My Facebook newsfeed contains a great number of posts on Donald
Trump. A high percentage of my friends
share the same opinion about our incoming President. As a result, my Facebook feed is the
inevitable echo chamber – a place where the same voices are heard, the same opinions are expressed, the same
articles and posts are shared.
This is not the public square, where diverse opinions and
feelings are shared should be shared. As with so many
social media sites where we each pick and choose our own crowd, each Facebook site tends to be the electronic version of a selective tribe, only talking to each other.
There has already been plenty written about this phenomenon
and the social/political impact of Facebook and similar digital sharing
sites. “Echo chamber” even made the annual
Lake Superior State University list of banished words for 2017.
I recently noted another consequence of all this
sharing: my Facebook newsfeed is a
continuous stream of Donald Trump pictures.
Every shared article leads off with Trump’s picture, so it is immediately used as the lead picture of a post. Each flick of my finger on my phone or tablet results
in a moving montage of the man’s face.
Flick fast enough, and I have a movie short. Rather disconcerting.
I’m sure the data mavens at Facebook have the numbers
that demonstrate the most prevalent pictures of people that appear in any
24-hour period.
Imagine the resulting movie shorts if all my friends were focused on Darth Vader for a day? or Brad Pitt? or Queen Elizabeth? or Vladimir Putin? or Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”
painting? or a cat?
Whoops. Stale
meme. Way too many cats on Facebook
already.
