Common Ether

Social media may have its critics.  Everyone’s a critic.  It’s their endowed right.  But the medium’s finest defense just might be its most significant offense.

It doesn’t discriminate.

If it did of course, it would not nearly be the fertile ground of commercial harvest known to its founders and financiers.  Their job is to constantly monitor, analyze and arrive at sectored determinations on their product markets and consumers.  No better way of doing this than gaining as intimate exposure as possible into the private lives of proudly shared egos, and as many as possible.

It’s the most powerful advancement in commerce yet.  Retro-head that I am, I find nothing more captivating than a trip down the Memory Lane of forty or fifty years ago, and all those highly serious and sophisticated diatribes on the social dangers of television.  Plenty of media critics and sociologists went in both directions on the social dangers and rewards.  One of the recurring attributes however, was in television's ability to unite so many co-existing cultures.  Two men, one upscale from the suburbs, and a ghetto struggler can both, for just one moment, meet in pleasurable unity over a punch line heard on Sanford And Son last night on TV.  Any medium that can provide that in such a scattered, sectored and separative world is certainly worth the highest admiration, according to some.

By contrast, it was the detractors who concluded over the years that the medium bears no such honorable social intent other than to indoctrinate innocent eyes and ears young and old into deep consumership, and a sense of self-inadequacy over any inertia or indecisiveness toward such at any moment.  Their point was no less valid, and still very much so.

The difference between now and fifty years ago however, is this brand new thing that has fast left the controversial frontier of television in the dust, and that's this new invention called Social Media.   It wasn't invented or introduced as such all at once.  Much of it began with the earliest underpinnings of the Internet.  Then, by the time Y2K rolled around, you really weren't anywhere unless you were there.  The author of this diatribe in fact was not agreeable enough to crack open his wallet for such until he genuinely deemed himself enough of a clinical outcast, five or six years into the millennium.  Even then, it took some getting used to.

Wrong as I might be, it somehow seemed that I got onto the entrance ramp of the Facebook Expressway just around the time all the other superhighway motorists did.  That was kind of encouraging.  Nothing makes arrival into a new neighborhood easier than the shared experience of such.  And before long, we'd all start absorbing the art of becoming highly sophisticated junior sociologists, standing back and watching the various toxic personalities vent themselves quite predictably in word, online, the written equivalent of their loud and incorrigible selves.  We'd see the sociopathic side of the traditionally meek and polite.  We'd see the odd, inexplicable passive-aggressive side of famous beasts sharing greeting-card memes and kitten videos with little red heart emojis.  

But beyond all the zoological exhibits we're mostly careful not to step up and hand-feed, there's us, the mentally responsible adult participants, moderating our tempers and self-monitoring our words and reactions.  Next step..? Make some friends.

Pretty soon, you're in a very friendly neighborhood of shared likenesses.....people who also get up in the middle of the night.......people who hate running late in the morning.......people who treasure Sunday brunch at home in their affectionately decorated kitchen.  People who go on vacations.   People who are grateful to God for the care their sick child got at the clinic or hospital.  People reveling proudly in their hard-labored, newly re-decorated kitchens. 

Well, perhaps I can't vacation in Rome or spend Sunday at a rented villa in Fire Island like my treasured Facebook compatriots.  But I can just as easily share the sophistication of my own, economy-sized world with some artfully conceived and just-as-exquisite phone camera-snapped images of my kitchen wall-hung art, my pet snoozing peacefully in a sunlit corner, and maybe a clever caption and music link to accentuate just how we're elegantly spending our well-deserved down time together.  See..? We can be some pretty impressive self-advertisers, too..!

It's a great, and often very positive and supportive way of asserting one's self-confidence.  Among well-meant friends its nothing but well-received.  Matters of socioeconomic division need not be a separative factor amidst this online interactive ocean liner cruise, one that transcends the barricades of COVID isolation and many other of life's unfriendly strongholds.  But as one relies more and more upon such social existence, among the kindest and most genuine of the faraway strangers, as legitimately intimate as the emotional co-dependency becomes, and amidst all its invaluable daily treasure, the stark and divisive factors ultimately emerge.  And whether or not we choose to bear effect reigns upon these so-called friendships.

There are no socioeconomic "barricades" on Facebook.  A young mother of three, situated in a NYCHA apartment in the Bronx can quite easily find close kinship with a young Carrie Bradshaw on the Upper East Side, after a blessed encounter where the young mom helps Carrie off the ground with great concern after she fell off her Manolo heels and dropped her new Apple phone to the ground.  Next thing, they're friending it up on FB.  Young Mom and Carrie have virtually zero in common beyond same biology, same birth year, and the same shows they saw on TV as kids, the same sugar cereals they ate, the same songs they heard at their prom, and same kind of irrational tempers that flare at the same ugly behaviors they see every day.  Ah, the unity the World Wide Web can provide..!

