I avoided joining Facebook for years. But was finally sucked in when some friends we met while traveling in Australia suggested it would be a good way to keep in touch. They were strangers that we’d met thanks to a physical billboard posting looking for people interested in sharing a car to Kakadu National Park near Darwin. There was a handwritten note, posted on an actual billboard, if you can believe that.
We spent the afternoon with these strangers, daring each other to jump into remote and stunningly picturesque swimming holes that each had a warning about “freshies,” fresh water crocodiles, that might be lurking, hoping for just such a visit.
We threw large logs into the water first to flush out any freshies who might be waiting for a snack. We found nothing but beautiful cool water with unseen danger always at its depths.
The analogy to social media writes itself. We never saw either one of them again in real life. But after we connected on Facebook the water seemed more and more compelling to swim around in. Somewhere, down deep, the freshies swam.
Part of what I like about social media is the ability to bleat out short thoughts about dumb stuff. No need to send an email blast to say, “It’s snowing.”
One might argue there’s no need at all to announce the obvious, but for that ability to share that first excitement at what might turn into a snowy deluge, full of snowpocolyptic possibilities. One might argue that it’s simply a way to trigger those old synapses that release a dopamine thrill when your fellow human replies. “Yes! I see it too!”
Gathered around a swimming hole in the remote desert landscape of the Kakadu, some humans prodded at a cool pond. It reflected the sky and slivers of the surrounding red hills, which warped and twisted whenever a stick or log broke the surface. Was there anything down there? The humans chirped and chittered at the thought. There was some addictive overlap there, between fear and excitement, and something even richer found in the sharing. When the first body plunged into the pool, shattering completely the vision of dark blue sky and white cloud above, the tension was broken, and the rest plunged in behind.
This was a temporary band of Sapiens. They neither mated nor fought. They did nothing as productive as scraping a meal together from the barren landscape. They simply spent an afternoon playing in the abundance of clean cool water, that primal resource, that gives and conceals. They were cheating the odds, paying the cost of incaution gladly. Indeed paying that cost was why they were there.
