22 December

At the end of another year on Facebook, more than ever I wonder what the point of it even is. I’ve long since just started using it as an online diary of thoughts. Interaction is slim to none, on most things, unless you’re into mutual self-obsession, posting about your personal life and liking and praising others who do the same, to give each other permission to keep going. Living lives on the platforms, performing and curating your life as content for your feed, so that lives become difficult to distinguish from magazine spreads. Stories about the epidemic of loneliness and lack of connection should ring alarm bells, at a time when personal, professional and political lives are all now taking place inside social media platforms, which have hijacked society itself. It doesn’t seem to occur to us that the enormous *increase* of sociality, via these platforms, is what’s leading to the disconnection. Sociality is not connection, it’s teens hanging out. Connection comes from working together on things, and discussing those things. Social media is the complete replacement of adult life with an extension of high school life. Not an analogy. The culture of likes and followers. Of the ‘feels’. Rampant sentimentalism, where we ‘stand for’ everything, and do nothing. We don’t have a clue what to do, even if we wanted to. Hashtag culture where public life is just constantly shifting meaningless trends.