I've been reading and watching various anti-social media essays and talks (TedX) lately, after reaching my own point of complete revulsion and dumping Facebook on the last day of 2018. There are several ugly truths about this social media Thing that are becoming widely acknowledged, and this point -- that it hijacks consciousness with its unlimited reservoir of the vicious and the inane, i.e., with patterns of thoughtlessness -- is one.
I have a hypothesis that the "like" is a key mechanism of the contemporary world's cultural regression. The "like" reduces the human soul to that mode of consciousness which civilization has been attempting to overcome since pre-history: the immediate connection between unchecked emotion and muscle reflex (finger twitch). Is there anything less conceptual than the "like"? It is the technological enshrinement of whim. It shrinks both the self and those one feels--mistakenly--connected to. It is unhuman, and can only lead into the sea of the inhumane.
