Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and lost time...
The sad picture painted of western society by people's reaction to Facebook's service outage.
Lately, I’ve been writing a lot but not publishing much. As people worldwide found themselves unable to spend their precious time on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, their reactions prompted me to break the long dry spell.
Time is the only real currency in life. The one thing that once lost can never be regained. People’s descriptions of their “need” to find a social site to connect to others paints a sad picture of the state of our society in the western world.
I’ve watched people discussing theories of why WhatsApp was delaying message delivery in a café. I’ve read countless people describing how they went from one Facebook app to the next, trying to connect before finding out that they were all unavailable. Finally, I saw people gloating on Twitter and Telegram about their choices of apps or services and poking fun at those who didn’t use those services and were thus “disconnected.”
Isn’t it interesting what I was most interested in finding online, which is an explanation of what happened and some idea of whether other companies might also be impacted by the outage, was nowhere to be found? Mostly, I found tweets of people making fun of Facebook.
While I am not particularly a fan of Facebook, I realize that thousands of people work for the company and that even more thousands make a living or an extra buck selling stuff online through the social network. An entire day of outage from these companies has a massive impact on people that use WhatsApp to receive orders for delivery. On those that sell goods online or make a living through advertising on Instagram.
It is sad that so many people seem dependent on these services to get their dopamine fix, and sadder still to realize that their dependency on these services makes it possible for the second group to make a living through them.
Image by anncapictures from Pixabay
Exactly. It’s the dependency that is saddening. A friend of mine was near hysterical today; she kept calling us all, her friends because of the FB, IG and especially WhatsApp crash. She realised how hooked she was.
I agree, Mauricio. It’s a vicious circle that we all go around, our lives interwoven in infinite circles, interdependent with each other.