Hero with a thousand Facebooks

by Paul Kandarian

Sally Field once famously and breathlessly said, “You like me! You really, really like me!” to a few thousand people at the Oscars.

That was 1985. When counting TV viewers, she said it to 38.7 million people. Not bad. Flash forward to the Facebook era. “Baby Shark Dance” in 2016 had 11.8 billion views – yes with a B – making the most annoying song ever created not just viral but pandemic, which if it’s not a category for clickbait, it really should be.

Facebook is insidious, to say the least, including the chasing-your-tail way of how if you block one ad from ever appearing on your feed for the rest of eternity, you’ll instantly get 10 more just like it for the same length of time – a platform that’s a festering sewer of cheesy unstoppable advertisements and ambulance-chasing shadowy lawyer posts, home to pathetic pathological and dangerous liars and bullies and brain-dead spreaders of complete b.s. – some becoming president – and an infinite supply of cute-kitten photos.

And we cannot stay away. Myself included.

Why are we so addicted to Facebook and find it impossible to stay away from divulging every bit of minutia of every move we make (again, myself included)?

For the age-old reason that used to happen in very small doses every so often: instant gratification!

In the olden days (preInternet in general, pre-social media in particular), if you wanted someone to like what you said you had to 1) actually know the person, 2) actually talk to the person, and 3) actually like the person (more or less). You did this face-toface, on the phone or, wicked old school, in a letter in those quaint days of snail mail before the word “mail” was elongated by being prefaced by a small “e.”

And indeed, if you wrote an actual letter, or left a message on an answering machine that used tape and beeped (remember those? I barely do), you had to wait for a response, sometimes for hours, days, or weeks – all interminable amounts of time.

Now, you write something on Facebook and hit “post,” by the time your finger leaves the mouse, someone has hit an emoji reflecting their response to your post, a boring thumbs-up or a loving heart, or maybe a caring face or one that says they’re amused or sad or astonished or angry. Or if they’re being sarcastic or denigrating (tough to tell the difference in the cold conversation social media embodies), they’ll leave a big brown curly smiling turd.

“Oh, today I bought a new pair of socks and had a lovely latte downtown with an old friend,” one may post and wait for the likes to mount up – and when they don’t, one gets depressed.

“Oh, isn’t so-and-so politician/business leader/ sports figure/you-name-it a complete piece of crap for corruption/greed/acting the diva/you-name-it?” one may post and when the likes mount up, one gets an enormous, albeit false, sense of their true worth as a human being.

In an article in the wonderfully named Brain World Magazine, Dr. Deborah Serani, a lecturer, professor, therapist, and presumably big-brained person, says “Facebook is the millennium’s new water cooler,” a pretty apt description. She said even though it’s a virtual, not face-to-face, design, “it serves as a way for us to catch up on the latest trends, share milestones, learn about juicy gossip or live vicariously through the experience of others.”

And hasn’t it always been thus? Haven’t we always done that because we’re human and tribal and need to feel good about ourselves and help each other survive, just in a much smaller, more intimate, and slower way?

Not only does Facebook give us a way to keep up with the Joneses, the article says, it’s a way to keep track of the Joneses, providing us with a new social capital that evolution at warp speed has birthed. And not for the best.

Social media has given us the attention we seek, making the world seem much smaller yet bigger at the same time by isolating us from the most important facet of human connection: actually being together. It’s no surprise that the poor souls who have social disorders or mental illness find themselves competing for the virtual thumbprint of approval and not finding it genuinely and constantly, often feel driven to a depth of self-worthlessness that compels them to end what they feel is a miserable existence.

A friend of mine, Val Walker, wrote a terrific book about this, called 400 Friends and No One to Call: Breaking Through Isolation and Building Community, in which she calls social isolation “a growing epidemic,” one studied by a 2014 National Science Foundation report which found the number of Americans with no close friends tripling since 1985. Her book is a rare wealth of good information on how to break that isolation and find support in community – as we’d done for millennia before social media. Books like hers are an essential step in corralling the emotional madness that places like Facebook have unleashed.

But meanwhile, Facebook and all social platforms open to the public, unjuried and unfettered, are unapologetically here to stay, for better or, more realistically, for worse. How do we get back to feeling truly accepted and loved – a sense that Facebook provides so falsely and so well and so lucratively? Maybe we can. Maybe we cannot.

With a tip of the hat to The Who and the new constitution, take a bow and hit “like” for the new revolution, smile and grin and click the heart emoji at the change all around, folks, cause the new boss ain’t just like the old boss. He’s much, much, much worse.