Facebook is Evil

Let me count the ways:

1. Facebook (and most other internet-based activity) is the bread-and-circuses of the 21^st century.  Our corporate masters have fashioned a techno-entertainment-distraction culture to keep us too busy to question our mindless consumption. While we are playing with our social-networking toys, the earth is burning around our heads.

2. Like all forms of social media, it encourages and perpetuates superficial social relationships and facilitates the intrusion of a “quantity is quality” economic mindset into the world of personal social interaction.

3. It exacerbates consumer society’s focus on image over substance.

4. It represents an exploitation of our loss of deep and meaningful social connection that results from a superficial consumer lifestyle.

5. Participation on Facebook grooms us for life in a surveillance society, and eases us into a passive acceptance of the loss of personal privacy.  Social media are in fact redefining what “privacy” means. 

6. It provides a large and vulnerable captive audience for corporate marketing.

7. It (along with cell phone texting, email, twitter, etc.) conditions us to impoverished forms of mediated communication.

8. It encourages identity fragmentation.

9. It accelerates the process of global cultural homogenization, helping to export corporate consumerism to remote parts of the globe.

10.  It is potentially addictive, and can lead to the same kind of life disrupting behavior seen with severe drug addiction.