It has been more than a week since I’ve posted here, which is a bit surprising. Then again, I did decide to take a short break from writing, which pushed blogging a little further down the priority tree. The much higher priority has been finishing my friend’s basement before his wife has a baby next week (they’re inducing labor on the 14th). Twelve-hour workday sure are brutal.
In any event, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the craziness of politics these days, and the role of social media in that craziness. Without getting too deep into Trump vs. Clinton vs. Bernie, it seems sometimes that the supporters for each candidate are living in entirely different worlds.
Perhaps that’s because they are.
According to Pew Research, three out of five Americans get their news from social networking sites, with one out of five getting their news from social media often. For Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, the majority of users get their news from the site.
But these sites are not politically agnostic. Far from it, in fact. Just last month, the story broke that Facebook may be censoring conservative viewpoints, with the head of Facebook’s trending news manager maxxing out his donations to Clinton’s election campaign. Compare that with #RIPTwitter and their Orwellian “Trust and Safety Council,” populated almost entirely by left-leaning groups that oppose free speech.
Do Twitter and Facebook have a right to be politically partisan? Yes. They are private businesses, and as such should be allowed to participate in politics just like any other business (of course there are issues when they lie about being politically agnostic, but that’s a different issue).
The problem is that people have come to rely on social media so much that it completely warps the reality that they live in.
Every online community is, to a greater or lesser extent, an echo chamber that amplifies the viewpoints that the members tend to agree on and suppresses the viewpoints where most of the members disagree. This is why we have Godwin’s Law: because intellectual laziness is easy when everyone thinks you’re right. As online communities grow, the culture becomes even more self-sorting, developing complex narratives to reaffirm and reinforce the rightness of the group.
Essentially, humans are tribal, and the trend is for online communities to be more tribal, not less. Social media accelerates this trend by enabling users to fine-tune their tribes, blocking out any uncomfortable or dissenting viewpoints and creating a “safe space” where the user’s core beliefs are continually reinforced.
When people spend more time with their carefully curated online tribes than they do with people in the real world, the online reality becomes their reality. Instead of facing uncomfortable truths about the way the world actually works, they craft their own worlds where they don’t have to be responsible for their own actions, and their beliefs are always correct, even when they’re based on a failed ideology.
(As a side note, this is why gaslighting is such a big thing nowadays: it’s the art of crafting someone else’s online reality, without them realizing what’s happening. It’s a tactic that we see very often in today’s online politic debates.)
So what happens when one of these social media junkies comes out of their online echo chambers?
Whatever your position on LGBTQ issues, you have to admit that Steven Crowder absolutely destroyed Zack Ford in that debate. It wasn’t even close. The Twitter warrior was woefully unprepared to answer even the most basic criticisms of his underlying assumptions, and seemed frankly shocked that those assumptions were under debate.
This is what happens when you live in a virtual world. When you can simply block or unfollow any viewpoint that’s inconvenient to your preferred narrative, then the narrative becomes your only truth, no matter how false it actually is.
In its extreme form, it’s just as scary as the worst propaganda of the 20th century. In fact, it’s even more scary, because we’re doing it to ourselves.
I feel like I’ve got a unique perspective on this issue because, for most of the last year, I’ve been living without social media. I deleted my Facebook back in 2014, and disengaged from Twitter back in March.
(Since then, I have gone back to Facebook in a limited way, only because there’s a particular church group where the only way to keep up with events is to be part of the Facebook group. But I’ve only friended family and close friends and liked only a couple of political pages, and even then, I’ve felt the pull. When I’m no longer a part of this church group, I will delete my Facebook again and leave the site for good.)
Life is a lot different without social media. It’s a lot less stressful, a lot more satisfying. I get out more. I have deeper and more meaningful conversations with my friends. I no longer feel like I’m perpetually caught up in imbecilic arguments with twats and idiots. I feel a lot more free to pursue constructive things, like my writing.
At the same time, it really does feel sometimes that I went to sleep ten years ago and woke up in a different world. It’s like everyone else is crazy, and I’m the only sane one (until I discovered Ben Shapiro). I’m not sure how much of that has to do with leaving social media, since I only did that recently. Perhaps it was only by leaving social media that I realized how much everything outside of that echo chamber had changed.
I’m actually a lot happier without social media than I was with it. At the same time, I feel a lot less connected with what’s going on in my country right now. But is that only an illusion? Is it kind of like how you always feel like your writing sucks just as it starts to get better?
Whatever the case, I do know that if I were more active on social media, I would definitely be the guy that offends everyone with my political views, including a lot of potential readers. I suppose I could roll with it like Larry Correia, but I’m not quite passionate enough about politics to make that my shtick.
Though with the way things are shaping up politically, I may do a fisking or two on my blog. On that note, I’ll leave you with Ben Shapiro bringing some sanity to the news cycle:
