EDITOR’S CORNER
Did you see the interesting news last week about Facebook?
No, not Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, testifying before Congress. Watching his inquisitors was—in the words of one perceptive writer—like seeing a grandfather pretending he knows how to use his 16-year-old granddaughter’s smart phone.
No, the really interesting social media news was the results of a poll conducted in the wake of whatever that testimony was supposed to have been about.
The poll asked respondents if they liked Facebook and if they trusted it.
And the results? Sixty-six percent said they liked it. And 55 percent said they didn’t trust it.
Let’s think about that for a second. That means, assuming the poll accurately represents the opinion of American Facebook users, 11 percent of us don’t trust it, but like it anyway.
That’s the best case scenario. I would imagine some of the 55 percent who don’t trust Facebook are also among the 34 percent who don’t like it.
But even if none of them fit into that category that still means about one in 10 users don’t trust it, but like it anyway.
My mind flashed back to my first freshman government course in college, back before General Sherman burned it to the ground.
It was one of those auditorium classrooms, probably 300 of us in there.
Everyone, at that time, was required to take a history course to graduate.
(I looked at a 2018 catalog and that requirement has been replaced by a course entitled “Not Offending Anyone Ever, Never, Never Unless This Course Offends You and If It Does We’re Sorry and We’ll Never Mention it Again.”)
The professor asked us if we thought a history course should be required to graduate. Virtually all of us raised our hands.
Then she asked if we would take this course if it hadn’t been required. Maybe a fourth of us raised our hands.
“Then what you are telling me,” she said, “is you want to be forced to take this course.”
Well, yes.
So, are we to infer from the poll results that at least one in 10 Americans feel like we have to be forced into liking Facebook even though we don’t trust it?
Or at least saying we like it to pollsters.
There’s a term in physics called “critical mass.” No, it doesn’t mean you didn’t like the priest’s sermon last Sunday, it means something has reached the no-going-back point and it’s now virtually an unstoppable force.
Obviously, Facebook reached that point quite a while ago and the chances of it falling from grace are about the same as anyone who is glued to Facebook every waking moment reading this column in an actual newspaper.
And you see the main problem with that poll, don’t you? “Trust” simply doesn’t apply to our technology.
It’s above base concepts like that. Social media, Facebook, Twitter, simply are and will always be.
Unless, of course, you try to use the Internet in Rock-dale after it rains.
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