Is there life after Facebook?: The Cyber Gulag revisited & Debate reloaded

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International institute Ifimes :Is there life after Facebook?

By Anis H. Bajrektarević

Is there life after Facebook? Or after the Spring-ing ‘revolution’? Now, when Wall Street is occupied, how will we occupy ourselves? Could we google protest, tweet discontent, upload promenades, block a tragedy and avoid farce, and eventually download pure happiness – happily ever after? ...

Through the pain of sobriety, the protesters all across the MENA, Euro-Med and overseas are learning that neither globalization nor the McFB(1) way of life (mostly spent in the large, air-conditioned shopping-malls) is a shortcut to development; that free trade is not a virtue, but an instrument; that liberalism is not a state of mind but a well-doctrinated ideology, and finally that the social media networks are only a communication tool, not a replacement for indepen- dent critical thinking(2) or for the collapsed cross-generational contract. “We are the suckers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones– and the eternally disappointed ones(3)...”

Machines run on binary-coded algorithms (predictability of human behavior cyber-providers) can neither compensate for an empathic human touch nor can they replace the wonders of socio-emotional interactions of individuals in a real time-space(4). Sociableness is neither of a linear, one-directional dynamics à la the Running Sushi, nor can it be simplifiable and instant portable like the three-size Starbucks coffee. Personal relations are lived, not utilized by the mouse click. Human integrity is self-molested (brutalized) and self-reduced (trivialized) into the lame shop-window commodity which is purchasable 24/7 by ‘poking’ on the photo of someone’s personal profile. And, likies are available to give a rating for ‘commodities’.