A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times discusses the dangers of social media to our political system. Several sentences in the piece got my attention, these in particular: “Twitter and Facebook are just a mirror, reflecting us. They reveal a society that is painfully divided, gullible to misinformation, dazzled by sensationalism, and willing to spread lies and promote hate.”
The problem is much more systemic than that, I think, and another sentence gets at it: “The real crisis is Americans inability or unwillingness to sift fact from fiction, a problem that is worsened by a loss of trust that the mainstream will set the record straight.” I believe that this situation has its roots in the many hours most people spend every day listening to the radio, watching television, or especially surfing the internet, all of which carry messages that promote products or ideas. We have become so inundated by advertisements, commercials, infomercials, and “news” having the goal of selling us something that most of us are unaware of the miasma of propaganda that we inhale, that we cannot avoid inhaling. We don’t realize that we are losing the ability to think for ourselves.
Thinking for oneself entails several things: a curiosity, a basic cultural and historical literacy, a realization that “truth” is inherently fuzzy, a respect for one’s ignorance, and an ability to appreciate opposing viewpoints. It also requires self-respect—a sense that one’s opinions are of value. Much of the populace lacks these characteristics. Curiosity is increasingly focused on consumerism, what to buy next. Cultural and historical literacy have been sacrificed in our educational system to the simplistic goal of creating complaisant workers and consumers with only rudimentary skills of reading and cyphering. Ambiguity of viewpoints has been supplanted by a hard-edged intolerance. Self-respect has been perverted into a narcissism manifesting itself in consumption-driven pseudo-individuality.
The result is that rather than engage in self-reflection about issues beyond our own immediate situation, we merely adopt one of the au currant belief systems that fits the tribe with which we tend to identify. We don’t create our own intellectual dinner, nor do we order a la carte; instead we simply choose something from the frozen food section. Facebook in particular enables this by offering a platform by which we can share vacuous details of our lives or trivialities we see on the internet. Although sharing is natural, Facebook through its addictive nature (as the op-ed piece notes) has allowed this sharing itself to become addictive and hence a perversion. Moreover, Facebook has become a platform for advertisers and other propagandists to attract and seduce us with their products and viewpoints—after all Facebook makes its money from advertisers, not from its members. Rather it sells its members to advertisers in that the more users it has, the more “clicks” on its pages, the more revenue it can attract from advertisers.
Facebook is a symptom of the emptiness of our consumerist society, but more importantly it symbolizes the uncertainty we have created in our lives by the rapid adoption of these new “information” technologies. We have unleashed forces that we neither understand nor can control. I will write more on this in a future post.