Social Media And Society’s Race To The Bottom
Information is growing faster than our capacity for wisdom.
Twenty-five years ago, Harvard professor E.O. Wilson said “we are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”
Fast forward to the present and information is created at an even faster rate, with society creating the equivalent of 300 billion Encyclopedia Britannicas each day, but how much of it is wise, and how much of it can our brains reliably process?
Let’s face a difficult fact:
It is difficult to be wise while checking your phone 352 times a day, or once every 3 minutes.
This incessant phone checking eats into our focused, productive time. We make excuses by saying we’re multitasking, but science has repeatedly proven that multitasking is simply distraction. Successful multitasking is a myth, the human brain is simply not wired for multitasking and the penalty is paid in “task switch costs” where working on multiple tasks can reduce productivity by as much as 80 percent. A mind occupied increasingly by distraction is, by definition, not concentrating on the more focused tasks of meaning-making.
So as we perform the daily rigmarole of endless switching between our beloved smartphones and activities like driving, eating and working, distraction has unwittingly become a part of our existence. Information Age society is simply not conducive to focused concentration.
Who does the attention economy enrich?
While a portion of this screen time is spent on necessary utilities like the morning alarm, banking and travel, a 2022 screen time report exposed an alarming 147 minutes spent on social media daily. Our attention is the ultimate scarce resource, and like it or not, we are pawns within the attention economy. Arrayed against us our legions of data scientists, product managers, and engineers whose job it is to earn our attention. Except in this war, every participant is a loser, and the only winner is the social media company who monetizes that attention.
Of course, social media has enabled many opportunities for connectedness, commerce, and self expression. However social media also impacts our mental health and can make us less happy. Research links disrupted sleep, lower life satisfaction, and poor self-esteem to lengthy social media use. In considering the impact on vulnerable populations like children and teenagers, researchers report a disturbing linkage between increased social media use and self-harm and suicide. Other studies establish a clear link between social media use and loneliness, even though the founders of companies like Facebook talk about bringing the world closer together.
Swipe culture contributes to loneliness.
Dating apps offer limited respite in the search for meaningful connection. The ‘swipe right’ culture leaves users overwhelmed with the illusion of infinite options. Scott Harvey of Global Dating Insights eloquently summarized why:
“Say it takes 10 swipes for a match, 2 matches for an opening line, 3 opening lines for a response, 5 responses for a flowing conversation, 5 flowing conversations for a date, and 5 dates for a second date. That’s a user browsing 7,500 profiles before connecting with someone ‘meaningfully.’”
Put another way, in modern society, we have an overwhelming number of people we could theoretically connect with meaningfully, but the technology we use to access these people tends to promote the most superficial of connections, like swiping right or sending the same chat to hundreds of people. For example, Tinder is designed to capture and monetize attention, which it does by keeping people swiping and sending icebreaker chats, and yet, at the end of the day, the brain does not mistake such superficial interactions for meaningful ones.
Despite — or perhaps as a result of — the widespread use of social apps, society faces a “loneliness epidemic,” a term used by the former surgeon general of the United States. Meanwhile, the UK has appointed a Minister for Loneliness, recognizing that: “For far too many people, loneliness is the sad reality of modern life.” The reality is these social apps not only do not resolve loneliness for people, they contribute to it.
Perhaps the most astonishing scientific link between meaning and socialization come from an NIH study which concluded:
“Humans are such meaning-making creatures that we perceive social relationships where no objectifiable relationship exists (e.g., between author and reader, between an individual and God) or where no reciprocity is possible (e.g., in parasocial relationships with television characters). Conversely, we perceive social isolation when social opportunities and relationships do exist but we lack the capacity to harness the power of social connectedness in everyday life.”
Put another way, all these modern social apps create more loneliness than they resolve because the apps for the most part produce superficial digital connections that generally have no value in everyday life. A like on an Instagram or a right-swipe on Tinder may in fact alienate us from the person who is acting, because the human psyche was optimized over millions of years of evolution not to mistake shallow relationships for profound ones.
