Photo Credit: Me
There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that social media has changed life in one way or another. Whether you are the social media maven who knows the ins and outs of every popular app, or someone who doesn’t use it but knows someone who does, it’s in everyone’s lives. The debate about if this is a positive or negative effect is one that will rage on until the end of time (and in some of my previous posts).
One thing that is definitely clear is that social media now is much different than it was at its conception, or even five years ago. Starting with long-forgotten platforms like MySpace, social media was intended to “make the world more open and connected,” as Facebook’s original mission statement was. The Internet itself was (and still is) a vast, endless field of information, where if used correctly, could truly enlighten people to learn and better themselves.
If used correctly.
That’s the key piece in all of this, and where a fracture developed in the land of social media. As with everything in the world, there is a “good” way and a “bad” way to use things. For example, you can use a knife to cut into the steak on your dinner plate, or you can use it to gash into your enemy’s tires. Social media follows this same logic. It can be used to make new friends, chat in groups, stay connected with family across the globe, etc. Or, you can use it to create a public group whose sole purpose is to make fun of someone’s appearance (based on true events…middle school was something else…).
In the article, The Dark Psychology of Social Networks, Jonathon Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell discuss how social media has cultivated the “outrage machine.” As apps developed with more advanced features, like sharing or retweeting posts with a simple click of a button, they unknowingly exacerbated the rapid flow of information, making it instantaneous. And with information being spread to a tightly connected network, reactions become instantaneous as well. This goes for both positive and negative, but the negative is unfortunately what’s causing the problem.
Before the Internet, if there was anger or outrage about something happening or what someone said, the altercation would have to happen face to face, and there was time after the inciting event to reflect. The Internet allows people to spread hate behind a keyboard and post anonymously, granting them the ability to hide and not confront the situation head-on. This mindset, coupled with the half-a-second click of a button, adds fuel to an already raging wildfire.
Now let’s take this and add in how these apps provide us with information. Clive Thompson, the author of “Social Media is Keeping Us Stuck in the Moment,” examines the concept of reverse chronological order. Twitter is a perfect example of this as they deliver the most recent tweets at the top of your feed. If you want to find something from earlier in the day, you’ll have to scroll down a bit. If you want to find something from two days ago, you’ll have to scroll even more. Something from last week? Your thumb will surely get a workout.
A culture that is stuck in the present is one that can’t solve big problems. If you want to plan for the future, if you want to handle big social and political challenges, you have to decouple yourself from day-to-day crises, to look back at history, to learn from it, to see trendlines. You have to be usefully detached from the moment.
Just consuming information as it pops up is incredibly dangerous. Without context, or looking at the history of the event and what led to it, can ultimately lead to uninformed decision-making or the spread of false information. Memes can be a great example of this. Someone can edit a video of Melania Trump saying “hello” in the middle of an Anderson Cooper interview with the Trump family and suddenly it’s trending on Twitter with harsh comments from thousands of people. But that never happened, it was just someone spectacularly good at video editing.
But why do people create false or misleading information in the first place? The creator of the video, who did not specify that this was a joke, just gained internet fame for sharing such a hilarious and believable clip. And because so much other media out there caters to this narrative, it’s taken as fact. Of course, it’s much easier to just take the info as it is and believe it’s true. There’s much more time and effort involved in sitting down and researching the truth. No one has time anymore.
It’s this that is threatening our society as social media changes the way we consume media. We have gone from being actively present in collecting news and reflecting. Now, we hand over that attention to social media apps. It’s time to take it back.
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