St Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, expressed a feeling probably deeply embedded in all humans who have not lost their sense of humanity. “We are members one of another” (Eph 4:25), wrote the Apostle of the Gentiles.

Marshal McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin believed that the electronic media can now help us feel that we are members of one another more than we could ever feel so in human history.

These media weave a web connecting all humans together in a fashion that is similar to our nervous system which unites all our organs into one body. Different organs achieve their purpose not by living an existence on their own but by being intrinsically and organically united with others. So, let it be with humans.

Global village. Really?

The internet raised to a qualitatively higher plane McLuhan’s dream of a global village. The internet, the space-biased medium par excellence, collaps­ed space. We are now able to live in two spaces at the same time: physical space and virtual space. Both are real and in both spaces we fraternise in different communities which we can hold close to our hearts or important colleagues with whom we work.

But not everything is as rosy as it seems or as it was envisioned by McLuhan or de Chardin. The anthropologist Appadurai is arguably right to note that McLuhan “overestimated the communitarian implications of the new media order”.

Is there not an argument in favour of the position that the society being creat­ed by TV and the social media has many elements that one cannot and should not be proud of and that do not help us to create healthy communities?

Umberto Eco could not have described the current situation in a better way: “Social media give the right to speak to legions of idiots who first spoke only at the bar after a glass of wine, without damaging the community. They were quickly silenced and now they have the same right to speak of a Nobel Prize. It is the invasion of fools.”

Facebook, truth be told, followed the slippery slope started by commercially owned TV. The utter commercialisation of the medium and its dumbing down of culture created – in Postman’s words – a “shrivelled” and “absurd” “peek-a-boo” world.”

Dearth of intelligence, loads of arrogance

Is it not true that idiots have colonialised large swathes of Facebook? Go through Facebook and you could read and see idiots in all forms and shapes pontificating on all sorts of subjects. (You find them also invading phone-in discussion programmes on radio, sending messages during television programmes and being invited during some programmes.) The less they know about a subject the more they speak with authority and if they know nothing about the subject they will speak with a sense of infallibility.

Is it not true that idiots have colonialised large swathes of Facebook?- Fr Joe Borg

Besides, notice the way the English and Maltese languages are being massacred. Sentence structure is non-existent, words are spelled in what may charitably be described as ‘phonetically’ and thoughts are so disjointed as to make the logical Mr Spock blanche. This dearth of intelligence is accompanied by a tidal wave of arrogance, insults, threats and hate language. If you can’t convince with a good argument, then intimidate with threats, seems to be the prevailing trend.

We have recently had several cases in court. People were arraigned because of their hate language towards politicians. That is only the tip of the iceberg. Hate language is used towards many others and not just politicians. Many times, people answer with the same coin instead of bothering the police with their reports.

Is Facebook a true mirror of what Maltese society is all about or it is representative of a freak section of society? The tsunami of idiotic comments and vulgarity, together with the all too frequent absence of intelligent debate, make me believe – against what I would like to believe – that there is a lot of truth in the first option.

If mine is the correct analysis that’s sad news indeed, particularly because Facebook has taken over Malta. As of December 2020, 82 per cent of Malta’s population above the age of 16 had an active Facebook profile. It is also people’s preferred platform for news.

Facebook toys with us like a cat does with a small mouse

Moreover, Facebook knows so much about us that it can predict our emotional state and address to us messages consonant with that state of mind. They can exploit our anger or envy to push us to accept certain policies, products or candidates. We are manipulated for commercial or political reasons.

Remember Cambridge Analytica.

Can we be manipulated more than that? Yes. Facebook and Google ‘imprison’ us in an echo chamber. They create the make-believe world we dream of and present it as if it is the world that exists. Our prejudices are strengthened, our fears made worse and our illusions become believable.

But McLuhan’s global village has at least one other problem. This new condition of neighbourliness is also marked by “fantasies (or nightmares) of electronic propinquity”. Pope Francis, in an October 2021 address to the Popular Movements, described the media-induc­ed hyperconnectivity as one of the reasons why many live in chronic anxieties.

This hyperconnectivity places us in a situation of tension between those in the physical community in which we live and the virtual community, which, for most, is as real as the physical community. The Facebook friend messaging to ask about, for example, his cooking is, for many, as important as the physical friend with whom one is sharing dinner.

The resolution of this tension – virtual vs physical communities – and the curtailing or otherwise of the power of the big tech companies will mark what kind of global village we will inhabit in future.