In the beginning, there was the Internet. It was slow and it only displayed text (green text on a grey screen) --- it was so slow that you could actually see the characters as they streamed across the screen of your Personal Computer; at that time, I considered taking up knitting to put this time to good use. But it was cherished by the people because it connected you to the rest of world; you could read other country’s newspapers and find out what THEY thought about things and you could send and receive mail faster than even airmail, and you could join Bulletin Boards where members of a common interest could converse in a setting similar to an actual coffee house. Students could talk to students about music, cooks could share recipes, and shoemakers could wax eloquent ... about soles. It could also privately deliver pornography and allow you to surreptitiously cheat at word games like Scrabble. What’s not to like?
In short, you were no longer constrained by your neighborhood or limited to your local friends for interesting conversations --- you could make new circles of friends based on common interests not on geographical location. While the VCR was called a “time-shifter” (you didn’t have to watch your TV shows at the same time they were broadcast) , the Internet had become a “space-shifter” --- you could be anywhere conversing with anyone (who had access to the web that is) about anything. The headline no one ever read was, “ Man Finally Conquers Space and Time!”
All was going like clockwork until around the mid 90s When the term “social media” emerged to describe new websites like Facebook and Twitter and Google (remember Google Circles?) which displaced the slower and awkward interface of the previous generation chat rooms. These new social media websites hinted that the age of Aquarius was beginning. Families across the nation, indeed the world could share photos of reunions or Internet videos and articles (which contained videos) with other family members. When it was founded in 2004, the mission of Facebook was, “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.” It reminded me of the more straightforward mission of the ILLIAC IV Supercomputer: “To make the world a better place to live in” These were heady times It felt like it was a good time to be alive. Little did we know...
All was going well until we began to notice that some of our email was actually unsolicited advertising and this was deemed to be “spam” whose etymology was either a ham-like meat served in a tin in decades past or it was an injoke reference to a Monty Python sketch --- also decades earlier. So it was that spam filters were created that could recognize spam and send it straight to your trash can. We also learned recently that Google and Facebook were skating very very close to invading our privacy. They were selling what we assumed to be private information to companies that used that information to increase their sales under the guise of claiming that they were only trying to improve service. There was no profit motive involved. Right.
The next phase of this downhill slide was fairly recent when it became clear that the Internet had a dark side. It could do more than bring people together, it could also drive them apart. It could be used to foment social disruption by manipulating public opinion. Trolls could plant “fake news” specifically designed to elicit emotional responses from both sides of the political divide. Foreign interests began to see they could increase their global power simply by weakening our country. Vandalism has been supercharged thanks to social media on the Internet.
Twitter was either designed or has been corrupted to foment this type of corrosive discourse despite their mission statement: “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” The flaw in this design is that while kindness begets kindness, fear leads to anger and anger begets anger. Angry responses spiral out of control as each response to the previous response metastasizes.
And so it is that I humbly ask you to consider the request in the title of this essay and eschew the use of Twitter (as well as social media of the same ilk) for just one day to see how that feels. If you feel withdrawal symptoms (as I’m sure I will) then consider the possibility of an addiction to be dealt with. And what better time to give it a shot than on Thanksgiving Day?
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