I am Good and if You are Not Like Me Then You are Bad (And Other Lessons I’ve Learned From Facebook)
I am a human being. I am flawed and I am uncomfortable. I did not receive the rules for how to live when I was born. I did not get a manual that said which adults to trust or how to do things on my own. I try and I fail and I make mistakes. I am a hypocrite about things I don’t fully understand. My perspective is limited to what I have experienced and what I believe enough to learn from others.
In order for me to learn something, I have to believe that it could be true. Belief can come from prior knowledge, faith, or trust in the person imparting information. In science and research, people gather broad samples of information and read it in order to tell a story, but even the sources and samples must be something they can trust. Trust is cheap currency on social networking sites like Facebook. I know that for every opinion and experience I have had, there is a headline and a stock photo to support it. Thanks to social media and the internet at large, I can create an experience of the world that suits the narrative I have already created for myself, no experience necessary.
The enemies I believe in exist. The heroes I believe in exist. I get to be the victim of something every day and celebrated for my strength in surviving something else the next. The point is, I get to be the Good Guy. Always. There will be someone, or more often a group of strangers, who will completely validate me in the way that I feel and think. They are easy to find. When someone enters my space on a post or a comments section who disagrees, I can block them. I can call someone every heinous insult that comes to mind and be the victim of their bullying. I can share an article written by a nameless algorithm of questionable origin and use it to validate my life experience. I get to self-diagnose myself the victim of an oppression that until today I didn’t know existed. But what would be the point?
The point is that I am on social media because I feel a void within myself and I wish to fill it with connection. I want to connect with people, to be called a friend, to have something sent to me. Reading public posts by people that I know feels personal. It feels like they had me in mind when they shared that they missed all their old friends from back home. When someone shares a photo of their new baby I am quick to respond because I feel connected to them. This is how social networking began and how it worked beautifully. When someone asks a question it feels like they’re asking me and I feel obliged, and delighted, to answer. I feel like I’m helping.
Several years ago when I relocated to Los Angeles, all of my friends were people I met on Facebook. My entire first apartment was furnished by people on Facebook. My clients at my first job found me through a Facebook group. My relationship questions were answered by strangers who seemed to have my best interest in mind. I felt bonded to a secret club and doubted that any harm could come from something that had helped me in so many ways.
Though connection fuels our desire for and our reliance upon social networks, what we get out of it evolves to provide us with what we perpetuate. It has become less acceptable to call a friend on the phone and tell them about my day than to type it out in a paragraph to release to anyone who looks. As I scroll through at night, I find my timeline filled with desperate cries for help. Not the kind that have direction or want advice, but “I can’t do this anymore.” This is a familiar cry because it is something I have done, too. In those dark nights of the soul when everything hurts, I used to turn to alcohol or drugs or one night stands. I would wander into a bar and hope that someone in there would start up a conversation and let me leak my pain to them. I didn’t have an outlet, I didn’t have any help. I battled anxiety and depression without a set of tools to feel my way though it to the other side. Today, I find myself using a new drug: my timeline.
But even worse, those cries are not in a vacuum. They are peppered in among amateur, emotional, and fear riddled judgements of the state of the world. Our timelines have flooded with political analyses by the ill and uninformed, social commentary from perspectives made hopeless by offensive and defensive counter arguments from those who believe they know best, and ads catered directly to each of us based on what we have shared, which is most often expressions of our fear, grief, and discontent. The worse off we feel, the more we share things that mirror our state of mind, the worse it gets.
I noticed this for the first time around the 2016 Presidential Election. The weight of the world was already heavy, but the news of the election results led to a cascade of posts of hopelessness. I found myself compulsively scrolling pages upon pages of non-stop news, op-ed’s, and opinions of friends and strangers. I would comment and share posts that rang true to me. Over a few days I noticed that each time I opened my Facebook app, my timeline was filled with horror. It was a terror of daily tragedy. It was no longer just bad news about the President, it was my friends posting articles about domestic abuse. It was people wanting to “spread awareness” about a police shooting by sharing a literal snuff film of a dying man shot by is crying wife with his screaming child two feet away.
That’s as dark as this article is going to get.
But do we realize what we’re doing? When my mom (a Black woman in her 60’s) posts a quiz asking “what will you look like as an old lady” and her answer is a stock photo of a white woman in her 50’s, she posts the results because it’s funny. I laugh. She does not stop to ask herself what the consequences of sharing her photo or her name or her email address to a strange unnamed game on Facebook would be. She is seeking connection and validation, and while she may not have found it, she at least found something to share.
