Social Media as Social Control
Can we cut through the noise?
I am about as devout a social media user as you will find, but even beyond all the benefits of social media use, I cannot help but feel unnerved at it’s ability to distract from the greater issues at hand.
The noise that social media creates around the consciousness of the masses is vast and serves to focus users on the day-to-day minutia of life rather than deeper subjects of thought.
“The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.” — Noam Chomsky
There has been no other form of media in the span of human history that allows for greater recording and sharing of everyday minutia. Every person with a smartphone can share pictures and videos of their everyday lives to the their multitudes of friends and acquaintances.
Textual updates on the minute by minute statuses of peers, celebrities, and strangers alike can be found in the millions, if not billions, on Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr, among a host of other services. Articles, blog posts, career advancement information, cat videos, memes, viral videos, baby photos, lunch photos, throwback photos, and the like all swirl around the maelstrom that is the modern technocrat’s social media world.
The benefits of such a wealth of information have been well-noted. Society benefits from a twenty-four hour news cycle, unprecedented access to the higher-ups of society, the ability to connect with people a world away at the touch of your fingertips, and of course, the possibility to galvanize social change through this sort of social-enabled enlightenment. The much lauded Arab Spring rebellions come to mind in terms of active social change facilitated by social media, as well as efforts to facilitate support following natural disasters, such as the Haiti earthquake and the Japanese tsunami relief effort.
I would venture that such benefits reside at a superficial level of analysis and the true impact of social media on society as a whole is a more nuanced one.
In saying that social media is more social control than a means to social progress, I suggest that its focus on the minute by minute details of primarily first world existence distracts the populace from being able to focus on grander social and philosophical issues that require a greater degree of focus and critical thought.
Rather than being able to contemplate deeply on the financial disparity and inequality in America, the rampant genocide and humanitarian crises across the globe, or even the potholes on your major local highway, such contemplations are considered briefly before being forced to the back of our social media indoctrinated minds.
I think we can all agree that with all the information and connections available at our fingertips, it is becoming increasingly difficult to “single-task” and really put thought and time into activities requiring deep attention and contemplation. A college student may deactivate his Facebook or have a friend hide his phone in order to escape their now inherent desire to constantly “be connected,” just so he can crank out his lab report in the next five hours. A young professional may take to Twitter or Instagram to note how much she “loves her job” and all the “free lunches” that it entails.
Sharing is the norm now but that is not an evil in my opinion. The issue is that the content being shared is not of the philosophically substantive persuasion and merely distracts from such higher thought.
With social media and personal technology becoming more and more pervasive with younger and younger segments of society, the problem will only grow over time. The social norm of acceptable minutia is becoming more and more acceptable while social encouragement for deep, contemplative thought fades to the background.
The institutions in place to stem this tide of inconsequential thought are few. As in my critique on the American higher education system, I harken to those in the know, above the fray. The societal powers that be, the rich, the owners of capital, whoever you please, allow for the advancement of social media technologies in order to maintain the status quo. While the populace believes that social media has given them a new voice for revolution and social change, the “wiser” understand that this technological revolution is unlike social revolutions past.
“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” ― Plato
There is a certain comfort in being able to connect with friends and lives from around the globe via a sleek device in the palm of your hand. You feel empowered. Anything and everything seems possible in this world.
This comfort, the comfort of learning random information about some random subject on Wikipedia, the comfort of humorous tweets from a surprisingly down to earth celebrity, the comfort of seeing your friends having a great time on their Instagram. These comforts are noise. Noise that convinces you that much is good in the world/your world and distracts you from critical thought regarding how things really are. You are viewing the world through an unrealistic and overwhelmingly difficult to understand prism.
Issues like LAPD’s corruption and brutality, racial tension in the country regarding the criminal justice system following the Trayvon Martin or Fruitvale Station trials, domestic terrorism a la the Boston Marathon Bombings, the whatever is going on in Syria issue. These are issues which push through, above the ocean of minutia that otherwise resides on social media. Quickly though, these issues sink back down and into the muck that is “social consciousness” or rather “social empathy.”
On a more focused and discrete level, social media has made one so consumed with one’s relative social standing versus others’ easy to view social standing, how can one possibly, objectively view themselves in a deep philosophical plane of thought? Where does one fit in the world? What is really going on?
I love social media. The ability to connect with people so easily and so frequently is a boon to the human instinctual need for companionship and understanding. I am not advocating an abandonment of Facebook or Twitter, or uploading food pics, memes, and details/video of drunken shenanigans.
Rather, I implore the social media heavyweight to step back and consider why he uses social media and for what purpose does it serve him?
Where better could that time be spent perhaps? Instead of wishing for things to happen after you see them on a social media channel, how could that be translated to your own life? Why has this information become available to me? For what purpose have I stumbled upon this image or story or Tweet?
The beauty of social media is its ability to strengthen relationships remotely and endlessly, and its ability to increase the volume of relevant information available to the world on a similarly endless basis. To properly prevent social media from becoming another tool to distract the masses from…whatever they should be focused on, that is the end goal.
Rather than just consuming social media and treating it as an answer to the questions that plague our daily interactions with others, I believe it would be worthwhile to treat social media and its wealth of information as merely another means to question the greater issues at hand.
Do not let society and social media bury you with this new-found wealth of information. Critically question all that you see and do not be complacent with being a casual observer to the humanity that resides on a plane of deeper and more difficult, philosophical thought.
