If you spend enough time online like I do, then you begin to understand that our Founding Fathers didn’t really mean for us to have free speech. Well, not all of us.
I have learned that the two worst things that have come along in recent years is Facebook and the ability to make comments at the bottom of news stories. My, the populace is unprepared for public discourse.
I remember back to 1996 when I first got online. Back then, AOL was the name of the game. They had all these forums that you could post on. I thought, wow, finally, a mass communication device for the rest of us. Up until then, only the power brokers had control of communication – newspapers, TV, radio, book publishing, etc.. There was no way for the common guy to be heard.
It didn’t take me long to discover that it was all smoke and mirrors. I joined several forums on AOL, ready to share my thoughts. One of them was the Parrothead forum, created by people who loved Jimmy Buffett music. Instead of like minded people sharing their knowledge, it turned out to be just a big hot tub party, complete with sound bites from Jimmy Buffett songs and an occasional “SPLASH.”
If you recall this time in Internet history, the bandwidth was pitifully thin. I was on a 2400 baud dial up modem at the time, soooooo slooooow by today’s standards but state-of-the-art back then. So any sound bite would take a minute or two to load on the damned computer, just so I could hear three words: “cheeseburger in paradise” from some geek-head who probably hadn’t had a real date in a decade.
I’m not sure this is what our Founding Fathers intended with the First Amendment.
What’s really sad is that it continues everywhere online. Go to an editorial about the debt ceiling and you get some idiot talking about illegal aliens. Or worse, they’re spewing hatred or misinformation about the topic, never bothering to check their own facts.
Now, I’m not an Einstein by any stretch. But I do like to share thoughts and even argue about a subject that is in all our collective interests. It rarely happens though. Instead, I will post something that I think is fairly thought provoking and back comes a response that is akin to “liar, liar pants on fire.” I thought we had all moved beyond the third grade. My mistake.
Facebook is quickly losing my favor. Now, I don’t mind it if you promote your business once in a while along with personal posts. I do this too. But if you’re doing nothing but post advertisements then give me the option to “like’ your Business page. Don’t foist your ads on me or my friends under the guise of wanting to Friend me. Today, I spent 10 minutes hiding posts from people who do nothing but advertise their business and don’t seem to have a personal life or personal interests.
If I sound perturbed, you’re right. Many Friends on Facebook have felt the rapture as of late. I think I’ve hidden almost 50 because they did nothing but whine, posted banalities, shared information that is obviously incorrect, touted their misguided politica agendas or promoted their business endlessly.
I was so looking forward to sharing ideas, thoughts, dreams, news, ideas and interesting things to see. And all I got was the freedom of ill advised and ill mannered speech.
I would love to have seen what Ben Franklin would think of Facebook. In his time, and I think thankfully, a lot of Americans could read but weren’t exactly writers. Farmers didn’t really have a lot of time to share their views of the world, they were too busy feeding it. They left the big thoughts to the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and John Adams.
I could just see a colonial Facebook site. Filled with hot tub parties at Wilkerson’s farm down the way and ads for tricorns. When a big issue was discussed, such as, I don’t know, freedom from tyranny, someone would chime in that old Ben was just a fat fart or gay and the masses would post about that instead of the real issue at hand.
If you noticed, this is happening now in our world. The tyrannical bastards of Congress are trying to take our freedoms by telling us boldfaced lies. The smart people who know what’s going on are trying to tell the others that there is a fox in the henhouse, well, actually there are 435 foxes in the henhouse. But the masses don’t seem to know what’s going on. They are all so busy sharing banalities that our future is being sold down the road by these crooks we put into office.
I am often confused why people like to show off their ignorance so willingly. And then it occurred to me. They may actually think they are well read and masters of the English language. And that thought frightens me.
It’s like the American Idol contestants who think they can sing, but can’t. As they warble in front of the judges, they actually think that the voice of angels is pouring forth from their mouth. They really don’t know that it sounds like a cat being skinned alive.
I think there are obviously a lot of cat skinners out on the Internet today.
Out on the Treasure Coast, holding my tongue, but letting the fingers fly,
— Robb