Pete Davis, writing for Front Porch Republic, posted an article titled
The Soul of FaceBook Venting: Empowered Alternatives to Ranting Online. It's a rather long article and maybe deeper than some of us would like to go on the subject of the history of what we now lovingly refer to as "Face Book Rants," but I found it interesting (If maybe only to me becuz I am intrigued by thoughtful theology). Face Book ranting isn't really new, but it's older than Face Book. It stems from a reaction called "being human" and how we respond to perceived injustices. Face Book is just now where we vent it.
- In the old days, when you saw something in your morning newspaper that bothered you, you could vent your ballooning anger with a minute or two of hearty breakfast-table grumbling. Today, we have Facebook for that.
He draws from that and then goes to this:
- About half of Facebook vents seem to be “raising awareness” about something too distant and specific to make our mass outrage useful: some person somewhere is speaking in a bad way; some parent somewhere is parenting in a bad way; some school somewhere is schooling in a bad way. The other half seem to be “raising awareness” about some partisan issue that fellow partisans already know about and the other side will ignore: some Fox News anchor said something insensitive again; some liberal college has approved a course with a heretical curriculum again; some politician is evil or stupid. In a way, all we are doing by Facebook venting is replicating the same process that the original news story initiated: getting people riled up without helping them begin to imagine a possible solution. We are not helping to heal the societal ills we have witnessed, we are just spreading the anger around, sucking our friends down into their own Facebook venting cycle.
And he goes much deeper and you can catch the whole article
HERE.
