horse of george

"... I see Facebook as a gateway to massive groupthink... that's not liberating, that's restrictive... that's the tyranny of the virtual mob... when I view a friend's Facebook page I don't see the person I know, I see an individual subsumed into an insufferable mass of nonsense and gibberish and sentimental goo... I see a person reduced by technology to simpering data streamed like little smiling automatons into a vast, moronic ether... listening to promoters of social media talk about it in ecstatically glowing terms what I hear are hucksters making specious assumptions based on the rather naive belief that a madding crowd of people joined instantaneously in a pervasive network is perforce a good thing... why? where's the evidence of that?... to me history offers up plenty of evidence that such an assumption is disastrously wrong... social media may prove an able platform for the selling of things, but that's a utility that to this humble observer seems diametrically opposed to the ennobling value and virtues claimed for it..."