Facebook: it's where the wild sheep are.

It's a strange and interesting, if not particularly brave, new world most of us are connected to.

It's a world based almost entirely on the consideration of how people manipulate themselves to be perceived  by others.

An easy task for me, people expect me to be borishly opinionated, because for the most part that is what I am like in real life.



What I am NOT in real life, what I am NOT in face to face communications, what I am NOT in business or in friendship ... is a sheep.

Opinions should be formed by consuming information and then distilling that information into some semblance of order that others can understand. The work of translating an opinion giving power and new light on a potentially needed subject.

Opinions should shape how missions and causes are supported, because the importance of the causes should far outweigh that of the individual...

... unfortunately, what could be the most significant downside of the social media age is that of cause-dilution.

Apparently all the individual has to do now, to support anything at all, is to simply cut and paste purile repost-requests in the retarded belief that because they were one of the 3% who reposted the thing, they are immediately of more worth than that of the 97% who don't.


For example:

Do you know that frogs can feel bullshit being posted on facebook? Every 2.76 seconds a frog is killed by random useless posts. With their death their children go hungry and die too, as a result they can't grow to be harvested for their mucus that might be the cure to AIDS or baldness, or pinkeye or ABBA. 97% of you wont repost this, because you suspect it's a passive-aggressive ploy made by some sad, personally powerless individual to claw into some hither-to-unknown stash of brownie points, without the intestinal fortitude to go out their front door and find a way that they could feasibly exact some kind of change. 3% of you are on the same bandwagon and can't help yourselves acting like sheep, while hoping that the repost will encourage the original poster to give you something for your mindless plant-and-grind farming/cafe/theme-park games.

Okay... I'll admit I have changed the feel of the standardised post somewhat for the purposes of entertainment but usually it serves as nothing more than a  shitty guilt trip using cancer/rape/paedophilia/animal cruelty/diabetes/HIV-AIDS/depression in the belief that connected 'friends' will see the poster in a better light.

Come. ON.

So much technology is available to the people of this giant blue space marble to be connected and disseminate messages of dire importance. Instead, those messages are getting watered down because people actually believe that they are making a change by spewing out post after post of rehashed chain mail, enabling the posters to push their chairs back, wiping their mouths as the crumbs of their social awesomeness drop onto their lap.

In late 2010 Mainstreet.com posted an article about charitable donations hitting a 20 year low citing global down turns and a raft of other variables that could cause such a thing to happen.

I suggest that at least some of the blame could be shifted to social media in that the act of reposting such drivel (lampooned above) is taking the place of doing REAL charitable work.

I therefore put that this non-action is this era's version of, "No I don't have to send any money or physically support "xyz charity", I gave at the office"

I call upon all ranters no matter how far flung to challenge every post of this nature.

Ask for the data set that states there is a 97% deficit of posters. Or at least, if not wishing to be so direct, simply google the cause that the Ovine poster has implored you to support, find a charity that looks like it knows what it is doing and respond in their comment stream with "OR people can really help by sending money to www.<charitysite>.com".

I also suggest utilising a pre-emptive post on your own update stream that reads something like:

...want's to see the statistical study for every "x% of people won't repost this, y% will" post.

Who holds the data set and is there a study on why it seems to be the same breakdown of posters:nonposters with every purile request to repost?

If you wish for me to repost, I require such data and links to the studies and data sources that supplied the ratio.

Thanks

If people get all crappy about it just send them to this post here on indignantrant.com. If they feel compelled to respond, fine...

...97% of them won't say a word.

Andrew Webber is an Australian author living in the Middle East, his first book "Erasure" was released in June 2012 to critical acclaim. Available in Kindle and paperback on Amazon.com