Revised Draft of Talk

Explaination of Schrodinger's Cat

Schrodinger’s…Facebook?

How do you use Facebook? If it is anything like the way I use it you may be in trouble. So when I log on Facebook I update my status with something goofy, I comment on the pictures from last weekend and I post something on the wall for my pledge class. Those few things are just a fraction of the day. For most of the day I am rushing between classes because I am a material engineering student and meetings because I am captain of my fraternities dance blue team and I am service/philanthropy chair. When I go back to my dorm people do not see me reading, doing homework, or scheduling and planning events. This is a problem because we are only showing a part of our personality. It is not the real us. It is an even bigger problem when I apply for a job and my highlighted personality on Facebook makes me look like a bum.

I use Schrodinger’s Gedanken thought experiment to explain this thought because of how perfectly it is applied to us and Facebook, it also provides a simple solution. Getting on to the experiment, its similarities to my point are pretty stunning. Essentially without Facebook we are in the same super position as the cat in the bunker, we are a sum of all possibilities (possibilities being moods, mindsets, etc.). What Facebook does is opens the bunker and whatever personality traits we chose to put on our wall become who we are as a whole; we are no longer the sum of our whole selves. This is a bad thing, because now new “friends” see a contradictory Facebook page from your personality and potential employers see someone who they do not want to hire. Just like how we would see a cat that is alive with many traits if we were on the inside of the bunker, but the bunker creates a narrow collapsed view of a dead cat.

As if that was not worrying enough, according to the experiment we cannot have a very diverse and deep personality while Facebook takes and shows only the one shallow, cut down personality. It is like when the cat is in the bunker and with all of the possibilities, and the outside observation forces one outcome to become entangled with that cat. Hence, causing reality to collapse on what we observe inside the open bunker. Taking this over to Facebook, it is like having our diverse personality stuck in our bunker but what we think the public want to see in the bunker becomes what traits of our personality we chose to show. So this means that even though we have diverse and deep personalities, the narrow personality that Facebook creates, is subconsciously what we are trying to become. It means that even though I am a responsible, smart, chair of philanthropy and service, and captain of a dance blue team; I am secretly and subconsciously striving to become the wreck less, goofy, rugby player on my Facebook.

The answer to this problem however, is pretty simple, do not post just what others want to hear or see. Show all aspects of your personality let Facebook be like a billboard showing everyone what a friend in your close friend circle (what a person in the bunker would see). That would eliminate the personality that is created by Facebook’s collapsing effect.