When a white woman in Cincinnati shares a video of police brutality, she may not know exactly how she feels about it before happening upon a headline that says it for her: “This Must Be Stopped! Please SHARE!” And she does, because it feels like the right thing to do. A Black father in New York sees a video of a white woman in dreadlocks with a caption “The Anti-Blackness of White Privilege and Cultural Appropriation.” He doesn’t need to read the article. He knows that this white woman with locks is his enemy. (These terms, by the way, in addition to terms like “micro-aggressions,” “gaslighting,” and “triggers,” have only been actively a part of our societal vocabulary on a general basis since the budding of social justice activism on social media. They were not commonly used terms before online social justice activism took hold. They were predominately terms reserved to academia, psychology, and psychotherapy-related spaces.)
Social media is a tool for validating our identities for the purpose of building connection with others. Our common goal is to be seen for who we really are, and at the core of it, we believe we are doing the right thing.
This is why, when someone posts something that shames or judges someone else, there will often be a roar of debate and arguing in the comments section. I have been one of these commenters. I have posted judgmental opinions of others’ behavior or beliefs. I have been an active participant on both sides of this because I, like everyone else, want to believe that I am right. I am the hero of my own story. I am the underdog, the victim, the survivor, and the hero all at once. I am special and I deserve love. These identities are the fuel behind anything I post on the internet. I am of service to others on the internet because it makes me feel good that others can see the proof that I’m doing the right thing. I follow the rules and do what I’m told by anyone I believe I can trust because I don’t want to be the bad guy. At the core of me, I cannot accept that I might be in the wrong.
This is also how misinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories, and dangerous opinions are spread. We desire a common enemy but do not allow for our bad-guys to have positive traits. We out someone as having said something racist once and we cancel them, not because we believe that there is truly something wrong with them, but that making an example of them proves that we are good. We firmly, and publicly, condemn anyone suggested as having been guilty of one of our agreed-upon cardinal sins. Donald Trump, for those who do not support him, is incapable of doing anything progressive or helpful without it having been in some way manipulative of or detrimental to the American people. Similarly, our heroes become incapable of doing wrong. To the progressive left, it has become a cardinal sin to call out the wrongs of anyone in our agreed-upon oppressed groups. This hard line of what is Good and what is Bad, without the ability to entertain nuanced conversation for the sake of gathering new information, or the compassion to be willing to listen to those who feel opposed without taking personal offense, has created a divide deep within the American heart.
What is it that we then turn to to fill the void of the loss of connection through this divide?
Facebook.
My intention is not to simply reinforce or simply call by name an issue that we all feel brewing but can’t exactly lay our finger on. I do not know the scientific ins and outs of what exact effect Facebook has on our psyche and I will not pretend to have the answers for everyone. What I can share is that it has become imperative to me to call out my own behaviors.
I have been the bad guy. I have been racist, I have been sexist, I have appropriated cultures, I have been ableist. I have judged others behind their backs for their weight or what they wear. I have responded to a high school acquaintance’s Facebook post by telling them that they’re racist and “how dare they” for the purpose of battling my own inner guilt. I have hopped on a comments section to chime in on calling out a white girl for wanting box-braids claiming personal offense when I had none but wanted to be celebrated for my “wokeness.”I have pulled emotional theatrics for attention. I have blocked people for having varying opinions and simply not wanting to admit that they had a decent argument that I couldn’t win. I have been wrong. I have been so wrong. Sometimes I knew what I was doing and sometimes it took time to become aware that I had acted out of fear.
Saying these things does not make me a better person. It makes me a person. When I am capable of being honest enough with myself to admit that I don’t have all the answers or that I am desperate for validation and attention of others, I can instead use my energy to build relationships through my vulnerability. Not just the vulnerability to admit my victimhood, but I get to honor the vulnerability of admitting that sometimes I am the bad guy, and that there’s nothing actually “bad” about having been wrong. The love and connection that can actually fill the void within me is not that an approval of an anonymous crowd, but the connection I can create between myself an another person when I am willing to forgive and be forgiven. When I can seek to understand rather than to be understood.
I am not perfect and in fact I am often part of the problem, but each day I try to post less, share less, read less, and focus on things that can actually get me to a place where I can be ok in my own skin. No quiz on Facebook can tell me who I really am. Instead, I get to find out for myself by being a human being. Flawed. Messy. And probably not doing it right.