A Distorted Reality.

Why can’t people care about things that matter, or even take a direct action for those causes that they supposedly stand for? We have Facebook petitions and groups as a main line in political activities, and it really is tragic. Yes, collecting 1 MILLION PEOPLE AGAINST ROBERT MUGABE (case left as its group’s owners intended it to be) will really pressure a tyrant into submission. He loves the insignificant ‘voice’ of the digital generation’s pleas so much.

Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary), 2 Million people against Female Circumcision and One Million Faces Against Malaria are just as redundant: the collections of lists of names is not going to change any one of these things. Voting, not having your female children mutilated and vaccination are the respective answers to these huge dilemmas. Doing something oneself would actually serve to combat these issues, rather than just acknowledge them in passing with your name on a fictional dotted line. If you’re going to campaign about something, get the fuck up and actively do something. Peaceful protests, polite letters to government officials, civil disobedience, violence: I do not care; just make your support for a cause count, no matter how trivial this cause is.

Then we have the practically omnipresent ‘ohmygod I lost my phone and need to tell everyone my new number’ groups: what is the point in this? As you obviously have the people to be invited to the group on your Friends list, you may as well just contact them individually. Expediency is not even a valid excuse: you can send messages to multiple recipients these days. It’s like people don’t care for their privacy: yes, just put your number in the name of the group so that friends of friends can easily obtain your contact details, should you wish them to or not.

The abundance of almost meta Facebook-groups-about-Facebook also irks me somewhat: nobody is ever going to shut down Facebook, so stop trying to get people to join your little group in your vain effort to gather a large group in your name, Anonymous God Complex Sufferer. Then there’s ‘I’m a Facebook Addict’ groups - a sad indictment of the weak will of the common man. Of late, we’re seeing ‘boo-hoo, I want the old layout back groups’, much as happened with Last.fm: it truly is a shame that people do not realise that websites (espeically websites owned by media conglomerates like CBS, in the case of Last.fm) are not democracies. And as a true exercise in redundancy, there are also several thousand (perhaps exaggerated, but a large number nonetheless) ‘Get x on Facebook!’ groups: as x is not currently on Facebook, it is unlikely that they’re going to see the group to respond to the pleas of others.