{"id":10589,"date":"2016-06-06T19:12:37","date_gmt":"2016-06-07T01:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=10589"},"modified":"2016-06-06T19:12:37","modified_gmt":"2016-06-07T01:12:37","slug":"life-without-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/life-without-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Life without social media"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has been more than a week since I’ve posted\u00a0here, 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).\u00a0Twelve-hour workday sure are brutal.<\/p>\n

In any event, I’ve been reflecting a lot on\u00a0the craziness of politics these days, and the role of social media in that craziness. Without getting too deep into\u00a0Trump vs. Clinton vs. Bernie, it seems\u00a0sometimes that the supporters for each candidate are living in entirely different worlds.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that’s because they are.<\/p>\n

<\/a>According to Pew Research<\/a>,\u00a0three out of five\u00a0Americans get their news from social networking sites, with one out of five getting their news from social media often.\u00a0For Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, the majority of users get their news from the site.<\/p>\n

But these sites are not politically agnostic. Far from it, in fact. Just last month, the story broke that Facebook may be censoring<\/a> conservative viewpoints<\/a>, with the head of Facebook’s trending news manager maxxing out his donations to<\/a> Clinton’s election campaign. Compare that with #RIPTwitter<\/a> and their Orwellian “Trust and Safety Council<\/a>,” populated almost entirely by left-leaning groups that oppose free speech.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> about being\u00a0politically agnostic, but that’s a different issue).<\/p>\n

The problem\u00a0is that people\u00a0have come to rely on social media so much that it completely warps the reality that they live in.<\/p>\n

Every online community is, to\u00a0a greater or lesser extent, an echo chamber that amplifies the viewpoints that the members tend to agree\u00a0on and suppresses the viewpoints where most of the members disagree.\u00a0This\u00a0is why we have\u00a0Godwin’s Law<\/a>: because\u00a0intellectual laziness is easy when everyone thinks you’re right. As online communities grow, the culture becomes even more self-sorting,\u00a0developing complex narratives\u00a0to reaffirm and reinforce the rightness of the group.<\/p>\n

Essentially, humans are tribal, and the trend is for online communities to be more tribal, not less.\u00a0Social media accelerates this trend by enabling users to fine-tune their tribes, blocking out\u00a0any uncomfortable or dissenting viewpoints and creating a “safe space” where the user’s core beliefs are continually reinforced.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0worlds 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.<\/p>\n

(As a side note, this is why gaslighting is such a big thing nowadays: it’s the art of crafting\u00a0someone else’s<\/em>\u00a0online reality, without them realizing what’s happening. It’s a tactic that we see very often in today’s online politic debates.)<\/p>\n

So what happens when one of these social media junkies comes out of their online echo chambers?<\/p>\n