The ostensible function of social networking sites is, of course, to bring people closer together. The same function is attributed to the process of neoliberal globalisation.
Despite obvious superficial increases in interconnectedness in both cases, however, the fundamental outcome is alienating. In the latter instance, ‘interconnectedness’ has been characterized by enhanced disparity in socioeconomic conditions and a crusade for profit at the expense of communal wellbeing. In the former, the face-to-face contact for which human beings are programmed is replaced with electronic exchanges incapable of satisfying innate communication needs.
Willful misinterpreters of contemporary history continue to argue that globalization constitutes the solution to the very global ills it creates. In vaguely similar fashion, Hoffman’s New York Times article portrays Facebook as a potentially useful aid in the quest to promote mental health when the two concepts appear to be inherently at odds.
The neoliberal experiment in the US has helped mold a society disconnected from the human condition, where oppression of the individual has aimed to thwart popular solidarity that might threaten the experiment. What should be a universal right to health care, for example, is instead wielded punitively against the population, and, as acclaimed journalist and radio host Doug Henwood points out, “Obamacare” will presumably result in a situation in which “scores of millions are thrown onto the private individual insurance market and forced to pay $1,000 a month for crappy coverage”.
Henwood hopes that “this could vastly increase the constituency for a single-payer scheme, such as Medicare for All—assuming our rulers don’t destroy Medicare first”.
In the end, perhaps Facebook and similar phenomena have already contributed to solidarity on the health care front: in the very least, we’re united in mass attention deficit disorder.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."