On Social Media
Social media. Continuing where I left off in my first ever post on this blog, social media is the opposite of communication. The internet has always been about yelling into the void, about putting a collection of thoughts out there for anyone to read. Ironically, it’s always been an offline medium. Posting on the internet in the early days required writing, composition, thoughtfulness, a coherent point, time invested in an original idea.
Well, maybe not in the comments section, where it became a trope to yell “FIRST!!” in claiming the first comment on a freshly-minted article. But that’s sort of the point I’m making anyway. Social media is the comment section. There’s no substance to it; just a bunch of people yelling incoherently.
If that is true, then why it is so prevalent and - apparently at least - so important in today’s world? Because it’s yelling at scale, and scale is useful.
Why do businesses pay people to post to social media? Ask any random person in the street what they think of mass marketing, product advertising, email marketing, business accounts on social media, and the general opinion will be that it’s annoying, cheesy, that nobody likes it, and the general sentiment is usually that if it all stopped tomorrow, that would be great. Yet businesses invest heavily in these activities. If nobody likes it and nobody wants it, why do businesses do that?
Because yelling at scale works. One percent of a million is 10,000. A quarter of a percent of one million is 2,500. If you yell at a million people and only a tiny fraction hear you, listen to you, respond to you, that’s still a number big enough to be called a customer base. If a few thousand people smell what The Rock is cooking, that’s still a fanclub.
The problem with social media is, yelling at scale works, and it works for any voice that catches enough ears. It doesn’t matter if that person understands what they’re yelling about, if they have any vested interest in that subject, if they’re yelling for altruistic reasons, personal gain, or just trying to contribute in some way. Inevitably, someone will listen.
This especially becomes a problem for people who don’t experience the world. People who don’t leave their house, spend most of their days turned inward, getting most of their interaction with other people through the internet. Because remember, the internet has always been about yelling into the void. It’s a book of fiction, a place to explore ideas, a thought experiment. In the same way that science fiction writing in the 1960s was largely intended as a warning of - and meditation on - the atomic age of the 50s, so the internet has always been a warning of - and a meditation on - the ongoing information age. We were always meant to use it as a convenience; we were never meant to take it seriously.
Except that too many people live in the forest of the internet, and so can’t see the wood for the trees.
Now, you might be thinking that the inevitable conclusion to this post is a new rendition of the classic “touch grass” call to action. But that’s not where I’m headed. Sure, it is important to talk to other people. As in talk, face to face, breathing the same air, existing in the same physical space, sharing many of the same challenges. Getting rained on arriving to the same coffee shop for your in-person chat. Experiencing mis-timed traffic lights on your way across the city or nearly hitting a deer on your drive through country roads. All of that is important as it reminds us that we share the same space and place, but none of it requires us to “touch grass” in the superior, derisive way that phrase is often used.
You might also be thinking that another direction this post is going in is another classic call to arms, the “delete your accounts” variation of touching grass. That these problems with social media could be solved by deleting your account. This is another great logical fallacy: “if everyone deleted their account then there’d be no social media!” This is so fundamentally true that it distracts us from the reality: they won’t.
What I mean by that is, yelling into the void works, and if a quarter of a percent of a million people on social media hear you yelling about deleting their account and think “that’s a great idea!” and immediately do it; they were never the problem. The other 99.75% of a million aren’t necessarily the problem either, but for whatever reason, they didn’t hear you yelling. It didn’t resonate with them. While it’s true that if everyone did something, then the outcome would be absolute, the reality is that most people don’t. So this wouldn’t solve the problem either.
By now you probably figured out what the conclusion is. You’re saying to yourself, maybe even triumphantly, “They don’t have one!” and you’re reading to find out if you’re right. Sorry to disappoint you, but I do have a point here.
The point is, hypocrisy.
How many friends do you have who say they detoxed from social media for a month, but were online every time you hopped on to check your messages or post about your day. Perhaps you are that friend in someone else’s life?
I’ll wager that the number is non-zero. Maybe we have done it ourselves, maybe we know people who have, but the point is, when we say we’re “getting off socials for a bit” to hear ourselves think and then we don’t, it makes the problem exponentially worse. We tell ourselves we’re listening to our own voice, that we’re thinking for ourselves, that it’s getting quieter in our heads, but in really we push ourselves further down the spiral when we pretend.
Okay so that’s not the conclusion, it was mostly just to get your attention. The real point of this post is, intentionality.
Be intentional and human with your thoughts.
You don’t have to detox from social media - or pretend to - just because it’s the trendy thing to do, or because you think it’s necessary to think clearly. You can just post what you’re thinking, consistently from the core of your humanity. You can be a person online, whole and complete, flawed, proud of yourself, frustrated, ashamed, angry.
One of the reasons that genuine in-person conversation is so powerful is because it erodes boundaries. Most emotionally stable, rational people don’t actively hate other people, not individually anyway. People love and hate ideologies; love the ones that are theirs, hate the ones that they perceive as a threat. But people, on an individual scale at the 1:1, are not the sum of their ideologies. They’re just people, who get soaked by the same rain, laugh at the same jokes, drink the same wine, breathe the same air, and are as human as the rest of us.
Being 0.25% of a million isn’t human. Personhood doesn’t work at scale. The ideas of touching grass and detoxing from social media both unconsciously drive toward the same point. Put the human first.
The trick with social media isn’t that you have to delete it, remove yourself from it, or fix your relationship to it. The trick is that you shouldn’t have a relationship with an entity, you shouldn’t try to have a million individual feelings for a million voices yelling.
You just have to be you, and not be swayed from your humanity by the yelling.