by Duane Burghard
©2014
I'm deeply conflicted about whether or not to continue using Facebook and I want to explain why.
I didn't discover Facebook until the summer of 2009. It was great. I was part of a wave of people my age (mid 40s) using it to reconnect with friends from elementary school through college. Each day was kind of like a celebration as I got to see old friends, their spouses, children and see and hear details of their lives.
And then something odd happened.
We essentially use Facebook to have a random series of simultaneous transmit-wait-receive-wait-transmit conversations that are based on what we and our friends are thinking about at any given moment, and while that's different from a face to face conversation, *what* we talk about in those conversations is generally not that different; the weather, what's going on in our lives or the lives of loved ones, popular culture, current events and politics.
The odd thing that has happened over time is that, compared to 2009, the number of Facebook posts in my "news feed" that are about current events or politics has increased sharply. Now, if you know me, you might argue that this has to do with the fact that I twice ran for the U.S. Congress, and therefore a number of my friends are quite politically active, but having just completed a random scan of my newsfeed while preparing to write this article, I found that exactly 50% of the posts in my feed involved current events and/or politics in some way, and that the sources of the posts (which is to say the particular Facebook friends those posts were coming from) made little difference (in fact, the bias towards political posts actually skews *away* from my political friends).
This change is a problem for a couple of reasons, but mostly because it seems to me that the world right now feels more full of bad news than at any time I can remember in my life. But more than that, the level and degree of opinion polarization in the world (and amongst my friends) has never been greater. Add to that my sense that the amount of ignorance and animosity being expressed in many of the posts which I disagree with is by FAR at an all time high, and there's simply no denying this fact; my use of Facebook is affecting my overall happiness away from Facebook.
Unlike at least some (if not most) people, I don't come by what I know, what I think, or what I merely believe lightly. I am a science guy, an empirical evidence guy. I don't have a problem with opinions as long as I see that they are intellectually consistent and are based on some empirical fact.
But where I differ, where I seem to have a fundamental flaw as a human being, is that I care when someone has a different opinion, and I pretty much have only one goal in that situation; to prove that my position is right or wrong (if I'm wrong, I want to understand why so I can change my position and be right, and if I'm right, I want to help you understand why you're wrong so that you can understand, change and be right). This goal is admittedly sometimes at odds with the obvious fact that there are issues for which there is no empirical right or wrong or for which there can be multiple, equally correct opinions, but in any case, my tendency to pursue my goal earnestly can easily be misinterpreted and has, throughout my life, made me a polarizing figure (something a large part of me would really prefer not to be). As much as I try to fight it every day, I have a natural aversion to staying silent, which is to say that I have a very powerful sense of right, and I believe Einstein when he said that the only thing necessary for evil to succeed was for good men to stand by and do nothing. Speaking up is rooted so deeply in my personality that, at this point, I've just learned to accept it.
My bigger problem, however, is that my friends with whom I have differing opinions very often don't want to be "fixed." Even in cases where I have a very high certainty that their position is incorrect (and even when I can demonstrate beyond any measure of intellectual capacity that a statement or opinion in question is simply and often factually incorrect), most people don't take life as seriously as I do, and they don't *want* to be "fixed," they don't think they need to be fixed, they are perfectly content to believe what they believe simply because they want to believe it. And I must confess that I certainly see validity in the argument that their comparative lack of intensity may in fact be a better and healthier approach to life (even when they're wrong).
I know that this is not an uncommon problem on Facebook, and many of my friends talk about unfriending people that they have significant differences with. This reaction makes sense to me because people naturally want to have friends that are like them. They don't check in on Facebook looking to get into some emotionally painful and stressful argument about Obamacare, they want to join in a kind of relaxing and reaffirming fellowship with like minded people. It's hard not to understand that.
But even if it might be emotionally healthier, I find that I stubbornly resist the temptation to cut off friends, and that's where my core conflict is rooted. I can't just unfriend people who I have a connection to, because I value those connections (I am an intensely loyal person, but it's more than that, friends are *important*). I argue with them when I think they're wrong not because I want to argue, be difficult or increase the stress in their lives or my own, but because I care about them. It is (or has been until recently) worth the struggle to me to help someone understand an issue better (and if it turns out that *I* am wrong, well then I also win because I've learned something important and valuable myself). You can't help increase the aggregate amount of good in the world simply by unfriending and/or separating yourself from people you disagree with. Yes, that may be more harmonious for you, but it isn't real, and in my opinion it has dangerous consequences when it comes to learning to co-exist with others in the real world.
So here we are (and you probably know this problem too or you wouldn't still be reading). On the one hand there is a noise machine of anger and hate and division and racism and ignorance and animosity and all manner of other evils that I desperately want to separate myself from because facing it saddens, depresses and exhausts me so much on a daily basis, and on the other hand I feel reasonably certain that simply separating myself from these things (and my friends who believe them) will, in the long run, actually make things worse because it will only strengthen and perpetuate a MORE deeply divided society that will have even less understanding and less hope of finding the kind of compromise that has been so essential to the survival of our Republic.
Ironically, there probably isn't a right and wrong answer to my dilemma, which frankly pisses me off and runs counter to the way I think the universe should work (there should be *a* (single) right answer here), but I do think how each of us handles this dilemma comes down to a fundamental question, do you want your Facebook life to be a sort of utopian, peaceful, idyllic, fairy tale world tailor made for you, or is it healthier for you and the world if your Facebook experience reflects the real world in ALL of its aspects?
For now, I'm sticking with ALL of my friends and the "real world" approach to Facebook, and I'm doing that for one key reason: I think I'm right.
