Zygmunt Bauman: Facebook And The Pitfalls Of Social Media
Zygmunt Bauman is a Polish sociologist who gained fame and recognition thanks to his work ‘Liquid Modernity’. In it, he denounces that postmodernism brought with it the collapse of the “solid”. There is no solidity in anything. Everything is temporary, transient and changing.
Zygmunt Bauman’s youth was not easy. He had to flee his own country, pursued by the Nazi regime. Finally, he managed to establish himself in Israel and, since the 1970s, he began to surprise the world with his theses. This earned him several awards of great relevance.
Zygmunt Bauman analyzed the contemporary world in a rigid way. One of the topics that occupied his most recent thoughts is the Internet and social networks. He doesn’t see great virtues in these things. Rather, it defines them as contemporary traps, into which people fall and feel satisfied.
Zygmunt Bauman and Facebook
One of Zygmunt Bauman’s phrases catches our attention. He says: “Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made billions with his company by focusing on our fear of loneliness. This is Facebook”. In fact, it doesn’t just refer to Facebook, but to all social networks.
The sociologist emphasized that Mark Zuckerberg’s great merit was realizing how far the human desire not to be alone goes. In a social network, loneliness does not seem to exist. 24 hours a day and 7 days a week there is someone “there”, willing to read any of our concerns and to reinforce the fact of sharing it, giving it a solitary “like”.
People now seem willing to be part of totally inconsequential conversations, all to stay “connected”. They no longer spend their days accompanied by people. In your daily life, the partner is a computer or a smartphone.
The absence of dialogue and community
The work of this sociologist speaks of new technological dependencies. For him, they are devastating forces that almost no one can resist. They have an impressive power of congregation. Never before in history has there been such a thing. However, Zygmunt Bauman thinks that before there wasn’t so much communication that didn’t lead to dialogue, that didn’t bear fruit either.
Zygmunt Bauman says that on Facebook and similar social networks, what people do is a kind of echo. You only hear what you want to hear. It speaks only to those who think the same. The hammocks, then, are like an immense house of mirrors. They allow meeting but not dialogue.
Establishing or eliminating a contact on a social network is extremely easy. In real life, it’s not so much. We have to face each of our actions. On the Internet, no. There is an exchange of messages, but no dialogue. Differences but not constructive debate. In any case, the illusion of being connected with others is created.
The realm of the “public self”
Social media invites you to expose yourself, show and demonstrate. Of course, we chose only the most presentable moments to show. We are little dictators in the realm of our account. We decide who is and who is not. Absences and presences don’t end up affecting us completely.
The “I” occupies a decisive place in social networks. Without realizing it, we become dependent on this public exposure on the networks. We want to be identified and recognized in a certain way, and we may even get frustrated if we don’t.
Zygmunt Bauman sees a trap for human beings in social media. He thinks that this kind of space has a decisive impact on what he calls “ liquid culture”. In it, precarious human bonds prevail. Loves without a face and without commitment. Waves of today’s feelings and ideas that tomorrow disappear. People who remain entertained, while power, political and economic, controls them more and more.
For Zygmunt Bauman, the prognosis is not promising. With so much information circulating, we are becoming uninformed people. We never know what to believe. There’s so much communication that we’re getting more and more into a monologue. There is so much globalization that individualism has become increasingly aggressive. Apparently, such freedom has made us more docile than ever to the impositions of those who decide our ways of life.
