The World According to a Facebook User
Is the Internet slowly dragging us back to the time when humanity considered itself the center of the Universe?
Excerpt from the chapter “Generation Me” published in the book Atlas of Prejudice: The Complete Stereotype Map Collection
The last century ended with Andy Warhol’s prophecy granting everyone their 15 minutes of fame. The 21st Century turned out to be far more generous. The time restrictions Warhol put on fame are not valid anymore. They were a consequence of the broadcast mentality of the Television Age, when the day had 24 hours and was partitioned among few competing A-listers. Today everybody is a star, simultaneously and perpetually. Even critics.
Critics are not interested in being a corrective force because the whole notion of an established authority is not cool anymore. What’s cool is your hairdo, your gadget, and the rasterized quotes by famous people you share on Facebook and Twitter, with an added personal “wow” at the end. The systematic effort, that vital element of getting things done, has been replaced with the declared intention. Everything is a tap and a click away.
The lack of authority created a vacuum to which we still struggle to adjust. The mind-blowing speed with which information travels leads us to believe that what we see in our newsfeeds is a stream of everything significant going on in the world. Few of us are aware that social networks, content discovery services, and even search engines like Google meticulously try to analyze our habits. By filtering out subjects that are unknown to us, they use algorithms to serve us information tailored specifically to our taste, filling the empty gaps with “useful” automatic recommendations from our contacts.
Internet activist Eli Pariser calls this phenomenon a filter bubble. It could potentially introduce a new kind of world view, a quantum mechanical nightmare where each of us perceives a personalized version of the Universe based on the specific information fed automatically to our brains. It may seem like science fiction but it’s not hard to spot examples which are disturbingly real.
“A world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there’s nothing to learn,” writes Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think.
However, the detrimental effect of the authority vacuum doesn’t always involve a filter bubble. It could appear as a good old misinformation tsunami.
The death of Nelson Mandela on December 5, 2013 created a media storm in which the smallest details were blown out of proportion. Journalists all over the world milked every public statement, trying to captivate the eyes and ears of an audience with a notoriously short attention span.
A day later, attending the memorial service in South Africa, Barack Obama had the audacity to take a selfie with David Cameron and Helle Thorning Schmidt, prime ministers of the UK and Denmark. Hordes of outraged Twitter users voiced their disapproval, copying and sharing false information, according to which the act happened during Mandela’s funeral, an event that was yet to take place. Some British tabloids paid special attention to Michelle Obama, who seemed to frown disapprovingly at the alleged disrespectful behavior of her husband, prompting a debate about the unjust stereotype of the “angry black woman.”
On December 15, 2013 it snowed in the Egyptian capital Cairo for the first time in 112 years. As the news of the extraordinary event spread, pictures of the Sphinx and the Giza pyramids covered in snow were shared more than 10,000 times on Twitter. They later turned out to be fakes but the number of people who found out about it was significantly fewer.
Misinformation spreads with such ease on social networks because everything we see in our newsfeeds is taken at face value. It usually reaches us via friends and family, people who we implicitly trust or feel compelled to agree with. In such a scenario, the open-mindedness, which the Internet is supposed to inspire, can easily turn to mass delusion.
Some delusions are harmless. There is little danger of something bad happening just because you’ve been misled that the snow in Cairo didn’t reach the pyramids, located 20 km southwest of the city.
Things can get scarier when you see your friends sharing bogus medical advice without checking the credibility of the source or consulting a professional. Made-up diseases like “inflammation of the immune system” are diagnosed by people who can barely distinguish a liver from a stomach. In another post, you can be asked to save a little baby whose successful cancer treatment is funded by likes and shares.
The dream of a more informed, elevated society can dramatically degrade into a dystopia where ignorance and narcissism reign supreme. For some, this dreadful outcome is already a reality. Slacktivism is a term describing our addiction to parade values with minimum effort. Want to help a demonstration in Iran? Change your profile picture! Outraged by India criminalizing gay sex? Sign a petition and ask your friends to join in!
The dissonance between declarations and problem solving became especially apparent in many protest movements from the beginning of the decade like Occupy Wall Street in the US or the Indignados in crisis-hit Europe. Both movements demonstrated an amazing ability to mobilize people and organize protests. What they didn’t do was offer successful alternatives to the political order they so enthusiastically condemned.
In the meantime, our obsession with fame turns every just cause worth fighting for into cheap demagogy. A telling example is a recent royal pardon, granted posthumously to UK scientist Alan Turing, who was sentenced to chemical castration in 1954 simply because he was gay. Not a word was uttered about the other 50,000 victims of the Gross Indecency law, many of whom were submitted to the same barbaric treatment.
As the tsunamis of misinformation spread to the most remote corners of the world, our narcissistic idealism grows like a mushroom in freshly piled manure. By condemning everything imperfect, we have become trapped in our own fallibility as human beings. We have forgotten that ideals should be perceived as guidelines, not as attainable goals that can materialize out of thin air.
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An international bestseller, the Atlas of Prejudice has been published in English, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Italian. Its various hardcover, paperback, and electronic editions have sold more than 100.000 copies worldwide!
