Calculating Loss In Social Media
How not to mix things up in a world full of casual brushes with the truth – uncaring as to what is real and what is not. In principle it has always been the same for at least some of the population. Now, however, we have reached critical mass.
Each uncaring and unthinking person has access to weapons of war. A tweet ricochets off another tweet and spins off into another social media platform. Like a pinball machine full of pinballs, the machine gets hot and melts down.
Anger, frustration, good old-fashioned gratuitous annoyance – they have nowhere they want to go except deeper into the furnace.
And the furnace spits them out. It doesn’t need them except as examples of persons. It doesn’t care about them except for whatever trace they leave behind in the the social weave.
If they all disappeared tomorrow, their loss would be calculated in loss of engagement, followers, likes, and shares.
As one of the protagonists in Darkness At Noon says - a dictatorship is a system where those in the driving seat see one person as simply one million people divided by one million.
Unless we rein ourselves in, the future is bleak. It might pay if enough of us were to imagine what a future might look like were we to rein ourselves in. And behave accordingly.