Facebook: autistic communication
Short journey inside Facebook experience, where “communication” is autistic and “friends” use “likes and hearts” and speak just to fight about nonsense and foolishness. An upside-down world, like “Alice through the looking glass” world.
“Autistic communication” is an oxymoron. Everybody knows that autism is a disease that makes you lose touch with reality and makes you build the inner world that keeps you from having any contact with other people like everyone’s outside of an insurmountable barrier.
According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, Autism is a mental disorder that starts in young children and causes behavior that is unusually centered on the self while limiting the development of social and communication skills. The word autism comes from Greek “autós” (self) + -ism and means self-reference, the negation of the other and negation of diversity and, therefore, the loss of contact with reality.
Autism is a disease that starts in childhood, but since Social Media exist and, in this specific case Facebook, I’m afraid some kind of illness drift has spread in adults. If we want to press on a raw nerve, we should say that the most vulnerable people about Social Media autism are all people over 40 next. Contrary to what we may think, young people between twenty and thirty-five years use Facebook more communicatively: most of them use specific groups to receive and give updates about their own professional or student competence; they share posts of topics they’re interested in, associations they belong to; they use words to comment a post, and not just “like” “hearts” and all the other silly smiley and emoji. To finish, generally, they don’t create self-referential posts, one right after the other, compulsively, as adults do.
Just like Alice through the looking glass, when we get through the Facebook system, we are not able to understand we are in an upside-down world. Not yet. First of all, we’ll have to learn how all different categories of Fb users work: the first category is the “friend” one. I mean the real friends, friends in the flesh, those we meet in our everyday life, friends whom we talk on the mobile, and whom we text on Whatsapp and Telegram. It’s of no use communicating with them via Facebook too, but we and Fb system need them, as a kind of weft in which you can weave all the warp threads: these threads are all the new Fb contacts.
The second category is the “old friends”. People you don’t meet or talk to since you were in high-school. They ask your “friendship” or accept your request but they don’t tell you a single word. “Like, Heart, Wow, Sigh” but not a damned word. You look to some of their useless, depressing posts and, sometimes, you leave your feedback — in words — and maybe your comment is a joke, other it is challenging, in a very polite way, but old “friends” keep stay silent and astonished. You would like to yell: “Hello!!! Is there anybody in charge of this robotic account?” but you won’t do it, because you know your old friends are right: you are the “one who’s different”, not them. That’s the exact time you start understanding you fell in an upside-down world: persons who collect hundreds or thousands “friends” but with no longing on talking to them.
According to a study published by the “Royal Society Open Science” journal, the human brain is physiologically unable to handle more than 150 Facebook “friends”. This number, called Dunbar’s number, comes from the theories of Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist. Though most of Facebook users carefully seek to increase the number of their “friends” like it’s an added benefit to their life.
After the “old friends” category, here’s the “unknown”. You are used to trusting friends of your friends as if it were a dinner invitation and you don’t realize you are walking on thinner ice. Just one false step and you’ll find hundred friendship requests by horny men if you look like a graceful girl in your profile; hundreds of friendship requests by men from the poorest countries, if you are a European woman — no matter your age; hundreds of friendship requests by prostitutes if you are a man over 40. Once eliminated all those requests, one by one, you’ll probably have a break! No more tsunami, just a few waves now and then…
What’s going to be harder is decrypting who belongs to the next category of users: “friends” of your “friends” who looks like men and women just like you, with “no hidden agenda”, but after you accepted their friendship request you finally find out why they picked you: because — just to make an example — you are a literature lover and they have a stupid booklet to be released, and they will soon do a public reading of their stupid booklet, and in their posts, they’ll let you know every detail about that reading, and all their friends’ comments, like: “Wonderful!” “So deep!” “Magic!” together with hearts and other trivial stuff like that. And you can wager any amount of money there will be another reading after the first, and another one after the second, and their “friendship” will show itself and you’ll finally and sadly understand what these people are: pure spam.
In the next category, the “self-referential” are users who found a home on Facebook, where they publish a huge number of posts, one after the next, compulsively. What do they post? Everything: old music that everybody knows, thoughts nobody is interested in, their parents’ photos, old stories bad told; but the most important thing is they don’t give a damn about “friends” who are going to read all the posts they wrote because their Fb autism is probably full-blown and they are just talking and posting to themselves. Some of these self-referring users create a kind of audience around them and wait “friendly and admiring comments” inside their posts, like spiders on the web, and they’ll never, never move to look at someone else’s post.
Talking again about autism we know autistic children cannot identify people’s emotions and are not able to attribute a state of mind to the others. Autistic children don’t get what it’s defined “theory of mind”, consisting of being able to figure out people’s feelings and wishes, making assumptions and forecast about their behavior. In the human brain there’s a special circuitry, which has the task to process information coming from the social world; that’s why this circuitry is called “social brain”. Autistic children cannot develop a “theory of mind” and don’t have a “social brain”. In my opinion, many Facebook users don’t have these skills as well.
It’s kind of like the old question about egg and hen: who comes first? What I wonder is: the human existence has become so worthless and miserable because of Facebook and other social media or Facebook is Facebook because the human species is so awful?
