler Clementi Foundation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dc56kmpfjw
The “for-profit” enterprise that trades “clicks” for advertising dollars flourishes in the business of shame trafficking. The culture of humiliation fed by the lust for that kind of entertainment has reached “bubonic” levels that threaten everyone. Trolling is a new “past time.” So far, it’s unstoppable and lethal with no cure in sight.
Social Dwarves and Zombies
Facebook’s Founder demonstrated that social inadequacy is effectively disguised by hiding it inside a pretend digital persona. The shame of relieving oneself of such severe social frustration is concealed by operating out of the “privacy stall” of online anonymity.
Social cowardice and social laziness are thereby being synthesized at “anabolic” levels. Social growth is currently stunted. Social fitness is at a historic low in an entire generation due to lack of social exercise. Simple conversation is a lost skill that’s become impossible for many, terrifying for some.
The phone dependent are like social zombies, dysfunctional and dead to all human interaction save what comes through the handheld “rectangle.”
The counterfeiting of tangible interaction with real people is breeding a population of social dwarves.
Social Reality
Contrastingly, the rewards of vital social life involve some courage and some investment because a genuine relationship includes some risk and work. Social courage is developed, as are all social skills. Love can’t be uploaded. Conversing can’t be learned by typing. Trust doesn’t come in an “App.” Intimacy isn’t in videos.
“Social Media” is the bypass of all such exercises not facilitation of them. All social vulnerability, cost, and inconvenience are conveniently avoided at the push of a button. “Social Media” incubates social retardation, not social maturation.
Awkwardness and fear of embarrassment in social interaction with people are natural. But facing the elementary challenges of interpersonal relationships is an essential part of life’s basic training. It’s called growing up and in the end, it’s good for you. In fact, it’s part of the “good stuff” that enriches life and makes you a better person.
Disconnecting The World
“Connecting the world” was the ingenious marketing banner for Zuckerberg’s company. But it’s only an advertising slogan. Sure, for communication, the internet can be the greatest invention since the pencil. But connecting screen monitors, keyboards and digital contacts isn’t the same thing as intimacy. Intimacy with your computer is not intimacy with a human being.
Opportunity for Maturity
Rightly responded to, Mark Zuckerberg’s break-up experience could have resulted in a lifetime payoff in character Gold. That marvelous potential lies in every social exchange, whether it’s in dating, relating to a co-worker, family members, neighbors, the checkout clerk, or thousands of other social situations. These are the true riches. They are worth the small price of our selfishness.
A personal inventory, an apology, a resolution to make adjustments might have resulted in a better Mark, maybe even a better Facebook. Instead, a new hiding place for social delinquents was created, complete with a secret sniper’s nest for executing mischief and cruelty upon others.
The Irony
Later, Mark would courageously attempt to humble himself and express his heart to his lost love face to face. His previous digital expressions, however, deafened her to any value in his spoken words. The irony of the tag, “Social Media” is here amplified to unmistakable, heartbreaking volume. [2]
That is what the angry do now days!
Compensations for real social dynamics, whether fantasized, digitized, or otherwise, only stunt growth in character and social skills. The counterfeit is displacing the legitimate. It’s retarding all of us.
Russ Moe 11/23/2018 hedoesallthings@gmail.com www.hedoesallthings.com
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i3eUjeE0Pc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a54ZcQXfxV4