Social media frays our shared narratives.
But social media may undermine meaning in yet other ways, beyond connecting us superficially to people who leave us feeling only more isolated. Throughout history, humans have historically found a great deal of meaning in their political institutions, in their workplace, and in their relationships to the rest of society. But technology undermines trust in institutions, fracturing our sense of meaning.
As The Atlantic noted earlier this year:
“Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.”
The piece argues, convincingly to this author, that social media use transformed from the 2005–2008 times of connecting with friends to putting on performances in pursuit of retweets & likes, while managing a personal brand, activities that often do not deepen connection. As Jonathan Haidt put it, these social media platforms “were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.”
By magnifying and weaponizing frivolous distinctions, social media has contributed to the fraying of our shared narratives. Academics have shown “social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” And unfortunately, this rise of misinformation may only grow worse. Stanford researcher Renée DiResta predicts “The supply of disinformation will soon be infinite,” as AI gets so good at creating content that it becomes indistinguishable from a human being.
Yes, the industries and technologies created by capitalism have always disrupted political institutions, but eventually those institutions evolve to bring the modern industries and technologies into the larger political environment. But today, those modern technologies themselves undermine the shared narratives that permit a functioning society in the first place. As algorithms serve an endless stream of content meant only to resonate with existing viewpoints and keep our attention longer, society risks losing the glue that keeps it together. There is a certain wisdom in sharing a narrative with the people on whom you depend — after all that’s what societies are.
This much is clear: we are hungry for meaning, but social apps, so successful at distraction, leave us feeling empty. Swipe culture has made our interactions more superficial, while the rise of apps like TikTok has lessened our intentionality.
TikTok — Kids in the candy store
TikTok, and its famous algorithm, presents an infinite smorgasbord of content and quickly narrows down on exactly what will keep us swiping. But TikTok does more than simply determine what you like and then give it to you — TikTok determines what you like! It serves up everything in a values-free environment. It is the candy store, and its audience is the kids.
On the audience side, TikTok serves an unending buffet of your guilty pleasures, while, on the Creator side, TikTok leads people to distort themselves so that their reflections earn them social capital within the system.
TikTok is like a funhouse mirror, and to make ourselves attractive to it, we must distort ourselves to be that person the algorithm most values.
TikTok’s genius was to combine frictionless content creation with high-friction distribution, while retaining Facebook’s content agnosticism, but that means it has no values about what it distributes, other than it optimizes to find those pieces of content that can go viral, that can draw maximal attention.
Naturally, resourceful creators then do everything they can to solve the algorithm in the pursuit of attracting as much attention as they can, from whomever they can. Only it is very difficult to make a piece of content go viral, so much so that if you browse a Creator’s profile on TikTok, you’ll often see dozens of variations of the same video with slightly different text, all aimed at breaking through the algorithm.
Social media of every stripe has one thing in common: a race to the bottom. Over time, every network becomes its lowest common denominator, the intentions of the founders and early users make little difference, unless those intentions are reflected in the product’s core design.
It is a hard and fast rule of social networks, they race to their lowest common denominator form of content.
Today, these networks optimize for retention and time spent and not for any value other than more advertising or in-app-purchase dollars.
Social media spews social waste
A byproduct of today’s hyper-competitive social media industry is the spewing of social waste. This waste takes the form of Twitter outrage and misled electorates. It takes the form of prominent VC’s hiring ghostwriters to craft their tweets. It takes the form of young people conned into believing their best opportunities lie in distorting themselves to attract more followers. It takes the form of polarized societies.
Like a factory dumping chemicals into a river, social waste is the byproduct of social networking. BigTech has spewed massive negative externalities into the media landscape, dumping trucks full of toxins in the community pool that is our media landscape, and worst of all, the pollution has enriched the polluters, while the rest of us, barely notice what we’ve lost.
While difficult to conceive … this waste BigTech creates is not a byproduct. It is the product. There’s nothing “necessary but unfortunate” about it, except perhaps it doesn’t have to be this way …
Dayo is the founder of the Wisdom app.
