FEAR AND FACEBOOK

You might not believe it but I try to maintain some standards. Sometimes I get tired. I then latch onto the first thing I see. It seems that Facebook is the new version of the party line telephone service.

I like to imagine that when the telephone was introduced and had gained widespread adoption, so that late adopters like myself had gotten into the act, the tabloids of the day were ablaze as now with the fear and dread that the new technology brings. Maybe, if for example, you lived in Tasmania or other remote places, despite the stories of dread, it was so much nicer to hear the voices of your distant relatives and verbally interact with them, than just rely on the cryptic code of the telegraph. In a sense Facebook has reversed the process from voice to print, but it means that I can communicate with my sister who lives across the water in Aotearoa almost daily.

Tracy Clark-Flory writes in Salon that according to The Telegraph, Facebook is responsible for the rise of Syphilis in the UK. The story in the cold light of day seems a bit tenuous. The explanation is as follows:

. You see, health officials in the North East English town of Middlesbrough have issued a warning about the dangers of unprotected sex following a rise in syphilis cases in the area. How, you might ask, did this sensible public service message translate into the Telegraph headline, “Facebook ‘linked to rise in syphilis,’” and a lead paragraph that outright blames the site?

Well, Peter Kelly, the town’s executive director of public health, issued the following statement: “Social networking sites are making it easier for people to meet up for casual sex.” This throw-away line came after much cautioning against unsafe sex and encouragement for people to get treatment for the disease, but somehow what stuck was “social networking sites” and “casual sex.”

Prodded for further soundbites worthy of distortion, Kelly told the Telegraph: “I don’t get the names of people affected, just figures, and I saw that several of the people had met sexual partners through these sites.” To be clear, that’s several people out of the 30 recorded syphilis cases in the area last year. Not only do we have a whopper of a causation-correlation issue here, we also have an incredibly small sample size.

Ah, but such things have never gotten in the way of handwringing over the horrors of casual sex and the moral dangers of technology, so why should they now?

As well as causing syphilis:

“Facebook has already exposed children to predators, blackmail and bullying, given teenagers fodder for mocking their tragically unhip parents, gotten adults fired from their jobs. . .”

And there may be some truth in these unintended consequences of new technologies where direct relationships can be established. For example, I notice that it was reported in a Sunday newspaper that deaths of pedestrians in NSW had risen by 50% (?) and it seemed reasonable to attribute that significant rise, which presumably would be reflected in statistics elsewhere. We might be wise to consider the possibility, as the official warnings suggest, that the use of headphones takes away our capacity to be aware of our environment and exposes us to greater danger on the road.

Then again computing has increased the sedentary aspect of our lives perhaps to the detriment of our physical well being. As for myself I go into a parallel universe, and perhaps as is suggested that the time absorbed would be better spent, as it suggested, in physical activities associated with other work that needs attention. I suppose as human beings our impulse is to create and adopt technology, and then we have to use it wisely. If we are able to that with regard to our social and natural environments, we would justify the self-prescribed label and potential of Homo Sapein, Sapien.