I posted last week about the idea of the signal-to-noise ratio in social media. What interests me about social media (which is a phrase I’m suspicious of, if only because Facebook is more a megaphone than a medium) is that it’s the test kitchen for free speech in the age of information overload. Those of my generation, to maintain our sanities, must tune out more information than our parents ever had access to. It’s one thing to tune out targeted advertising, or Taco Bell customer surveys, or the Drudge Report. But we are now in a position to “unsubscribe” from friends online in the same way we “opt out” from telemarketers or, for those of us in the city, outright ignore those on the corner with beards and sandwich boards, shouting “the end is nigh.”
Obviously having friends with ignorable opinions, and ignoring those opinions, is nothing new. David Brooks talks about “the empathy gap,” saying that on some level we’re simply less interested in each other than we used to be, and I think he’d associate “unsubscription” with that gap. But I’m not sure that the interesting story is how our culture affects the way we treat each other online. Rather, it might be how the way we treat each other online is affecting our culture, the way we talk to each other and therefore the way we understand each other.
I’ve unsubscribed from one of my aunts, whose Facebook posts combine the infuriatingly trite with the compulsively outspoken. Before Facebook, she was an out-of-state aunt and little more. Facebook has brought her much closer to my life. It has brought her opinions into my home, and I don’t want them there. It’s not that I disagree with her, really–I think we probably vote the same way. My unsubscription aligns more with an aesthetic displeasure than a philosophical one. She’s still my aunt, obviously, which is why she’s been unsubscribed instead of “defriended,” and I thank Facebook for the technological platform that makes such nuance possible.
Facebook has made my aunt an immediate vector for information, and I’ve chosen to tune out that information, like an obnoxiously flashing banner ad. I can’t help but feel that my abhorrence at her online expression has caused me to think of her less as a person and more as a radio station I don’t like. I just think of her as static in my Facebook, and I’ve adjusted the rabbit-ears to minimize her influence.
Perhaps that’s the distinction I’ve been struggling to draw about Facebook: it’s not “social media,” it’s a “social platform.” Speech itself is the medium. Speech is a medium for information, the information is broadcast via Facebook, and it’s through the Facebook platform that I can tune out the information, denying the speech yet maintaining the access. Facebook allows us to set parental controls on ourselves, but instead of defying pornography, we’re defying people–people, we still maintain, who are “friends.”
