The idea that you can do something that’s funny or amazing and that all you need is the power of Twitter to spread it, or that if you “hustle” and have “passion” and you follow all these different cockamamie strategies that you’ll become rich and famous, or perhaps overthrow your government, or “disrupt” an established industry, it’s so obviously bullshit. But … it sounds great on paper. And given the record high unemployment rate and the general economic conditions America and most of the world currently has to deal with, anything that offers the promise of riches is what we’re going to cling to, despite all evidence to the contrary.
And because the myth sounds great, we make up these fantasies of what these platforms can do for us, and those fantasies get lodged so deeply in our minds that it’s virtually impossible to remove them.
Believe me, I know. I still think about Ashley. So when I argue with someone about how social media is bullshit, as frustrating as it is to have them just repeat the same specious “proof” that I’m wrong over and over again, I know deep down in my heart that the reason why they can’t accept the truth is the same reason this Ashley thing still exists in my mind: It’s because the truth sucks.
We want to believe that the beautiful woman can love the ugly guy. We want to believe that Twitter can give us a voice equal to a major news network, but … life sucks. There’s no other way to put it. And it sucks because neither of these things are not, and never have been, true.
BJ Mendelson, author of Social Media is Bullshit: What The Myth of Social Media Has To Do With A Beautiful Relationship That Doesn’t Exist | Modern Primate | man, that’s deep
I find BJ Mendelson’s anti social media rants to be really satisfying reads, especially given how many more followers he has than I do.
