Social Media: A Mixed Blessing

Social media has been a mixed blessing. Since the inauguration of forums and blogs in the 80s and 90s and cheap, available internet in the 2000s, everyone had the ability to become their own publisher and editor. This meant anyone with an idea or opinion could express it at the speed of type. Gone were the gate keepers of mass media! Hello free digital press! However, this also meant a severe lack in quality control and peer review. Just imagine! Everyone was a poet, a philosopher, a composer, an artist, a political contributor, a doctor, a scientist, an engineer, and on and on. Everyone claimed an experience which wasn’t theirs. Everyone claimed knowledge and wisdom they didn’t possess. What could possibly go wrong?!

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My romp through the social media landscape has allowed me to tango with all sorts of online denizens. Some had positive, cogent things to say. Others were not so welcoming, or should I say they found my entry into their domain welcoming as a lioness finds a wandering gazelle. But needless to say, I did not find the experience very welcoming. Regardless, social media did give me an outlet for writing and helped with some of my social awkwardness. However, places like Youtube, Facebook, Yahoo, and the like were at the bottom of the barrel for intelligent, evenhanded, calm, sane, and literate conversation. I think I found only one person claiming to be a PhD who seemed calm, collected, and intelligent, but he was frequently on a Canadian, Maoist Youtube channel, which consistently rages over identity politics. Uh, yeah…

You may have realized it already, but this bears repeating. Social media of any kind can be damaging to our long-term psychological health. We have relatively primitive brains which are simply not always able to cope with all this technology. We constantly seek validation and positive-reinforcement when it is available to us. This hooks us. It is like a gambling addiction, and the mechanisms are the same. The other side of this is how we frequently judge and compare ourselves to one another, cyber bullying, and trolling (which is similar but not exactly the same). Some of the negative effects include lack of productivity, social anxiety, lack of privacy, and a false sense of connection.

This brings us to here, Medium. I was very fortunate to find this place, because so far, I have not had to deal with the occasional angry Red-Pill, libertarian man-child. I do not want to be bothered with someone else’s anti-social problems and dysfunctional history.

I love writing, expressing opinions openly, communicating and discussing ideas. I love good company and good conversation. Medium seems to have these things in abundance. I thank all the people who have made this possible.