Whether we know it or not, we are all de-centered egos now. We are all linguistic, historical, social beings struggling for some new interpretations of ourselves, our language, history, society, and culture.
– David Tracy, Plurality & Ambiguity
And then there was facebook.
Those who know me have become annoyed by the privilege. My current nickname is, “I’ve been sayin’ it for years!” – I am, for all involved, tiresome.
The topic: social media is the destructor of civilized society. Pubs to POLITUSIC, social media is the falling sky about which I shout the most. Social media is the mechanized foundation from which weapons against Truth are launched, and without it, those weapons would be virtually useless.
For good measure, I’ll live my nickname once more: I have been, and continue to be right on this topic ever since a stalled 2008 essay about the perception of Truth: humanity is too emotionally immature to manage the long-term effects of cultural echo chambers. 10 years later, those echo chambers have been exponentially amplified by social media.
In 2008 I was a marketing manager experimenting with search engine and social media campaigns. Even then, the way we could exploit interest targeting scared me – what better way to motivate a person not by showing things they like or make them happy, but by showing the opposite: ads and images of things they dislike the most? Abuse their psyche just a little bit each day until the fear-fire we stoke motivates action.
It was so simple. All we had to do was make a person believe the things they hate – the things they fear – were “taking over” because they would constantly appear in the “private” environment of a person’s social media feed. Shouts of “Take Our Country Back!” soon followed.1
At the time I bet that if taken to the extreme we could drive a person crazy. Thankfully, I’m still capable of feeling guilt from harm, so never ventured down that dark path. Unfortunately for many countries, most political consultants think winning at all costs is a virtue, and that all means justify a victory.
The contemporary example of said win-at-all-costs politicos proves the theory: show conservative southerns an endless stream of posts promoting Black Lives Matter events… and that will scare them straight to the polls and down the President Trump rabbit hole.
Brains, Technology, & Instincts
Your brain is fast to synap, but slow to realize when it’s being duped. Brains create “facts” based on the information presented. To build a reality, a brain needs input from the body’s senses. If the arc of input is of a singular viewpoint, reality is skewed like a black hole. As such, in the chest-crushing gravity of a social media echo chamber, Truth bends like light. That bent reality is Fox News, MSNBC, World Net Daily, and North Korea. That bent reality is President Donald J. Trump and its Twitter feed.
Technology addiction exacerbates this problem. The more we strap technology and its dogma onto ourselves, the less conscious we are of what we are: human. We are animals burdened with reproduction and fight or flight instincts that will never breed out of our species. Fight or flight emotions cause police officers and gangsters alike to pull the trigger when the need to do so doesn’t exist. Reproduction instincts create everything from online dating to twice-divorced averages, IVF litters to generations of over-parented nit-wits, and movie producers to senatorial candidates from Alabama.
You are an animal. Your brain is nothing more than conductive meat that requires glucose to function. With even the smallest chemical imbalance, your brain creates gods, demons, and rainbow dragons. Humans are not better angels – humans are base creatures with a tenacious imagination and an insatiable desire to poke fire.
The Catalyst Of The Fall: The Like Button
The world-wide information feedback loop in which we find ourselves exploded in the last decade due to one thing: the facebook like button. In theory, the like button can accumulate so much psychological and emotional data that it will isolate Man into the black hole of his own ego. The more a person “likes”, the more personalized the information filter. The question is: how many likes does it take to get the the center of the human ego? Look around you… I think we’re getting close.
The follow-up question is: is a hyper-personalized existence a good thing? Look around you… it’s clear the answer is no: a large society can’t survive when its people roam around fully self-absorbed. People physically and mentally fall off curbs, walk into windows, and behave as if they’re the center of the Universe. Hyper-personalization creates a population of anti-social narcissists who like reality TV and dream of one day being on it.
As with most projects, social media began with good intentions – but then it was monetized. Yes, it can “bring people together”, but as mentioned, homo sapiens can’t resist poking fire. The more people use it, the less polite and less thoughtful they become, until many have the attention span of a newt and the manners of a hell beast on a bratworst diet. In modern-day society, people enjoy being mean. They laugh at pain and believe being cruel means being strong. Social media has created millions of this mindset because the platform not only makes such behavior safe, it encourages it by means of the like button feedback loop.
Ultimately, social media is anti-social.
Every time you hit the like button takes you one step further away from Humanity and one step deeper into the black hole of your own ego.
OK… Now What?
Other than E.T. landing on Earth and bestowing cosmological perspective, all we can do is hold on tight. Once a culture is bunkered, it takes a metaphorical explosion to evacuate its occupants. And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t exclusively a problem of the entrenched right-wing that’s fall-over dizzy from chasing its own conspiracy theory tail – all people in all places are in one way or another bunkered inside an information echo chamber.
The explosions we face are confrontations with facts and opinions with which we disagree. Surviving those explosions in one piece requires education and frequently traveling outside your neighborhood, both physically and mentally. It requires reading articles longer than 200 words. It requires more than facebook likes and photos of the day. It requires drastically lowering the social value of celebrity. It requires being curious, not afraid, of things you do not understand. Above all else, it requires acknowledging that no matter how smart or street savvy you are, you are incredibly easy to manipulate.
It’s up to you to decide if you want to climb, or be blown, out of your own bunker.
1 Not by my doing; I’ve always been more of a giver. (back)
