The User and the Used

 I happened to read part of a story last night about the lamentable situation of folks on some isolated island who had no access to the cellphone/social media culture. There was a photo of brown people sitting listlessly among the huts of some little village, apparently not knowing what to do with themselves, or perhaps pining away over the lack of something they had never had to opportunity to experience, having been denied the exhilarating heroin of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Snapchat, and so on. Boo hoo, right? 

I can't help but suspect that they are better off. 

Later, I watched part of a Netflix documentary about these very platforms, narrated by employees or former employees of those same platforms, addressing what they had eventually seen as the unexpected results of where all this has ended up, which is essentially in commercial manipulation and mass mind control. Every time we use the platform, we are being closely examined, analyzed, cataloged, and then nudged this way or that in a manner that ultimately benefits the platform itself, for we the users, not the platforms, are the product.

And we are addicted. Life without this can barely be imagined--and if you are younger than I, it really cannot be imagined at all. We are born now with a cellphone in the hand. I have seen 3 year old children as fixated on the phone screen as any adult. Every morning when I awake, I reach for the cell phone, switch the world back on. Is it still there? Ah, thank God. Bells and chimes and ding-dongs sing out from the re-awakened cell, messages pop up, and I am captured once again. 

Do you know that if you are idle for very long, the platform will poke you? That's right, they know when you are sleeping, they know when you're awake, they know if you've been using or not, so use for goodness' sake. A message shows up, a story, a prompt, beckoning you to click. You must! The platform wants to use its product. 

It's all pretty creepy, really. 

And I will probably end up dutifully posting this on Facebook, just as they had predicted.