Facebook is now not only a means of communication between you and your friends, it is also a great marketing tool, a news source as well as an online space where people of the same interests from all over the world can find each other. To me, it seems like Facebook reached the point of being ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’. Of course, it is convenient to have most of the social and informational activities placed in one easy-to-use application. Nevertheless, it feels like we stuck in this little ‘meme of the day’ bubble sharing videos of funny cats while at the same time being deeply moved by the post about homeless children in Syria.
It looks like we stopped social evolution, because every day my news feed is just a mixture of funny animals and sad newspapers stories. Do I learn anything from it? No. I am ensuring myself (every day) that animals can be funny and that (every day) fathers kill their kids, politicians are cowards and cars crash on motorways. I am certainly convinced, that if I have seen any of these posts once a year – not once a day, I would not lose much. Probably, even gain few spare minutes to write more articles on my blog.
We have reached an era of being a passive audience, which is fed with all the possible information the world can handle, without any type of filtration – straight into a device held in our pockets or hands at all times. But this is not the worst thing. The main problem is that our society is completely happy about it. It is us pressing likes or entering clickbait links, causing this sort of posts to become popular.
We have entered 2018, is it a right time for a change?
I would like to show you how the new ‘Facebook’ could look like. I also welcome opinions from any of you, maybe we could inspire each other to create a brand new platform? Maybe it already exists and just needs some more attention to be brought towards it?
Firstly, the news feed should be revised. Most of the ‘news’ is not even a news. The brand of a new Meghan Markle’s jacket is hardly a news at all. We are unnecessarily covered by tons of information, which tend to manipulate our perception of the world. The better social media would encourage us to spend some valuable time exploring the world as its really is. For example, it should let us find out about daily life in Zimbabwe before we encounter its political news.
Imagine commuting to work in a bus and scrolling through hundreds of memes, half of them being the ones you have seen the day before already. What did you gain through that journey? A smile… maybe. Now imagine the same amount of time spent on tagging your friends under one of the Rembrandt’s paintings. Reading a description to understand its historical background. Scrolling up to click on ‘Leiden, Netherlands’ to discover the place where a large collection of Rembrandt’s work is placed.
What did you gain from that journey?
You managed to see a work of one of the most praised artists of Early Modern Europe. You shared it with your friend. In addition, you found out about a new city, which you probably would like to explore during your next trip to Amsterdam.
This way, we would come across so many interesting information, become curious, learn how to rest and relax without getting brainless. We could exchange real news, books, plays, songs, history, ideas, professional relationship advices, medical novelties, science breakthroughs and many maaaany more in much better, productive way.
What would happen if we replace ‘vines’ fashion with a fashion for Ted Talks? Or ‘The most idiotic comments’ fashion into the one of ‘grammatically correct 2 lines’ of an actual discussion? Why things which would probably make us stronger, more clever, witty as well as psychologically healthier are not appealing at the moment? Because there is not enough people who are willing make a change. We can be a better performing society if we make it into a new trend. Let’s create a fashion for better videos, wiser news, good quality discussions and let’s wait for a revolution! Afterwards, the hours spent on Facebook will never feel like a procrastination again.
You could ask, if I am against Facebook’s reality, why do I still use it? Because overall, it is a very good and powerful social media, which in my opinion could be slightly improved. Of course, there are many educational websites we could use; Reddit, Ted, YouTube, Science… the list is enormous. But why do we need to jump between those websites and search the pieces of interesting materials if we could have a whole newsfeed filled with them by our friends? If this happened years ago, it might be that the vaccination crisis would not happen, GMO would not scare people anymore and the freedom of speech would be the most respected right of every human being.
Maybe until now, most peoples’ evening read would be ‘Nature Briefing’ instead of ’10 times President Trump’s face was most orange’. Is it really what we want to read? Educated and well-informed society is something we should be aiming for to make the most of our democratic privileges.
The mission of this blog is to inspire and initiate a discussion, thus feel free to drop a comment below (whether you agree with me or not) or share it with your friends.
Remember, it’s your day to achieve great things!
Ewelina x
motivelina.com 
I agree that the Facebook feed has become an ultra-convenient way to get artificial pleasure. But it’s not just the Facebook feed. Most of the mobile apps, whether games or social media platforms are in that category, because they are competing for the attention of the users. At that point the substance is not most important anymore – it’s the ability to chain someone to the screen. That’s impossible with any content that requires focus from the user – e.g. the analysis of paintings. It can only be achieved by content that requires no mental effort (like the memes and autocorrrect fails) and yet provide stimulation that lead to some sort of artificial pleasure. Of course the app developers also need us to take our smart phones into our hands in the first place, but the knowledge concerning for example habit loops (The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg) helps to create habits through which we constantly return to our phones. Summarizing – I don’t believe the revolution that would reverse this trend is going to happen in the near future. In my (perhaps pessimistic) view, only individuals can be saved from wasting a looot of time by educating them on the mechanics that lead them to use these sources of instant artificial pleasure (quite a cool term actually!)