Down the spectrum somewhat, you'll encounter others of slightly better economic struggle-status in happy friendship with those Finzi-Continis of the higher tennis-courters. Friendships that prove that you don't need money to share the appreciation of a flowered garden.  Perhaps the only insignificant difference remains whether you can appreciate it from behind the gate you pass along the Botanical Garden on the way home to your complex from the bodega, or in the garden you own and have tended by your hired gardener, in the backyard of your four-bedroom home in East Islip, with the newly finished deck, all set for the summer holiday.  But to recognize and self-discriminate on such obvious basis remains uncouthedly trite.  Is the object of the game to disparage yourself or others based on such blatant economic disparity..?  Or is the better reminder that of exercising mindful adulthood, and owning up to one's position in the world, and learning to embrace it proudly, within this mall of online citizens, each in rightful possession of a sense of artful and joyful appreciation on the most visceral levels.

In the eyes of many, such co-existence is simply "where we are now", and the social atmosphere to which we're behaviorally expected to acclimate.  To some, the grind of such is really no different from the way their mom or dad had to wait on line at the bank in 1972 just to cash a check, and in the process endure a friendly conversation with some lady or fellow they know from somewhere, who can't help but regale them with tales of woe over their golf or tennis game, and wallet photos of their grandchildren and their beaming parents, degreed physicians residing in the Douglaston Hills.  Meanwhile Mom or Dad is more absorbed with how badly the cost of that blown carburetor or the kid's sudden trip to the ENT is going to kill them.

The difference now is that these passing and more prominent social media "relationships" are more elusively and conveniently both selective, and at the same time insidiously invasive, often in ways we're not going to realize or accept until we're forced.  I could insert a "Heaven Forbid" next to "forced", but the truth is that Heaven will not forbid inevitability.

Should one's barely-afforded lodging be destroyed in a local flood one fine day, should one's loved one or self be pitted against injury or illness for which treatment is undeniably unaffordable, or should one be put to any kind of crisis for which their previously livable economic situation finds them tragically unprepared, suddenly, the value of nearly all those well-meant, affectionate Facebook "relationships" with all those on the economic upper balconies immediately becomes, to no fault of anyone, confederate currency.  The best anyone can offer to anyone in those once-fantastical, joyful, picture-sharing, day-off-I'm-enjoying portraits that compose our fragile social existences is now reduced to an illustrated smiling cat-face emoji, the extent of what some far-extended well-wisher can offer, a friendly wave from the curb.  No one can come forth to save the life or even the day of the tragic struggler.  And they're not really supposed to.  Even the struggler might not bear resentment against her fair-weather Facebook friends.

Especially since there's really nothing "fair-weather" about them at all.  Social media is just what those words denote: A media providing the capacity to be social.  Nothing more.  Whether or not we, as responsible participants decide to see ourselves bearing any unreal socioeconomic connection with our "friends", greater or less, is part of our "God-Given Right To Life".  And at the same time, it calls upon the need for mindful, responsible "Choice".

And indeed, amidst this social crowd, bigger than any blanket-to-blanket beach population on the hottest Fourth of July, there is, fascinatingly enough, a level of social order, a Geneva Convention of sorts, one that no Group Administrator needs to post, articulate or remind.  One that transcends angry rants, political talk on retro-memory pages, homophobic talk on collectible antique pages, and the misanthropy that will find welcome nowhere.

Should one find themselves unable to care for a loved one, when one has to in any way bid farewell to their parent, sibling, child or even beloved pet, forced strictly by dire economic condition, where conditions held by perhaps any or more of one's Facebook "friends" would never, Heaven Forbid, incomprehensibly see them, an understanding somehow politely exists.  When divisive conditions become inarticulately clear, on line, for all to see, civilian "friends" and commerce kingpins alike, it's all well wishes, extensions of prayer, and red heart emojis.  No questions asked.  

And it's not, as prior eras and in-person acquaintanceships might suggest, an insensitive distancing or alienation.  In such case as this, it's a level of shared respect.  It's the humility that reminds that rich or poor, we are valuing shared ground together at all times.  And none of us bear the right to judge the struggle of another.  For one thing, we've no right. And for another, we've no desire.   Everyone has their own cross to bear.  Even if a greater population helps us carry that weight every day.  "For The Grace of God Go I" is more than ever just as much a secular prayer.  And if we had to log off our social media page each day or night with some type of serenity prayer known to twelve-step fellowships, that certainly would be the disclaimer at the end of the broadcast day.  

Yes, the internet, commerce-commanded social media and the like are hijacking our minds, our brains and our behaviors every day, every minute.  But it's still worth it for the relationships and what we discover they really can mean.  Because as living, breathing humans, we still know better.

Noah F.