Herd Mentality

So there recently was a outage of all of Facebook's services. I came across some of the details as to what had happened -- or at least what I could know at the time of writing. But that's not the focus this time around. Instead the social impact is more interesting to me.

I got a message in the Signal group I have managed to get my friends to use, saying that Facebook services were down. My first response was to ask what had happened. The reaction was effectively "I don't know". So I decided to look a bit further and send a few articles in the group. Several hours later, someone else said "Oh wow, Facebook services are down, have your heard of that yet?"At which point I had been thinking about what could be happening and assumed it was either some DNS or CDN problem and relayed my theory. A few minutes later, yet another person said "Oh wow, Facebook's services are down, has anyone noticed this yet?"By now I got a little annoyed and decided to see if I could figure any more information regarding what might be happening and sent three more articles. I should mention that most of the people in that group aren't exactly tech savvy. Regardless, I looked around to see if I could find any more articles. I came across three and tossed them into the group. They were mostly ignored as expected.

Now the whole reason for writing that paragraph is to touch on the fact that none of my friends who were active in the group at the time were even remotely curious in any way. Personally I would be a little more curious as to why several of my main forms of communication were down. But then I guess that sense of curiosity is exactly part of the reason I don't use any of Facebook's services anymore. Still, I find it baffling to see how not curious most people tend to be. It makes no sense to me.

Other thing that baffles me is the fact that people have a tendency to explicitly wonder about something and then completely ignore any faintly educated guesses I can throw in their general direction, showing that they weren't interested in any answer. It just doesn't get through my socially inept skull. I talked about that tendency and they called it herd mentality; using it more as an excuse to talk about _something_. The act of talking being the goal in this scenario. Personally, I don't think I'd see talking about something as serious as my main communication platform, mainly WhatsApp, being offline as a way to have a fun little conversion.

Ultimately, I can't really do anything else than rant about it here and there as I'm too different to be able to engage in normal-people conversations. Oh well...

Back