On Social Media and Society

This was originally supposed to be a short rant on social media between cups of coffee for my daily musings on LifeLog but I wrote a bit longer form than I expected and enjoyed the resulting post quite a lot, so I figured I would post it here as well.
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I blogged yesterday on Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and how eye-opening it is to see that the foundation of the modern economy is built on nonsense and actively harmful jobs. In that book, Graeber talks about the idea of spiritual violence, which is an interesting term to me. Up until fairly recently, I’d only recognized the club-in-hand idea of violence, until I realized that academia recognizes many other, often more subtle forms of violence, and that due to their subtlety they often go unnoticed and therefore do far more harm over time.

Cal Newport talks about the idea of spiritual violence in his books, even if he doesn’t necessarily say it in the same way. In his book Digital Minimalism Cal talks about the harmful effects of social media and over-connection in general. He talks about how so many of us have been fooled into thinking that we’re having meaningful relationships with people when in reality we’re just connecting with them. This, to me, is a deep form of spiritual violence that has affected not just how we connect, but how we view connections.

One doesn’t have to look far to see agreement that social media has eroded society. In Cal’s book I mentioned before, he mentions only one study that looks at social media use in a positive light… and that study was done by Facebook employees. As a politically-plugged-in person, and as someone who has been working in the security space for the last several years, the 2016 campaign and election season, and all of the political fallout of the last several years, comes to mind. Social media played a huge role in the violence and division surrounding Trump’s election. As someone who has studied the far-right for years and years now, social media has played a huge role in the recruitment and organization of fascist organizations across the globe, often not just serving a logistical role in facilitating communication and connection but serving as an active bullhorn in amplifying the hateful ideology that has torn so many lives apart. Christian Picciolini talks about the role that social media plays in his (phenomenal) book Breaking Hate in amplifying hate and supporting fascist recruitment.

I say all of this acknowledging that I’m writing this post on a social media site. I have a good Twitter following and a decent YouTube subscriber count. I have two blogs as well. I am what I can only painfully call “extremely online.” Part of this is well-explained in Digital Minimalism as using social media for what it’s good for while (trying to) avoid its detriments, part of it is addiction, part of it is entertainment and part of it is the relationships I’ve built on these platforms. Do I think I would be a better person without social media? Probably. I would at least have a lot of my time back. Maybe I would have used that time to do something useful, maybe not. In terms of social media’s effects on society as a whole? They have been overwhelmingly negative.

I’ll leave this post with just two more book recommendations. Evgeny Morozov wrote a phenomenal book called The Net Delusion back in 2012 that was so good and influential to my outlook on the internet that I’m reading it again this year. In the book, Morozov talks about how we all viewed the internet with phenomenally opaque rose-tinted glasses, with heads of state including Bill Clinton saying that all the authoritarian countries of the world needed was more internet and they would open up all on their own. The Arab Spring was supposed to be an example of the transformative nature of the internet.

Instead, the internet has facilitated censorship, surveillance and a wholesale erosion of privacy and security both on and off the web. We saw it in Hong Kong, where the internet fanned the flames of revolution… and was used to suppress and surveil the protesters. During the Arab Spring, the internet was used to hack into the phones of protesters and organizers to surveil and often jail them and their friends. In China and Russia, the internet is used not as a tool to open the society up to more democratic ideals; it is used to control the information within the country to ensure that those democratic ideals don’t get the oxygen they need to blossom.

Finally, we have Shoshana Zuboff’s lengthy tome The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that truly is all one needs to understand the detrimental effects that social media has on society on a macro level. The book talks about how social media has wreaked havoc on society on an unbelievable scale with respect to our interpersonal relationships, mental health and more, all so they can erode our privacy and sell our data and screen time to advertisers. The capital behind social media, the billionaires it has minted, cannot be overestimated. As they always say, follow the money…

So, what to do?

Frankly, I don’t really know. I have grappled with my own relationship with social media quite a lot over the years, never really finding a great balance with it. I’ve gone good stints off of social media entirely and have missed the positive aspects of connecting with friends, publishing blogs, etc. and have come right back without really paying attention to the other side of the balance.

So, as I sit here drinking my second cup of coffee, eyes darting to the Twitter tab I’ll probably click on as soon as I publish this post, I don’t have much of a solution for you. Leave the social media sites that have no positive impact on your life, and be more introspective about your relationship with technology. Fight for strong encryption and data regulation policies to try to erode the dark money behind the screens, maybe read some of the books I’ve linked to in this post. We should all click with more caution.