Facebook - Today's "vast wasteland"

How many of us have the driver of a car loaded with family, and noticed the impenetrable curtain of silence drop as soon as the car starts moving?  It happens to me almost every time I get in the car.  My loving wife sits in the front passenger seat, takes out her Android phone, opens Facebook, and begins sweeping her finger up and down... up and down... up and down... seemingly looking for something, and spending her time watching videos or looking for videos to watch.

How many of us sit behind the wheel in silence, knowing that anything we say is either ignored or unheard, and knowing that we have been reduced to servants, invisible unless we are needed?  When we stop the car after having arrived at the destination, how many of us notice that conversations resume as if they had never stopped?

Happens to me all the time.  But today, when she finished watching a video that was accompanied with sound effects and turned to me to tell me what she just watched, I interrupted her with, "I don't care.  I don't want to know."

She and I are both in our mid-60s.  Her response was to sulk like a 12-year old who had just been told that she couldn't watch her favorite TV show, or talk on the phone for hours with a friend.  Or watch Facebook videos for hours.  Or that her BFF (in this case, "husband") was completely uninterested in a Facebook video.

Horrors!

Here's my take on it: Facebook has mutated from a social media platform to a platform that infantilizes adults, turning them into mindless juveniles and prompting obnoxious behavior.  Like spoiled children, they immediately become angered - as if their toy had been taken away from them.

Childish.  Selfish.

She and I used to have long conversations in the car on all kinds of subjects.  Her job and her interactions with clients.  My job and my interactions with co-workers.  Our children and how well they're doing.  Friends.  Family.  Sports.  Weather.  We laughed together,  We expressed our frustrations to each other.

We shared our time together.

Now I sit in silence in the driver's seat.  No more conversations.  Just the drone of puerile videos that someone thought was funny and posted for others to watch.

Until today, I had to suffer the indignity being ignored in favor of a video that I neither watched nor cared about, nor will watch later, nor will ever care about.  Instead of being able to socialize with a human, I was disregarded as unnecessary and unwanted.

This seeming obsession with Facebook has turned an entire generation - actually, multiple generations - of once-thinking adults into churlish children.

Newton Minow, appointed as a commissioner to the FCC by JFK, remarked at a National Association of Broadcasters meeting as to the usefulness - or uselessness - of television.  From the Wikipedia page:

"When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland." 

Newton N. Minow, "Television and the Public Interest", address to the National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, D.C., May 9, 1961

Today, television as a "public interest" is quickly fading into obscurity.  Instead, people spend more and more time on the Internet and less in front of a wall-mounted screen. What Mr. Minow said in 1961 about television is equally as true about the Internet, and especially Facebook, today.

We have only replaced one "vast wasteland" with another.  Only now, that "vast wateland" is no longer captive to that screen in the living room.

It follows us into our cars as well.