• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, June 16, 2020

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” — John Lennon

The magic of our lives is in the nuance, the unexpected — and, sometimes, the mundane. It depends on bandwidth, a full spectrum of experience and stimuli that extends beyond the best attempts of our imagination to put boundaries around it. As Lennon knew, life is lived in a continual parade of moments that keep marching past us, whether we’ve planned them or not.

Of course, our current ability to make life plans is not what it once was. In fact, most aspects of our former lives have gone into a forced hibernation. Suddenly, our calendars are completely clear and we have a lot of unexpected time on our hands. So many of us have been spending more of that time on social media.

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding that a poor substitute for the real world.

I’ve noticed a few of my friends have recently posted that they’re taking a break from Facebook. That’s not unprecedented. But I think this time might be different. Speaking for myself, I have recently been experiencing a strange combination of anxiety and ennui when I spend any time on Facebook.

First, there are the various posts of political and moral outrage. I agree with almost all of them, in direction if not necessarily in degree.

And then there are the various posts of inspirational quotes and assorted pictures of loaves of bread, pets, gardens, favorite albums, our latest hobby, walks in the woods and kids doing adorable things. It is the assorted bric-a-brac of our new normal under COVID-19.

I like and/or agree with almost all these things. Facebook’s targeting algorithm has me pretty much pegged. But if the sum total of my Facebook feed defined the actual world I had to live in, I would get pretty bored with it in the first 15 minutes.

It would be like seeing the world only in blue and orange. I like blue. I’m OK with orange. But I don’t want to see the world in only those two colors — and that’s what Facebook does.

This is not a slight against Facebook. None of us (with the possible exception of Mark Zuckerberg) should expect it to be a substitute for the real world. But now that a lot of us have been restricted from experiencing big chunks of the real world and have substituted time with social media for it, we should realize the limitations of what it can provide.

Facebook and other social media platforms give us a world without nuance, without bandwidth, without serendipity and without context. Further, it is a world that has been algorithmically altered and filtered specifically for a data-defined avatar of who we really are. We’re not even getting the full bandwidth of what is on the platform. We’re getting what happens to squeeze past the content filters that act as our own personalized gatekeepers.

What the past three months have taught me is that when we rely on social media for experience, information or perspective, we have to take it for what it is. As a source of information, it is at best highly restricted and biased. As a source of social connection and experience, it is mercilessly flattened and stripped of all nuance. As a substitute for the real world, it comes up woefully short.

Perhaps the biggest restriction of social media is that everything we see is planned and premeditated, either by humans or an algorithm. The content that is posted is done so with clear intent. And the content we actually see has been targeted to fit within some data-driven pigeonhole that an algorithm has decided represents us. What we’re missing is exactly what John Lennon was referring to when he talked about what life is: the unplanned, the unexpected, the unintended.

We’re missing an entire spectrum of color beyond blue and orange.