Facebook Ends All World Suffering - December 5th 2010
All the ills of World were finally ended this weekend after 6 years of massive campaign work on the social networking site Facebook. Before the website existed, our world was full of billions of people suffering, be it from hunger, AIDS, child abuse, cancer, poverty, malaria, flooding, genocide, rape, domestic violence, drugs, prostitution, slavery, land mines, drought, child labour, police states, terrorism and Justin Bieber.
Thanks to Facebook, all of this has ended and the world is now a safe place. These campaigns encouraged people to repeatedly think of these problems for anywhere between 30 and 90 seconds while they changed their status, changed their profile picture or joined a group whose name highlighted just how bad an issue is.
Keith Wilson, a professional Facebook user from England explained the phenomenon:
“You know, before Facebook came along, making a difference was hard. I can remember having school fairs on Saturday that lasted all day where we bought cakes, or threw wet sponges at the teachers for 50p, or guessed how many sweets were in the jar. After eight hours we had managed to raise about sixty pounds and a few pence and got a our photo in the local newspaper showing all the hard work we had done.
“I am sorry. Sixty pounds? What use is that? I bet that ten pounds of that went to cover the cost of the big cheque for the photograph in paper.”
However all that changed with the invention of Facebook:
“Whereas maybe 50 people turned up to the school fair, I joined a group on Facebook saying how bad genocide is that has nearly 500,000 members. We have all agreed on the discussion boards that it is a bad thing and how more needs to be done to stop it. I never realised that so many people agreed with me on this issue.”
The proliferation of Facebook campaigning is even bigger in America, where nearly every week most Americans band together in support of a cause:
“Yeah, it's really big over here,” Social Networking expert Chuck Hankman informed us, “I mean, Facebook started here, we're a country with over two hundred million people online and nearly all of us are on Facebook.
“Myself, I have over five hundred friends on Facebook; some of my friends have over thousand. I am just a few clicks away from 'friends of friends' audience that numbers over ten thousand people. That means when I change my Facebook status to: TO ALL MY FRIENDS, SHOW YOUR SUPPORT AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE BY MAKING THIS YOUR STATUS AND SHOWING YOU CARE – I can spread my message across America almost instantaneously. Even those who don't want to do it will still do it, because they will feel guilty if they don't because my wording implies that they don't care if they don't copy it. Not even Fox News is that powerful.”
Some people have been critical about the phenomenon, branding it slacktivism, claiming that it achieves nothing and only serves to diminish the causes they support as the people who participate feel they have 'done something' and contribute no further. However Chuck disputes this point of view:
“That is crazy. Let's get this straight, hearing about child abuse, hearing about cancer, hearing about people starving in Africa – these things make people feel really sad. So when we change our profile picture or status, or join a group, that makes us feel good about ourselves and we spread the word and enable the other people who also feel sad about these things able to make themselves happy too.
“It is a great thing. And everyone benefits from it. Except the starving children, landmine victims or rape sufferers... but what can be done for them?”
