Facebook Isn’t All Evil News Kawasaki Disease Incident Proves

Taking a critical stance on Facebook feels painful because most of us are part of that billion-user-plus beast. If we’re critical of the world’s largest social network, are we criticizing ourselves?

Since the birth of Mark Zuckerberg‘s fat opportunistic cyber baby, the debate over Facebook’s social and political consequences has gotten insanely overcrowded. Is Facebook sucking our souls? Or is it a boon to our humanity connecting us in newer, more intimate ways? After seeing “Social Network” Zadie Smith wrote an editorial on Facebook and Zuckerberg in which she said:

“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.”

But good-news stories do surface every so often about Facebook. Like the story Slate ran two days ago about the 4-year-old boy whose life was probably saved after his mother posted some photos of a rash which doctors had misdiagnosed. A few of her medically knowledgeable Facebook friends recognized the rash as the extremely dangerous Kawasaki disease.

But it was only a year ago when another major story surfaced about a Facebook kill list. After a hit list was posted to Facebook in Columbia, people on the list started turning up dead, many of them teenagers.

Taken together, the two stories prove the two most extreme consequences of hyperactive social networking: With speed and efficiency, it can be used to save lives, and to take them away. But can Facebook itself be held accountable for either? Or can Facebook hide behind human behavior, as in the old NRA maxim, “Guns don’t kill people, people do.”

As Zadie Smith points out, Facebook, with its illusion of connectivity, can and does reduce us. It reduced a woman’s sick child into a face with a rash—albeit one lucky enough to get diagnosed by some knowledgeable Facebook friends. It also can reduce a group of Columbian teenagers into a public kill list.

Of course, the vast majority of us billion-plus users exist via Facebook somewhere between those two extremes. It hasn’t saved a loved one, and we haven’t been assassinated. We can exist simply as old average, digital reductions of our real selves.

And for those of us who haven’t been murdered or saved from a potentially deadly disease, it’s still as good a tool as ever to voyeuristically stalk exes and people we’re too intimidated to approach in the real world.