Saint Google and Father Facebook

St. Google is the new patron saint of researchers," jested one wit during an academic conference I attended in 2010. That was when the daily searches on Google stood at about 1 billion (up from just 10,000 searches per day in 1999, one year after Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded this online portal).

Today, according to Internet Live Stats, 40,000 "search queries" are made per second, which means there are more than "3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide." The information explosion that Google ushered has indeed benefited millions of researchers not only by providing them an almost limitless data resource but also by offering them a means to share their outputs to the world and expand their professional network in the process. Google also aided many a professor or an editor in gathering evidence against plagiarists.

This Saint has been efficiently answering all questions (prayers) from every querist (e-believer) all over the globe. Add to that her/his ability to cast an insuperable influence over every aspect of our lives and you've got some godlike attributes. So I guess Saint Google should actually be Google Almighty, or better yet, GooglyXenu, the Inter(net) Galactic Lord.

Meanwhile, Facebook, now Meta, is not to be outdone. It continues to draw in millions of users many of whom have turned it into a sounding board for their daily angst, a mouthpiece for their multivocal advocacies, a stage to showcase their lives' glorious moments, a place to reconnect with long-lost friends, a conduit for their charitable works, a business space in which to earn some good money, a virtual infotainment resource, or even a data mining site for their scholarly pursuits. It has become a priest of sorts, hearing people's confessions, blessing their plans, cursing their sins, mediating worldly desires and heavenly hopes, and indoctrinating them into the ways of the (under/nether)world.

Zephoria Digital Marketing published intriguing statistics on this social media platform, among which are as follows:

• 1.62 billion people on average log onto Facebook daily and are considered daily active users (Facebook DAU) for September 2019.

• Every 60 seconds on Facebook: 510,000 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded.

• Photo uploads total 300 million per day.

The same site also states that to date, there are 83 million fake profiles and the number is likely to increase over time especially that five new profiles are being created per second.

All these facts and figures lead us to Roger McNamee's accurate depiction of the double-edged cuts (or slices) Google and Facebook make on our lives today. In his new book, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, McNamee says:

By pursuing strategies of global domination, Google and Facebook exported America's twin vices of self-centered consumerism and civic disengagement to a world ill-equipped to handle them. Tools that allow users to get answers and share ideas are wonderful in the ideal, but as implemented by Google and Facebook, with massive automation and artificial intelligence, they proved too easy to manipulate. Google's ability to deliver results in milliseconds provides an illusion of authority that users have misinterpreted. They confuse speed and comprehensiveness with accuracy, not realizing that Google is skewing search results to reflect what it knows about user preferences. Users mistakenly believe their ability to get an answer to any question means they themselves are now experts, no longer dependent on people who actually know what they are talking about. That might work if Google did not imitate politicians by giving users the answers they want, as opposed to the ones they need... Bad actors have had a field day exploiting Google and Facebook, leveraging user trust to spread disinformation and hate speech, to suppress voting and to polarize citizens in many countries... (2019, 539-540)

On Facebook, facts are not an absolute; they are a choice to be left initially to users and their friends but then magnified by algorithms to promote engagement. In the same vein, Facebook's algorithms promote extreme messages over neutral ones, disinformation over information, conspiracy theories over facts (542).

It's not surprising then that some people often refer to Facebook as "Fakebook," an online site where people can fake almost everything about their lives: their marital status is a match made in heaven (actually, their marriage is on the rocks and being roasted along hell's shores); they are perpetually happy (truth be told, their lives are skewered with grief and loneliness); they have all the money in the world and can buy anything they want (honestly, they are up to their necks in debt); they are the most likeable people on earth (uhmm, their personalities actually suck)...

More importantly, it has become a fake book of sorts because of the disturbing trend among users mindlessly sharing partially inaccurate and patently false information. Take this motivational quote, for instance:

A shark in a fish tank will grow 8 inches, but in the ocean it will grow to 8 feet more. The shark will never outgrow its environment and the same is true about you. Many times we're around small thinking people so we don't grow. Change your environment and watch your growth. posted by Bob Harrison

While the message as a whole can be inspiring to some readers, it actually contains a misrepresentation of an article on goldfish and an unscientific claim about sharks (read the tfh article here). A few other false claims being regularly bandied about on Facebook are the following:

• The Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure that can be seen from the moon (Nope, it's actually invisible from there.)

• Buzz Aldrin confessed that the moon landing was staged (Sorry, just another laughable claim by conspiracy theorists.)

• Archaeologists discovered an 800-year old cellphone -- must be the ancient aliens! (Not really -- and it is a high point of gullibility to buy the speculations of Zechariah Sitchin, Giorgio Tsoukalos, Erich von Daniken, and some other folks whose misrepresentations of actual data have been debunked by competent archaeologists and historians.)

• Archaeologists have unearthed Goliath's skeleton (It's a hoax; also, the legend of David and Goliath is actually a resignified story in Homer's The Iliad - see chapter 6 of Finkelstein and Silberman's book)

• Obama released Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi (It was actually George Walker Bush who did.)

These and many more "Facebook Facts" can easily be demonstrated to be false, if only people bothered to drop by Snopes or FactCheck to determine the veracity of these claims or news that are peddled as true or real. Or if only people prayed to St. Google long and hard enough.

This is not to say, of course, that every post or comment on Facebook is fake: A "complicated" marital status may actually be so; a birthday greeting may truly be heartfelt; a post about an actor's tragic death could be sadly confirmed by the police; that Lamborghini someone's sitting on may actually be hers/his; those seemingly photoshopped pictures in China or Timbuktu were genuinely taken during one of her/his jet-setting adventures; or that beatific smile and bubbly personality may perfectly capture his or her stress-free bubble of a life.

Fake news can be fun though, especially when they are published in two of my favorite satirical sites, The Onion and World News Daily Report . It's more fun when people can't recognize satire when they see one and so pass on articles from these sites as though these are factual or real. It's as amusing as seeing someone reading Gulliver's Travels and believing that Brundecral is a real sacred text and that Lilliputians did exist somewhere in or near Australia.

Fun or not, praying to St. Google or chatting with and listening to Fr. Facebook's hip homilies is much like going to an actual church -- you either get answers to your questions, receive no sensible answers, or come away questioning the answers all the more; you are either fed inspiring truths or come away with half-truths or outright lies; you either get the good news, or you gather the latest gossip; you either get your money's worth, or you are simply sweet-talked into parting with your wealth and retirement plans; you either gather genuine buddies, or you just accumulate fair-weather friends; you either savor a time well spent in a fellowship, or you rail at another wasted social hour; you either come away with an uplifted spirit, or you end up repeatedly slammed on a divine octagon; you either imbibe an "It's not about me" spirit, or you develop a narcissistic personality disorder, or at least a sense of entitlement.

Either way, whether you come away faithful or faithless, you will, sooner or later, be bound to say,

"Saint Google, pray for us."

Or, "Forgive us Father Facebook for we have sinned."