Saturday, August 24, 2013

what facebook is doing to the human eye, and why we are to blind to see it

"I wish I could have lived during the sixties"
 Me            

Jovanotti, a famous Italian singer, writes in his book "Il grande boh" that during full moon he encounters problems being creative. He usually stays up at night, since nighttime is when inspiration comes to him. During full moon he cannot focus on anything, his mind is dizzy, his body is anxious.

Sleep, I believe is something fundamental to us. Sleep, and also to let our eyes sleep at times. The modern human being is forgetting how she used to live like. She thinks that sitting in front of a computer is something normal, something sane. She never takes into consideration the fact that a hundred and fifty years ago, the human species spent their days on the land growing vegetables, or hunting or fishing in the forest.

The human eye is formed as a boiled egg, and what holds it there are six muscles that enables it to focus. When the human being used to walk in the forest, looking at birds, glazing at the horizon, she was training up the eyes´muscles. Today, sitting in front of the computer, looking at the iPhone, textmessaging, watching television our focus is still for hours. These habits are not only damaging for a day-to-day eye-sight, it causes some people having to wear eye-glasses since the eyes muscles itself are not able to change the focus. Eye-glasses are like a wheel-chair for the legs. 

A recent research at the University of Michigan, suggests that Facebook makes you unhappy. The research involved surveying 82 undergrads and showed that the more time the college students said they spent on Facebook, the more likely they were to report feeling a little less chipper, a little less satisfied with life. 
"The more people reported using Facebook, the more negative they were feeling following Facebook use," Oscar Ybarra, a psychologist at the University of Michigan.

Over the years, various studies have made a range of observations about our Facebook relationships: that posting photos alienates your friends, that "Liking" a post will nudge other friends who see it to do the same etc.

Here, to be complete the survey needs to differentiate between various kinds of activities on Facebook — whether the participants were simply browsing, posting public messages, or "liking" posts and photos. 

Facebook experience is influenced in no small part by "what you're doing online, and whom you're doing it with", for instance has satisfaction been a result of surveys when the undergrad students were communicating with their close friends or loved ones.

Considering human beings are complex creatures, and our online behavior reflects that too, it's perhaps not too surprising that this study shows how our actions influence our state of mind, even about the world's biggest social network.




Meanwhile the average American spends 31 minutes on Facebook each day, sleeping time has decreased to 6,5 hours per night, compared to 8 hours just one generation ago. In the last decades, sleep is increasingly considered as a waste of time: you snooze you lose. The digital culture promoves being "on", not "off". That the seemingly solitary sleep is dependent on a lived community makes the attack on the nightly rest, pictures the idea of how ​​a more cohesive society has broken down in favor of an ideology of individual success and fulfillment. Unproductiveness of sleep - the only remaining opportunity where we can neither work nor consume - is what Marx called a "natural barrier" against capitalism: that we sleep less and less is seen as an expression of the market's inherent demands for expansion.

The digital culture has effectively increased the commercialization of more and more aspects of our lives and normalized a connection 24/7 - around the clock. This has several consequences. The most obvious and often-discussed (but it seems to help) is that we make ourselves constantly exposed to intrusion and monitoring. We can say whatever we want about our abilities at ignoring ads in our Facebook feeds: no one can escape from the ongoing collection of our digital behaviors, which are then analyzed and resold.

Another consequence is how the constant readiness to perform different types of services places us in an ongoing digital training camp, where the distinctions between work and leisure, between public and private, between the living and the organization disappears. Any kind of set-up time can be filled with narcissistic self-reflection or construction of the personal brand. All occasions for real subjectivity, to free thoughts flow and daydreaming disappear.

When interpersonal contact is reduced to an interface, our responsibility for others finds itself eliminated, argue Crary, the writer of the book 24/7. Walter Benjamin noted that 18th Century people, which quickly became accustomed to the new congestion on city streets and trams, were the first generation to be systematically trained not to meet the other's gaze. Over a hundred years later, smart appliances prevent spontaneous meetings. More important still, 24/7 gives the illusion of a time without waiting and immediate gratification. As a result, patience, that is a prerequisite for any democracy is weakening: listening to others, waiting for their turn to speak.

24/7 is a time zone with no time, a world without shadows. Certainly, no one can work, shop, play, blog or do networking around the clock, but since today there is no time, place or situation in which one can not consume goods or use social networking, 24/7 infuses every aspect of our lives. But somewhere in the no man's land between society and nature, a resistance action is sleeping, which reminds us that another world is possible, and to some extent exists. A world where the earth and the sun moves and separates day from night. A world where we could relax.

Now that Facebook has entered an alliance with Ericsson and Nokia to deliver internet access to the worlds developing countries - in order to reach out to another four billion people - investing over 1 billion dollars, you do not need to be a genius to predict what is going to happen. Billions of people will see their lives changed; they will sit in front of screens, damaging their eyesight, getting bad sleep at night, feeling unhappy visiting facebook.

Why are we too blind to see what Facebook is doing to our lives, not only in terms of eyesight and sleep but also our state of mind?
Do we really need more human beings to suffer the same way as we do?

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