SEX!

It’s been too long since my last post, yet not enough time as passed where I feel like writing about the trip. At the end of my last post, I was napping in a strangers house in a Laotian village. Now, I’m sitting alongside a river in Kampot, Cambodia thinking about social media, the future of humanity, and a favorite activity of many people I know, including myself: SEX! All caps, exclamation point. Who wouldn’t be interested? However, this post is far less pornographic than the typeface suggest. Sorry to disappoint.

In an ironic turn of events, something I read on Facebook lead me to question the utility of social media. I came across a post concerning the privacy flaws in the Facebook application Bang With Friends, which is an application that connects willing people who are friends on Facebook to meet up for casual sex. It turned out there was a slight problem with the privacy settings, however. Apparently, all one needed to do was click a particular link to see which of their friends had installed the app.

My initial reactions were fairly standard: “Wow, that sucks for those people”, “Why am I just hearing about the existence of this app?”, “Why wasn't it invented earlier”, “This app would have been amazing in high school and especially college”, “Would I be using it if I were home?”, and of course, a non-committal “Meh, probably”.

I’m all for sexual liberation and think open and honest discussion about sex is both healthy and progressive. The egregious failure to protect privacy notwithstanding, I felt concern and even outrage about the app Bang With Friends. I didn’t fully understand the core of it until I began clacking on the keyboard; composing a rant against social media, which I promptly posted on Facebook.

My thinking is not that social media are not inherently bad or wrong. However, its axiomatic to state that they are designed to compel heavy use, and that such heavy use quantifiably diminishes happiness. As far as Bang With Friends is concerned, I’m not worried about the liberalization of sex and its promotion of casual sex. I’m worried about the cheapening of experience to the point where it becomes meaningless.

My rant is below:

Has the collective ignorance of society grown so large that nobody can see the danger in debasing the justifiably cherished and very awesome act of sex with “BangWithFriends”? If so, I want in!

I’m horrible at getting laid, and would love it to happen more often. That’s the great thing about interacting through technology, there’s almost no need to form sincere and truly meaningful interpersonal relations anymore! Finally, we can get through our lives without ever knowing what it means to live a human life. There’s an app for that :-).

I’m not against casual sex or even BangWithFriends. But social media is duplicitous. Strong interpersonal relationships are the number one predictor of subjective well-being (aka happiness). Paradoxically heavy use of social media empirically degrades such relationships and the well-being of millions of people. They are tools which are designed to be addictive. Thus, they are tools to be managed. We lose so much by confusing them for the real thing. Both individual happiness and a collective sense of humanity are diminished. Love your family, love your friends, and especially love your enemies. Love those who hate or do what you cannot understand. Find out what this means on the deepest level and you will be forever changed.

Things like Facebook and BangWithFriends are unavoidable and are likely here to stay, which is fine. They have the potential to add real value to life, but that’s not why they are created. The incentives which drive their construction and expansion are purely based on the amount of use; not the amount usefulness. They may be able to enhance personal growth and deep personal relationships, yet on average, they don’t. Don’t forget about the real thing. Don’t get through your life without ever knowing what it means to live a human life.