Essays--Facebook Sucks: Part I

Social media such as Facebook can be excellent tools. They can also spawn the worse examples of human interaction as they somehow seem to give people permission to communicate--and I use that word lightly--in the most callous and hurtful of ways--abusive even. Despite the development of cyber ethics. There are those that forget that the person on the other side of cyberspace is another human being worthy of the same consideration we ourselves feel we deserve. To wish someone death, for example, because they have different views on things seems a tad psychopathic, don't you think?

“More than a tad,” a mutual “friend” posted. Privately, she conveyed that this cyber psychopath has had issues on other web forums. She said that she had thought those days were behind her. Apparently not. 

Her. If it’s really even a her. Easy to hide who one really is here in cyberspace. Just about as easy as it is to put on pretexts, to live out fantasies as if cyberspace were a virtual reality with endless—and I do mean endless—possibilities. Creeps create alternative forms of online identities, because evidently one is never enough. In fact, they spawned a whole new field of academia--social psychology. Creeps did. 

Let me assure you, however, that cyberspace is more than simply a metaphor—more than a term coined by a novelist, to later be borrowed by comic techies crawling around in a basement somewhere deep within the bowls of the planet; it is indeed real and though the creeps may be masked by their cyber persona, cyberspace is track-able, because it IS real. It can be rebooted.

Do allow me to debunk some misconceptions. Cyberspace, for instance, isn’t in space. It is an electromagnetic spectrum intended to generate and extract, or even eliminate, information. It utilizes physical resources—mechanical and electronic infrastructures as well as software, networks, and high powered tel-comm devices the least of which include satellites orbiting the earth. Got it?

It is not something one gets sucked into—not mentally, not physically. It’s something we choose to engage. I mean, there are switches and plugs. Without power and directive, it’s dormant technology. 

Best beware to whom we give that power to then, eh?

So, I'm once again putting out my counter curse—just for good measure. Facebook-Powers-That-Be—and that includes you, The Almighty Zuck--keep the cyber spooks and would be murders and all around negative brooding evil creeps out of my realm. Shoo-shock-a-loom-la! Creeps be gone!

There, that should about do it.