Featured image by Daniel Steelman. Follow the link for more of this artist’s work.
Real life is an amazing thing. Of course, right now with all the COVID restrictions in my state, life is a bit challenging at the moment. And depending on how the vaccine rolls out, it may never really be the same again. Being able to go and talk to a real person, (instead of an online interaction, or a phone call). To be able to forge a connection to another person is a critical part of our humanity. And humans are a very interesting species, we have the ability to form groups beyond blood relations, organizing into tribes based upon not just physical characteristics, but upon abstract ideas such as common interests, religious affiliation, sports team, political ideology, sexual preference, etc… We form communities that can transcend the immutable characteristics.
I’ve never really liked social media. I view it as a necessary evil these days. It makes life easier in some ways, but increasingly I find it to be a source of anxiety and frustration. Incentive is a powerful force. I will work on a post diving more into how incentive is being corrupted by the larger big tech companies in the future, but let me give you an abstract. When we look at making choices between a series of options, we are more likely to do one over another if there is an incentive. This can range from wanting nothing more than to feel good inside, to gaining approval of a family member, friend, significant other, or community, or even for financial benefit.
My college econ teacher told me that everyone acts in rational self interest, including the person sitting in the restaurant wearing the tin foil hat because they believe that is the only place they are safe from the aliens trying to steal their brain. I know it seemed like an unusual example at the time, but I grasped the implications of it. The person who is clearly suffering from a mental disorder believes that there are aliens that exist, and that those aliens are attempting to steal their brain. In order to prevent that, they must wear a tin foil hat and stay in a restaurant. Perfectly acceptable and logical in their mind, therefore rational self-interest. It is only from the outside where we don’t understand the inner self-talk and motivation where it doesn’t look rational.
Social media is the person wearing the tin foil hat, shouting at everyone that they are crazy and that they are going to die from the aliens waiting to consume their brains outside the doors of the restaurant. People on the outside look at them as if they are insane, a mixture of concern for their own well being and pity toward their suffering. But in their mind, the tin foil hat wearing person screaming about aliens is trying to give a fair warning to those seemingly unconcerned people about to be consumed.
The world of social media is a space in and of itself, disconnected from real life. And yet, social media has a disproportionate hold over real life, because it offers people who couldn’t otherwise connect to events outside their neighborhoods the opportunity to be a part of a larger community of like minded individuals. The real life events are screened through the limited perspective of a camera and a microphone, and while it is a collective of images and perspectives, each is still only a portion of reality. But the majority of conversations and discussions are absent from real life, taking place between individuals with little familiarity, and a quasi sense of anonymity.
And what I find most frustrating is that this quasi sense of anonymity also leads some people online to intentionally troll others and intentionally inflame, raising the temperature of the discussion and instead turning it into an argument rather than a debate. This behavior too creates a feedback loop because it feeds into the tribal mentality and also gets the traffic (likes, retweets, reposts, quote tweets, etc.). Add in monetization, and you have a recipe for incentive. The traffic gathers money, the money incentivizes the behavior because it is what earned the money. Unity language doesn’t pay as well as inflammatory language, so more people parrot what works, and the entire environment becomes nothing more that a toxic dystopian wasteland full of factions trying to control the few remaining resources Mad Max style.
So, as usual, what can be done about it? Return to the real world. Talk face to face with people, find common ground and reasons to come together. Stop demanding perfection from imperfect people. Celebrate the diversity of opinion that we have in this country before it is entirely exterminated in favor of blind acceptance. Unplug from the black hole of social media before you are caught in the inescapable well of its gravity.
A Place 4Politics 