Facebook: The Fresh New Outrage Daily Update

My first social media experience was with BBSes. This was back in the dawn of trolling and flame wars, and that wasn’t much fun. When I got back into social media, it was through MySpace. Eventually, I moved over to Facebook, and reacquainted myself with people I hadn’t (and still haven’t) seen since High School, College, and so on. That’s pretty cool.

What isn’t as cool is how social media has changed us. For some of us, FB is a forum for sharing news, photos, recipes, and things  like that with friends and family. I suspect that for those people, Facebook can be a pretty warm place, most of the time. I mean, videos of kittens and otters? C’mon! I can only suspect, though, because I’m not one of those people. I’m one of those who post political and philosophical things, along with the occasional pop culture article. For those like us, Facebook can be a source of anger and frustration, especially if that’s how we get our news. And lately, with our current political climate, it sometimes seems as if Facebook is the Fresh New Outrage Daily Update.

A case in point. I was up late a couple of nights ago and I saw that somebody had shared an article to a friend (a friend whom I haven’t seen in-person since I lived in Los Angeles seven or eight years ago), and I read it. I wasn’t familiar with the website, but the article was about that cool sculpture of the little girl facing down the Bull of Wall St.

There’s a lot to be said about the subject of artistic vision and integrity as it relates to those two sculptures, and the commodification of dissent, but that’s for another post. I was just reading an article. As I read it, I could tell that the website was not a primary news source kind of thing, but more of a commentary/blog kind of thing. So I wasn’t expecting “investigative journalism,” but as I read it I couldn’t tell whether it was satire, or some pissed-off snark about something that really happened (somebody placing a third statue called Devil’s Advocate Boy). I also noticed that the photo of the Boy statue was taken indoors. That could have been for a couple of reasons: a bad bit of code calling the wrong photo, or maybe the author didn’t live in New York and didn’t have a photo of the actual statue. It was the photo that really made me question whether or not the article was about a real event. The actual reason the photo doesn’t match the article, of course, is that the article is satire, but I wasn’t sure of that at the time. Hey, I’m not always the sharpest knife in the block… and I was ready to be outraged about the little boy statue.

So, wanting to know more, I posted a comment: “Is this for real? I ask because the statue of the boy in the photo is indoors.” It went downhill from there. Some people responded as if I was ignorant, but others responded as if I were trying to mansplain something or be “right” or something. The whole episode made me a bit sad, because it seems as if the online social culture is so full of trolls that it isn’t implausible that somebody who doesn’t know me might think a simple request for clarification is some kind of high-level ironic trolling. People are so quick to make negative snap judgments and get hostile. I’m grateful to the commentors who assumed I was just ignorant (apparently, there is a way to tell an article is satire without even reading it. Some kind of filter? I never did see what that one helpful person was talking about…), and to the people who thought I was some kind of subtle, brilliant troll… thanks for the compliment? Frankly, I think that I could be that deviously malicious if I wanted to be, but why would I want to be? As far as I’m concerned, online trolls are essentially thought-vandals, mucking up people’s heads. If somebody gets off on pretending to be an asshole in order to get a rise out of people then guess what? They aren’t pretending; they’re really an asshole. They’re the ones who have helped make Facebook so it’s not fun anymore. Them, and any news involving the Cheeto in Chief.