Late Night Reflection: The Divisive Echochambers of Social Media!

I tend to have an "on again, off again" relationship with social media. Maybe I should add "mainstream" social media...

On one hand, I recognize it as a necessary nuisance I have to deal with because it's part of promoting my home businesses; sometimes I even enjoy it as a method of discourse and getting the news; but much of the time it just frustrates me enough that I kiss off the whole affair for an extended period of time.

A few weeks ago, I decided to come back to my Facebook and Twitter (I still can't get used to calling it "X") accounts in part because the holidays are coming up and I need to promote my artwork, but also because I just was curious as to what was going on after Twitter had become "X" and Facebook had started offering a "premium" version.

Well, Mrs. Denmarkguy bought into the Facebook Premium for shits and grins and because she manages a couple of business/community "pages" that already have blue checkmarks. As it turned out, the additional features were actually pretty lame. Waste of $13 a month.

I personally got started with some degree of enthusiasm but after about a week to ten days I ended up with my usual sense of mild disgust.

"Oh but why?", you might ask.

To a degree, I think the thing that quickly gets to me is the fact that everything is just a giant "echo chamber," within which we are fed channeled content by algorithms that serve up our particular interests and no alternatives. Those algorithms determine what we want and only give us what we allegedly "want" based on the false assumption that an awful lot of people in the world basically block or mute anybody who disagrees with them... and so we end up with a steady diet of just one opinion and viewpoint.

Consequently, we end up with these weird and twisted camps of extremism because as soon as somebody encounters something that challenges their perception they get all fired up and angry and ready to take up arms, rather than trying to actually understand what just came across their radar screen.

That led me to consider the utter impossibility of trying to solve real world problems when we restrict ourselves to only entertaining the solutions that serves our own reality but not the greater reality.

Let's be real here: the humans in this world are all different, with their own unique sets of ideas and problems and foibles. It's like a funhouse mirror world in which there's only one size of shoes. How the heck is that supposed to work?

And next thing you know you end up with the proverbial "villagers with pitchforks" who are out there getting super angry because it's detrimental or inconvenient to them as people that even thing that might be accepted broadly as a universal reality isn't what they want to be true so they vehemently oppose it!

So I quit again. Except for minimal exposure to my business pages. Perhaps the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back was when I realized that these social media "extremist fights" I would come across... were actually spilling over into places of government, where it seemed like any semblance of civility and statesmanship had been thrown out the window...

Grrrr... humans!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2023-11-16 00:57 PDT
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