The Story Behind The Gingerbread House
I’m not on any social media. This is for many reasons, but the biggest one is that they generally fall into two categories:
- A front for data mining
- Too small to connect with my friends
Take Facebook. At first, it started out as a good idea: connect everyone in the world. It lets you keep in touch with people, find old friends or teachers, and share important parts of your life with everyone so you don’t have to keep track of what you’ve told to whom. But then they realized how much money they could make off the information that people put on the site. It got bigger, eating up its competition to prevent anyone from challenging its power.
Normally, I’d be okay with ignoring it. That’s what you do with a service with whose terms of service and business practices you disagree. But our society has handed the keys over to Facebook. Events frequently only advertise and provide updates on Facebook, meaning if you’re not on Facebook, you can’t participate in those events. Friends post updates on Facebook, and often overlook those who aren’t on it. Despite the outrage people express when Facebook does something they don’t like, there’s no alternative. Facebook has worked hard to make this the case.
If we want Facebook to change, we have to work for it. They’re not going to change just because we glare at them. To this end, I’ve often looked for a way to explain my problems with social media giants in a way that doesn’t put people to sleep. I can reference as many articles from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that I want, but people don’t always want to listen.
The Gingerbread House is my latest attempt to convey my thoughts. I started describing Facebook as a gingerbread house months ago, and finally started putting more words to it back in April. While in general I try to avoid poems that are so heavy on metaphor that it’s not clear as to what they’re referring, I wanted to express my views on not only Facebook, but on many of the big social media companies.
Social media is a great idea. But for now, at least for me, the cost is too great.
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