PolubieniePolubienie
I can certainly see your point Sebastian. The only thing I would like to add to your very thoughtful and informative comment is that there is a group of Facebook users which feel simply offended (? if that’s the right word…) by the level of information provided on the news feed. Those kind of people feel torn between using the app to keep in touch with their mates and deleting it while staying ‚out of the information loop’. I spoke to a couple of people who recently deleted their accounts mainly because of that reason. I myself have been disappointed multiple times when my long and actually meaningful fb posts have not reached far at all. In the contrary, my holiday selfies have been probably seen by every single of my friends. Just to conclude, my aim for this post was to raise the point and maybe (optimistically speaking) inspire us to find ways of rising the level of social media before it hits the far bottom like TV already did.
By the way – The Power of Habit is an amazing book, I was planning to write a post on our habits inspired by Duhigg. He definitely changed the way I organise my life!
PolubieniePolubienie
I agree that the Facebook feed has become an ultra-convenient way to get artificial pleasure. But it’s not just the Facebook feed. Most of the mobile apps, whether games or social media platforms are in that category, because they are competing for the attention of the users. At that point the substance is not most important anymore – it’s the ability to chain someone to the screen. That’s impossible with any content that requires focus from the user – e.g. the analysis of paintings. It can only be achieved by content that requires no mental effort (like the memes and autocorrrect fails) and yet provide stimulation that lead to some sort of artificial pleasure. Of course the app developers also need us to take our smart phones into our hands in the first place, but the knowledge concerning for example habit loops (The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg) helps to create habits through which we constantly return to our phones. Summarizing – I don’t believe the revolution that would reverse this trend is going to happen in the near future. In my (perhaps pessimistic) view, only individuals can be saved from wasting a looot of time by educating them on the mechanics that lead them to use these sources of instant artificial pleasure (quite a cool term actually!)
PolubieniePolubienie
I can certainly see your point Sebastian. The only thing I would like to add to your very thoughtful and informative comment is that there is a group of Facebook users which feel simply offended (? if that’s the right word…) by the level of information provided on the news feed. Those kind of people feel torn between using the app to keep in touch with their mates and deleting it while staying ‚out of the information loop’. I spoke to a couple of people who recently deleted their accounts mainly because of that reason. I myself have been disappointed multiple times when my long and actually meaningful fb posts have not reached far at all. In the contrary, my holiday selfies have been probably seen by every single of my friends. Just to conclude, my aim for this post was to raise the point and maybe (optimistically speaking) inspire us to find ways of rising the level of social media before it hits the far bottom like TV already did.
By the way – The Power of Habit is an amazing book, I was planning to write a post on our habits inspired by Duhigg. He definitely changed the way I organise my life!
PolubieniePolubienie
I agree that the Facebook feed has become an ultra-convenient way to get artificial pleasure. But it’s not just the Facebook feed. Most of the mobile apps, whether games or social media platforms are in that category, because they are competing for the attention of the users. At that point the substance is not most important anymore – it’s the ability to chain someone to the screen. That’s impossible with any content that requires focus from the user – e.g. the analysis of paintings. It can only be achieved by content that requires no mental effort (like the memes and autocorrrect fails) and yet provide stimulation that lead to some sort of artificial pleasure. Of course the app developers also need us to take our smart phones into our hands in the first place, but the knowledge concerning for example habit loops (The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg) helps to create habits through which we constantly return to our phones. Summarizing – I don’t believe the revolution that would reverse this trend is going to happen in the near future. In my (perhaps pessimistic) view, only individuals can be saved from wasting a looot of time by educating them on the mechanics that lead them to use these sources of instant artificial pleasure (quite a cool term actually!)
PolubieniePolubienie
I can certainly see your point Sebastian. The only thing I would like to add to your very thoughtful and informative comment is that there is a group of Facebook users which feel simply offended (? if that’s the right word…) by the level of information provided on the news feed. Those kind of people feel torn between using the app to keep in touch with their mates and deleting it while staying ‚out of the information loop’. I spoke to a couple of people who recently deleted their accounts mainly because of that reason. I myself have been disappointed multiple times when my long and actually meaningful fb posts have not reached far at all. In the contrary, my holiday selfies have been probably seen by every single of my friends. Just to conclude, my aim for this post was to raise the point and maybe (optimistically speaking) inspire us to find ways of rising the level of social media before it hits the far bottom like TV already did.
By the way – The Power of Habit is an amazing book, I was planning to write a post on our habits inspired by Duhigg. He definitely changed the way I organise my life!
PolubieniePolubienie