2024-04-13 02:35:00
Facebook remains young in character, even if it is now deserted by young people who do not want to meet their parents there.
On this social network, invented like many of the mythical creations of America where everything is possible, in a garage or a student room, we see people who absolutely did not know each other from the post before, starting to insult each other in a paradoxical intimacy, following just a few clicks on “Send”. This is because everyone seizes everything that comes within range of identification or notification to manifest themselves: here, a rant; there, a declaration of love; elsewhere, a requiem. On Facebook, ultimately, a fundamental transgression, we do almost everything except follow the old advice of caution from parents before: “we don’t talk to strangers”.
This social network was the first to symbolize the “borderless” global village of our time. Communication technologies are creating a bubble of absolute and permanent connectivity between every point of the smallest territory inhabited by human beings. We make “friends” who are polar opposites of each other. We “like” causes from around the world. We discover “subscribers” of whom we will probably never know anything other than a thumbs-up icon.
I admit I remain in a waiting phase. As a precautionary posture in the face of what will remain a great unknown too full of surprises. How many of us would already be on Facebook? Ultimately, half of humanity? And, all of this world, accessible through the grace of an Internet connection and the convenience of modern telephones. The former Jesuit, reported to the journal Études, otherwise inaccessible to him. The guy from a Big Island, always too far away from the main streams of communication, who changes his profile photo, in real time, with the inhabitants of one of the capitals of the global village. An Inuit on his ice floe, a Pygmy from the equatorial forest and an Aborigine contemplating the rock Uluru, each representative of three extreme societies, if not separate, can find each other in “PM” (private messaging) on Facebook.
There is something fascinating there. Even for someone much younger than his grandparents who had to discover with the same disbelief the “magic” of a TSF radio or a Bakelite telephone. The plane has not always been accessible nor the Internet so democratic. The travels that formed my youth took place over pages that were not yet PDF files. In a third world university, in the years 1980-1990, old issues from 1970 of “The World” were timelessly relevant. Only one generation later, real time imposes its urgency now measured in expiration seconds.
Child of the old school, nurtured in eternal gratitude to Gütenberg’s invention, and scrupulous of the perfect accuracy of copyright references, I cannot get used to certain fantasies of social networks. Like creating an account in someone else’s name. Like the practice of pseudo-anonymous. Like borrowing other people’s profile pictures. And that, ultimately, is what brings me here. When the “news feed” presents me with my own photo with the ritual question “do you know?”. Ransom of a glory that I myself would have ignored. But, in good company, ultimately, just like these hundreds of accounts bearing the image of Buddha, Albert Einstein, Barack Obama…the Eiffel Tower or Manjakamiadana.
Replaced by Valiavo Andriamihaja
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#Facebook #oldfashioned #expectation
