The Disagreeableness of Social Media

How the Convenience of Facebook Can Create Fools

Abstract

During a time when all things electronic started speeding up and a letter from home took too long to reach the hands of its receiver, Mark Zuckerberg and other Harvard students decided communication would be faster and more accessible online (Shepherd). Facebook was the result of that thought-process, and since its inception in 2004 to help students at Harvard interact with one another, it has grown exponentially (Shepherd). In other words, Facebook, with its intention to allow students to be social through media, has ultimately become a multi-billion dollar industry that does more than send messages from one to another saying, “Hi! How have you been?” (Shepherd). It is now a platform for everything. It is a means to get across any kind of thought its users have. Of course, some of those thoughts are more than a genuine hello or a comment on an old photo. Sometimes they are fake, hateful, and inappropriate in nature, and it is at times like these that scrolling through one’s Facebook stream can bring more scowls than smiles. Twenty years after its creation, Facebook has allowed anyone and everyone to communicate about almost anything and everything, and with three billion personal agendas, not including those of various Facebook Groups, it is easy to see that even a statement as simple as, “Trump is…,” can make the average person look like a fool because they posted it, re-posted it, or believed it in the first place (Shepherd).