Post No Evil

Practically everyone I know or meet uses Facebook to stay in touch with people and keep up to date on what's going on in their friends' and family's lives. But what I've noticed lately is a change in the way people as a whole are using the social networking site.

When I first joined Facebook in 2008, there wasn't much you could do in terms of posting. You'd update your status or add a picture of your kid's birthday or the baseball game you attended over the weekend. Gradually, Facebook added a plethora of ways to post, including the ability to link to other social networking apps that would do the posting for you. Some of these apps include Twitter, Foursquare, Miso, GetGlue, and Yahoo. Before long, you only needed to be logged in to your Facebook account and your browser would automatically let others know what you were reading or watching in another window. And you could recommend things to your friends with a single click without even having to copy, toggle back to Facebook, and paste. But the latest trend is one of particular interest. And it concerns me for many reasons.

Take a scroll through your newsfeed. Notice anything? How many people actually update their status anymore with a, um, status? How many people actually take the time to write their own words; what they are thinking or feeling or doing?

All you see are pictures that are shared from not even another person, many times, but a page. A page that thousands or millions like just for the purpose of seeing pictures they can share so they don't have to say things themselves. Doesn't anyone have a mind of their own anymore?

Look, I'm guilty of sharing pictures too. Some of them are cute, colorful, funny, or too long and deep to put into a status myself without someone saying "get a blog!" But anyone who knows me knows that I have no reservations about stating my own opinions in my own words too.

Maybe it's not that people don't have a mind of their own. Maybe that was a poor choice of words. Maybe it's that people have been brainwashed and are too afraid to have and express their own opinions. They are worried that if they're not politically correct they might offend someone. But they're forgetting one thing. The First Amendment is not limited to actual speech. We have the freedom to speak our minds in the written form as well. If we choose to use our own Facebook wall as a platform to do that, well then so be it. Unless you're yelling "fire!" in a crowded Facebook room, you're not breaking any laws.

Now, that doesn't mean that it's okay to defame or bully someone on Facebook or any other site. Those actions should be punished accordingly. However, if you run the risk of losing friends simply because your religious, political or life in general views differ from theirs, then they weren't your friend to begin with. I think that while we should be considerate of others, we should not be silenced by them. We should not be taking the easy way out when expressing ourselves.

Not only does this behavior add to the lack of personal interaction but I think that by sharing the photos of generic Facebook pages, people are hiding behind the blame of the controversy caused by those photos. They sort of take on an "I didn't say it" attitude. No, but you shared it. You agree with it. Stop avoiding the issue. Either you stand for something or you don't.