Is Social Media Antithetical to the Social Enterprise Movement?

I have a confession to make; I don't like social media.  There, I've finally said it; it feels good to clear my conscience.

I refuse to get a Facebook page; horrifying I know.  How else will the extroverts I loathed in high school know what flavor cereal I ate for breakfast?  I have a theory; every social update from now on should read as follows: I am peering into a man made computer screen or mobile device!  "Unfriending" and "oversharing"; what do these words even mean?  I trust these aren't the lessons that my young children are learning in the schoolyard.

My rebuke of Facebook, and the social media empire it presides over, extends beyond the company's dogmatic effort to publicize personal information; an effort which is categorically divergent from the interests of its stakeholders.  While unsettling, this is only part of a larger picture.  Social media is siphoning the act of social capital creation away from households and communities and transplanting it into the virtual world.  Normative behavior and value systems within families and towns become eroded; the building blocks of culture eviscerate.

I know I'm being cynical.  Social media has transformed the way we connect with people and share information, right?  Granted, in the highest and best use of the form, it does just that.  But one need look no further than Twitter to understand how seldom, if ever, this is actually the case.  Social media campaigns seem rarely more than an attempt to advance a message (but more likely a brand) above a cacophony of mindless chatter.

For me personally, social media represents the commoditization of relationships.  It reduces the human person from a vehicle of production into one of consumption.  It derivates and monocultures the linkages organized around people.  Diversity is replaced by homogeneity, and wherever this occurs in the natural world, beauty and resilience is compromised.

We are losing the bonds that make us "native to place."  Hyper-connectivity is exhilarating and intoxicating, but it prompts us to operate at a frenetic pace that disconnects us from the cycles of the natural world.

Rachel Carson once wrote, "Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself away from the realities of Earth; the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of tides, the folded bud ready for spring; and, intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into experiments toward the destruction of himself, and his world.  There is certainly no single remedy for this condition; and I can offer no panacea. But it seems reasonable to believe, and I do believe, that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders, and realities, of this universe about us, the less taste we shall have for its destruction."

All that said, thank you for using your social media and tweeting this message along.