Facebook : hidden disruption of the spreading of good ideas

Eyes glued to the monitor, leaving comments to each and every post they see, checking new 'likes' for their brand-new profile pics. This is how Facebook changed our life. As Mark Zuckerberg ambitiously declared, he created Facebook to 'connect the world' and 'spread good ideas'. But is his creation truly doing its job? Or is it blocking good ideas to be spread reversely? We must question ourselves 'Did we actually became open-minded to good ideas?', because the answer becomes 'no' when we are dependent to its virual reality.

After I listened to Revisionist History Episode 3, I contemplated about the reason why good ideas has so much of a difficulty to be spread. In the past, we believed that the development of technology will enhance the spreading of ideas by connecting various people around the globe. People believed that discrimination will be lessened, people will respect each other's ideas more. Actually, it did - only in certain aspect. Sometimes, 'right' posts are not only 'disliked' by majority, but also mocked by nasty comments. Social media apps such as Facebook eventually created a vast virtual reality, and people became dependent to these hyper-reality, losing their ability as an independent thinker. 

We need to clarify what virtual reality is to investigate the reationship between Facebook and spreading of good ideas. Virtual reality is a duplicate of reality. If it is so realistic that originals and reality started to follow duplicates and peoples started to confuse between them, it is called 'hyper-reality' - a simulation of reality which is more real than the real world. Let me give you a real life example. Last week, my friend went to a famous restaurant, and he ate some delicious pasta. He took pictures of that appetizing food and uploaded it on Facebook. Now when we think about it, his real life, which is eating pasta, went first, and then SNS came later. But do we really use Facebook in this way? The answer is shockingly, no. Many people don't upload the pictures because the Pasta tasted good. They eat the pasta to upload it on Facebook. We are actually adjusting our normal lives to fit into virtual reality, named SNS. 

Now, how is it related to 'spreading of good ideas'? Well, virtual reality which Facebook created is so strong that it atrophied our ability of questioning and being different. If we can independently distinguish reality and virtual reality, Facebook can be a playground which gives unlimited opportunities. However, to the ones who unquestioningly accommodate their world, Facebook can be a Panopticon, a jail with no prisoner's privacy. Let's assume that Rick Barry- the best free-throw shooter - was young enough to post his underhand shooting video on Facebook before getting famous for it. There will be some people who are fascinated, but most of his friends will laugh at him, sneer at him, and describe him as a 'girlish player'. If Barry wasn't the one who only cares 'right thing' to do, he would easily give up shooting under-handed - and that's what normal people do. Everybody has at least one experience of being courageous to do the 'right' thing. But since those actions were not 'liked', they would have easily give up and return to their normal behavior.  By virtual reality, people started to compare themselves with society's model human character - not only their external shape, but also their internal thoughts. Eventually, Facebook increased mob mentality by making people feel as if there are inside a mob even though they aren't in the reality.

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident that they are acting on their own free will. This quote not from myself ; it is what Hitler’s right arm, the head commander of Nachi, Paul Joseph Goebbels said. It is our responsibility to decide what is right and what's wrong, to decide what purpose to have in life, and how to live life. If we become dependent to virtual-reality, we'll naturally build higher threshold, which will block the spreading of good ideas. Certainly, there's a way virtual realities can help spreading good ideas: we, the one who use SNS, must always question ourselves ‘Am I thinking what has been injected by others?’. By these actions, we can move a step closer to doing things in the right way, rather than being liked.