WAS: What Adults are Saying about Toxic Social Media
How did something with so much promise become so bad?
A recent New York Times poll result was shocking: a majority of persons under age 40 wish social media had never been invented!
This is an astounding sentiment about a new media paradigm that has democratized who has the talking stick. In everything from journalism, to high school reunions to getting laid this weekend (the original aim of Facebook) social media has been widely praised as an effective means of connecting us quickly, ( if we wish) privately and with the illusion that’s it’s all “free.” What’s not to like?
But this allure rapidly fades once realizing the social and cultural costs are often immense. From election interference to personal harassment to faux information so good experts can’t spot the fake, it has forced us into a constant task of separating information wheat from its chaff. We Americans are not built for that.
While rogues like the National Inquirer, William Randolph Heart and of course the dreadful foreigner Rupert Murdoch have long invaded many media channels, until social media, we’ve never considered an entire medium as suspect. This is a big deal. It’s one thing to believe something like Fox News exist solely as propaganda sewage but it’s another to think (which we don’t) that the television medium can never deliver credible information. As Marshall McLuhan taught us decades ago the “medium” is the message. With TV we’ve never indicted that channel as incapable even though current efforts are horrid. But the social media we’ve engaged in it’s brief history shows us it is unable to be a reputable information source. The “dirtiest secret” about all of this is it has built into its DNA at least two qualities that gives us big stress, and worse, makes us stupid.
The first issue is the business model. No news or information medium in our country’s history has ever been commercially viable without also providing significant social or cultural utility. In theory at least this means viewers, readers and listeners would select content that serves this whether it be news, entertainment, a right of passage (what do you think Top 40 radio was for decades) or a crisis communication channel (something that legacy media does very well). As audiences would make moves programmers altered content and priced advertising accordingly. A market would be born and media content or “talent” changes were always part of big business and culture discussions.
Social Media has neither this ethos nor structure. Unlike all American media before it it doesn’t give two shits about anything editorial. Much like a phone or internet provider social media business models are (initially) about merely providing a connection for communication to occur. But as that takes hold social media platforms utilize its “subscribers” to create channel content. In doing this the business model demands we give further—our private info as example—something that is as nearly as valuable as the free content all of us provide. Then like moths to a flame we are drawn to endlessly and often, mindlessly, plumb the channel for as long as we can stand it. Every psychological trick is used to keep us there—identical to the ways casinos keep players at a penny slot machine—so that clicks and views are maximized.
Secondly, social media wants that content train to chug endlessly irrespective of how correct, authentic, factual or even reasonable are the endless posts from endless citizens. To encourage this contributors are invited to speak without identity or even worse, as a performing self. This cover removes the fundamental concept of “say what you mean and mean what you say” as a way by which to daily project our social selves. In dozens of different styles we then act like Howard Beale in Network being “mad as hell and not taking it anymore” and proceed to help create information mayhem. With no cost accountability to anything we might say or write we rub away our thin veneer of civilization and behave-monster like as though we are an early Godzilla ready to smash a Tokyo suburb. This is so unsettling we begin to either limit who our “friends” or disengage completely thereby turning the channel literally into “anti-social” media. How ironic and sickeningly sad.
Of course these features have invited endless abuses that have been apparent on most social media channels since their inception. Meanwhile the corporate fathers of all this have kept a collective tin ear about what they’ve wrought. All of this adds up to something unsustainable. No communication medium can forever last if it’s social bad outweighs its social good.