A Less Friendly Facebook

The other day I took one of the biggest risk anyone can take these days -- I posted a critical minority view of something to Facebook.

At the personal level, Facebook is not meant for people to disagree with each other.  (It's not the same for celebrity or corporate Facebook accounts, which practically invite strangers to troll.)  Facebook is all about inviting friends, which for the most part leads to everybody mindlessly 'liking' every friend's status update.  It's a fact that this usually is done by females to females, not only because they dominate Facebook, but because that's what female friends do.

The only exception I can recall to this universal 'like' business was during the 2012 presidential campaign, when obvious political differences came to the surface.  Even then, however, the disagreements were docile.

In my specific case, I posted an third-party blog entry that was somewhat critical of this summer's e so-called ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.  (If you're reading this in a different year, I'm sure the Google or Facebook archives will tell you all about it.)  In short, the article called the challenge a form of 'slacktivism' where some people made it seem like they were helping a charitable cause, when in fact they were doing nothing.

Essentially, I was calling out everyone who was cluttering up social media with videos of people having water dumped on their heads, which was akin to jumping into a lake because someone else told them to do it -- and then calling it fun.  My comment was an 'the emperor has no clothes' kind of thing.

The outcome was underwhelming.  I did get agreements from a few folks, who were relieved to know somebody else thought like they did, but no real push back.  Ironically, it may be that there are now so many ice bucket videos in the feed that not that many noticed my post!

Regardless, it was a little disappointing.  I would like Facebook, actually all social media, to be more intellectually stimulating.  I get tired of seeing pictures of other friend's children, or pets, or food.  How about a little more hard information and opinion-sharing?

Maybe I just need more friends.