Facing the music

A print media person complaining about Facebook is the latest example of the “Simpsons” meme that shows Homer’s father Abe angrily yelling at a cloud (ironically enough, it's published in the local paper), and admittedly, much of the animus is sour grapes. Zuckerberg and Co. have by and large replaced us as the primary source for news, classifieds, and items for sale while sucking up an astonishing amount of online advertising revenue and gradually becoming a ubiquitous behemoth infiltrating our personal, professional and political lives in unprecedented fashion.
           
But the recent news surrounding data collection—and more broadly, changes in my own life—have forced me to reckon with my own use of Facebook and wonder why I allowed it to control me for so long. Unlike the older generations, I’ve been on the site since I was 14 years old (almost half of my existence now), and I’m a self-confessed recovering social media addict.
           
From the early days, I used my profile to project a certain image of myself, attempt to seem witty and make friends with people I barely knew in real life. Likes, comments, arguments and communities of like-minded people drew me in right away, and I never saw it as much more than a way to connect with others—an unquestionable positive, especially for a budding young journalist.
           
Before long, I kept Facebook open whenever I should’ve been studying in college, felt the need to check my phone incessantly for notifications (thankfully, I no longer have the app) and spent family vacations scrolling through to see what my friends back home were doing. My girlfriend, my parents and my friends all told me I had a problem, and they were right. I’m glad someone else could point it out to me.
 
This is not the site’s fault—it’s solely my own—but it’s hard to argue that it’s really had any tangible positive effect on society as a whole except for the occasional viral charitable fundraising campaign that doesn’t turn out to be a hoax. We can no longer agree on basic facts, and whether or not the Russians are responsible, the political and cultural divides among us are widening by the hour. Facebook is now too big to destroy, but it’s done enough to expose the fault lines in our supposedly civilized nation that we may never fully recover.
 
And beyond the way that it used private information to sell micro-targeted advertising and voter data, a broader, more troubling truth surrounds Facebook: it encourages us to create fake versions of ourselves, shun face-to-face human interaction and hate people who are otherwise our friends because they don’t agree with us on everything. I know from personal experience.
 
As a writer, on the other hand, I need social media to reach an audience even as it now takes more and more of the ad dollars on local products for sale, help wanted listings and real estate. For most people between the ages of 15 and 50 to know that a newspaper still exists in Grundy County, Iowa, it needs a website, and for the website to draw eyeballs, Facebook is the only reliable distribution source—although, with the ever-changing algorithm, who knows if that’ll be true next week?
 
So local news finds itself in the precarious position of needing Facebook to stay relevant even as Facebook has gradually morphed into one massive local newspaper itself. How do we fix that?
The solution will probably require cooperation from all of the parties involved. Newspapers need to be appealing both visually and content-wise to sell copies. Facebook needs to recognize that it is a media platform and possibly kick back some of its billions in profits to smaller organizations that rely on the site for survival. Users need to realize that anything they do on the Internet—especially Facebook and Google—will be monetized in some way and avoid it if invasion of privacy suddenly bothers them, and the human race in general needs to place a higher value on in-person interaction.
 
I still have a Facebook account, and as long as I’m in this business, I’ll keep it. But the meteoric rise and potential fall of the Social Network reminds us of an important rule in a capitalist economy: when somebody wins, somebody else loses.