Everyone is searching for Utopia on the web but we keep getting let down.

FIVE  SHORT STORIES of how social media platforms let me down and woke me up to the reality, that the dream of utopia on the web, is probably unattainable.



01 STORY ONE: Too late, I was caught by Click-bait
 

Every single day a friend of mine kept posting dozens of links to articles related to all sort of different subjects.
I would open them, read through them and then comment on them.
In response to my comment, my friend would click  Like

One day one of these linked articles (he posted) was telling of something that was the very
opposite of what my friend stood for/believed in.

Later I visited him at his house I asked him about this:
"I was surprised you posted that article today considering that you are against such things"

His response surprised me:
"Which article was that. Oh yeah I have a vague recollection that I posted that. You know Arthur I did not actually read it, I just posted it based on the title".   He explained

 "WHAT!  You mean you did not read the article yourself and yet you still posted it?"
Was how I reacted to this statement. 

My friend just laughed and said: "Yeah I hardly ever read any one them" 

"Do you mean to tell me that you post these articles not knowing anything about them and yet here I am bothering to read them simply because it was you who posted them?
Why are you doing this?  I asked, somewhat in a raised voice,

"I don not really know. It´s no big deal, I mean everyone does it".  Was his flippant response.
I was horrified.
This experience lead me to understand the phenomenon known as "clickbait".

Question to myself: Why are people doing this?

2 STORY TWO:  I committed the Crime of  Using Too Much Time

I have never been a blogger but I have always had my own opinions on things and I like to get involved in a discussion in order to learn and grow/expand my knowledge.

So I began posting blogs on Facebook and making short documentary films
(of which were about 15. 20 minutes long).
I would spend a great deal of time and effort on these blogs/films and my only wish was to share information in order to begin a discussion. 
However I usually only got one or two Likes and the rare odd comment. 

I spoke to friends about this and they basically told me that people are just too busy.
"Keep comments short and make your films no less than one minute long."  I was told.

So I tried an experiment to see if this was true. 

I made a series of films that were exactly one minute long to see what impact/effect,
if any, they would have.
Result:  They were hugely successful...in that they got lots of likes.
There were also lots of comments such as "great" - "wonderful"- "excellent". 

Question to myself: Why was I NOT happy about this?

03 STORY THREE: Bubble Trouble

One day a woman, sent me a friend  request after seeing one of my replies. So I clicked yes.

This woman was basically using her FBook page to preaching that the US Govt was a puppet to the secret shadow Govt. She was also a big Jill Stein supporter.
On the whole I agreed with much of what she was saying and it seemed that perhaps I had made a new friend. 

But then one day she posted something I vehemently disagreed with.
In response I wrote my opposing view. 

Some discussion began and at first it was calm and logical.
But then I must have hit a nerve because suddenly she she became angry.  
Basically her stance was that she was right because of the number of followers who agreed with her.
I explained that Facebook was very good at sending people to us that agree with us.
This angered her enormously and I was told to "back off".

The next day she told me that she her FaceBook page was going to change the world because she was a visionary.
This surprised me and I stated that in my view all she was actually doing was the same as my friend, as in, posting other peoples articles/work that fitted in with her own view.
And that in fact she did not actually create anything that was of her own making at all.
In her own eyes she was spreading news that would eventually "wake the world up".

Again I pressed my point (delicately) saying that he was simply preaching to the converted and the comments she got back simply re-affirmed her belief that she was a visionary.
Once again I was told to;  "back off"

It was then I realized the power of the Facebook algorithms. 
FBook had done an extremely good job at putting this lady firmly inside a bubble.
FBook was constantly sending her people who believed in the same things as her .
Over a period of time she became surrounded by hundreds of people who all agreed with what she believed.
She openly told me that the moment anyone challenges her view, as I did,
she simply unfriends them.

The next day, this lady visionary told me that she kept the "real world"  very separate from her FaceBook world.

Quote: "When I visit my friends at a social dinner party I never talk about the subjects/topics I do with my FB friends. If I did they would soon stop inviting me"

This concept was totally alien to me.
I am the same person in the real world as I am and on the web and I don not really know how else to be. 

Finally I suggested to this lady that perhaps she should consider the possibility that Facebook makes it so that people are actually happy inside their self created bubble. In that it creates a perfect prison that people are happy to be trapped in.
She unfriended me.

Question to myself: Can there come to point were people become permanently trapped inside these algorithm bubbles?

04 STORY FOUR: Jake the Fake

During the time of the Trump/Clinton Campaign, I made friends with a guy who was a huge Trump supporter.
Now I will be honest with you, I very quickly began to like this guy.
Not because he was Trump supporter, but because he seemed honest, passionate about his beliefs and was open to learn new things. 

I very quickly and found myself communicating with him more and more and thought that I had finally made a real friend on FBook. A friend that was no a neighbor or someone from my college days. 

Then at the end of the US election, after Trump had won, this guy then suddenly confessed that he was not who he said he was in that he was using a fake Id.
Apparently he had been using the FB account of an ex girlfriend of his and the reason why he did this was that he wanted to promote Trump secretly. 

He explained that he had to keep his identity a secret from his work mates as most of them were against Trump.
But now that Trump had won he wanted to come out and use his real Id. 

So he sent me a message on the private messenger telling me who he really was, which was Jake.
To be honest I was stunned to say the least.
Perhaps I was naive but I felt cheated.
Almost instantly I found myself distancing myself from the guy.
It´s not that I intentionally made a decision to do this, it was more an instinctive reaction that I could not control.
I found that I just could not relate to the guy anymore.
I felt I did not really know who he was.
Within a couple of weeks we stopped communicating and drifted apart.
We have never spoken since.

Question to myself: What has caused the situation on the web that we need to use a fake Id

05 STORY Five: MAID Unwelcome.

Three years ago I heard about the MAIDSAFE network.
The idea of a new peer-to-peer internet was pure genius and it seemed an admirable project so I immediately joined.
Very few people know that the MAID-crypto-coin was invented 5 years before Bitcoin.

Anyway, I also joined the MAID forum.

I went onto the "introduce yourself"  section and wrote a short introduction of myself and then went on to write a long piece saying how great I thought the MAID project was.

Guess what happened?

A moderator banned me from the forum for one day saying that I was only allowed to write about myself in the intoduce yourself section/tag and not anything else.

SO here I was BANNED after being a member for only 20 minutes.

The next day I received a personal message from David Irvine (the creator of MAID himself) apologizing for this and even responded saying that what I wrote was very inspiring.
I still have that message today.
Somewhat hurt by this I proceeded to try writing on another tag.
This time being very careful not to go into the wrong section.
I wrote another positive piece saying how MAID could be a great place for Artists/writers.

The response was just as shocking;
"At the moment MAID is only for coders so my advice to you is to come back in a  few years time"

I never went back.

Question to myself:  Can there ever be a a utopian place on the web?

Thank you for visiting my blog and I wish you a warm welcome back next time