I have a love / hate relationship with social media. I think a lot of people do. It’s a thing I love to hate and hate to love. I love that I find out about things: concerts, events, and what’s going on in the lives of friends and family. I love that I get three or four or twenty Far Side cartoons in my daily feed. I love the funny videos of cats and dogs. I have a few friends who share some funny memes or beautiful sunsets or powerful poems. On Twitter, I subscribe to a number of news organizations and try to stay informed. To some degree, I’ve curated the life I want to see. I hate that social media has replaced real news, that it’s full of disinformation, that it can be a vile swamp of hate and despair, and that it’s become ingrained in our daily lives. It is inescapable.
I’ve always been torn about social media – especially Facebook. I was by no means an early adopter of FB. I think by the time I joined most of the people I knew had already been on it for a while. I had missed out on the frenzy of friend-making. In my early days of joining I had a lot of hope for the platform. It seemed like a place where I might really reconnect with people. I intentionally kept my friends list limited to people I wanted to be friends with (I did a similar thing on LinkedIn). I suppose I was a Facebook snob – thinking those people who were friends with everybody were Facebook whores. I mean come on – 3,000 friends? Who are you, Tom from Myspace? I wanted authenticity out of social media. I didn’t connect with every person with whom I shared zip code and a few awkward years in high school (most of whom I didn’t know and some of whom I thought were jerks). I remember reaching out to someone I would have considered a dear friend. I wrote a long email saying how happy I was to reconnect, etc. etc. He wrote back, we connected, but it had none of the enthusiasm or sincerity or depth I was hoping for. As such, I begrudgingly slid in to accepting more friend requests, seeking out more connections, and fighting the “look at me culture” every step of the way. I recognized that in order to make the most of the experience I would need to engage, however inauthentically that might feel.
Over the years, I’ve thought of quitting social media several times. I’ve also had spurts of engagement. Love / hate. I beat myself up when I see what a time-suck it can be and how much I use it to fill in the gaps. It’s so easy to just sit there and hit refresh… so easy to toggle back and forth between apps and get new bits of information. It’s designed to be addictive. At my worst, I lose entire nights scrolling through and clicking like a rat pushing the lever to release the small bite of cheese. At my best, I ignore it completely and read or paint or write. For many of us, it has become a new form of TV, but the interactive aspect of it seems far more… dangerous? compelling? fake? And the social media sites know this.
Early yesterday morning, I was scrolling through some news when I came across and article in The Atlantic calling Facebook a doomsday machine. The connection to the actual concept of a doomsday machine (a computer program that would launch nukes once it detected certain levels of radiation and essentially wipe out the planet) wasn’t the strongest of rhetorical arguments, but the bigger point was that it’s dangerous for one person, one company, one algorithm to yield so much power. Facebook is approaching 3 billion users. It’s algorithms determine what we see and read, and yet it is accountable to no one. It is not governed like a news organization and allows all kinds of hate speech, threats, and destructive/harmful behavior. It and Twitter have been the center of the free speech / fake news / fact check debate for some time now. In my little post here, I can’t really do the article (or all the other articles that slam social media) justice – all I can say is that I’m not sure I want to be a customer of an organization whose business model is built on engagement at all costs – clicks over truth.
I remember (or I think I remember) reading an article (years ago) about Google and publishing and copyright infringement. Google had undertaken a massive project in which they planned to digitize every book. Publishers were concerned about how this information would be used and sued to block the project. Part of Google’s argument was they were simply a vehicle (a technology platform) and that it would be up to the users to determine how the content was used. They compared themselves to a baseball bat. It has a specific purpose – to hit a baseball, and Louisville Slugger can’t be responsible for those people who decide to use their product as a weapon or a means to rob people. Large tech companies continue to make that argument – that they are simply facilitating the will of the people – a free marketplace of sorts. As the article in The Atlantic points out, they’re not quite that innocent.
People tend to complain about Facebook as if something recently curdled. There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view. Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture.
There is moderation, they drive what we see and don’t see. I’ve been one of those people that believed it could have been different – that maybe some of these things started out innocently enough…. but if Google (or Facebook) only shows me ways to use a baseball bat to break kneecaps (because all of my searches are about hitting people and all of my friends are in to breaking kneecaps) – then aren’t they normalizing and validating the use of a bat as a weapon? And if I needed further convincing on this lack of innocence, this quote from Zuckerburg’s early days helped:
“I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses … People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.”
Since moving to State College – to a house that is much more suburban than it is remote quiet or city busy, I’ve noticed that my social media consumption has ticked up quite a bit. I think most of us have a deep need to connect – to our community, to our friends, to our place, to our loved ones. We want to share, we want to be seen… to some degree we need the world to recognize that we exist. I also think that when we can’t do those things or get those feelings in authentic ways, we find cheap substitutes. In Memphis, I spent a lot more of my time walking, thinking, writing, and reading. I had a small group of friends I could see once in a while. I could go to the corner bar and be alone or talk to strangers. Moving (and the pandemic) disrupted all of that, and I’ve fallen back in to what is easy: passive consumption – sharing as a way of getting a small dose of validation in the form of a little blue thumbs up. I’m amazed at how quickly it happened.
I have a love / hate relationship with social media. I can’t decide if I should go all in or drop out. To some degree, I need it – and I hate the fact that I need it. To some degree, I get a lot of value out of it. But knowing that neo-nazi groups use social media to organize and terrorize and that companies like Facebook refuse to do anything about it makes me feel complicit. I worry that it has become too powerful. I worry that it determines what I see and read more than I do. I worry that it has eroded our trust in our institutions and in each other. I want us (society) to do better. On some level, I know that process starts with me. But to use some water metaphors – social media is a bit of a lifeline for me and one person quitting a network of 2.7 billion users is a drop in something much larger than a bucket.