Notes for A Prolegomenon to Any Future Social Media

Photo by Prateek Katyal

There is something, or many things, wrong with social media platforms that affect the behavior of ourselves with others, and vice versa. But what’s the problem exactly? Insofar as there is one, here are some thoughts from one of my notebooks.

Some Prefatory Assumptions:

1. Behaviors are naturally constrained by limitations of an environment. In the realm of social media (henceforth SM), this is made manifest, due — in part — to user experience and design of platforms, which are characterized by impoverished linguistic and epistemic environments (where “epistemic” refers to the transmission and revision of knowledge and beliefs).
2. A limited user experience and design necessarily isn’t capable of opening up and orienting to (a dynamic of) new or spontaneous aesthetic, psychological, and epistemic needs of SM users.
3. To better understand behavior of others — as an SM user observing other SM users — a set of meaningful descriptions could be routinely introduced in a foreground manner (from input variables) to maintain coherency of new/projected behaviors. Bayesian inferences on the backend could then be updated, generating “mood markers” and “language-semiotic-game rules”¹ for other user’s awareness, based on input variables provided by SM user, along with past and current social media behavior.
4. Distinct moods, interests, and dispositions of an SM user could be generated to catalogue an individual SM user’s current behavior; the SM user could then be provided other styles of curated timelines, feeds, and vice versa, based on same or similar moods, exposing them to new users or neglected SM friend/followers. These mood-dispositions can be switched around, triggered by the SM user or by the SM itself, and an SM user’s page wouldn’t be static, as in, if an SM user is having a “moody” or “depressed” day, their page wouldn’t reflect this to other SM users not having the same type of day, nor would it remain afterwards: this would work with the dynamic psychology of an individual’s online behavior.
5. A section for bibliographies or cited sources should be implemented for posts that want to share “academic,” “educational,” or “informational” content. Encouraging these types of posts (that are longer than a tweet/but not too long formats of discourse) may foster — what I like to call — a middle-ground epistemic environment between SM users and experts from official institutions of knowledge. There, an SM user’s knowledge-claims can be defended or critiqued by other’s “in the know,” regardless of the SM user’s credentials or academic pedigree. This would epistemically enrich an SM user’s experience, i.e., allowing them to genuinely feel like a useful part of the constant knowledge/belief transmissions which occur in SM environments. At the very least, encouraging the interaction between laymen and experts can help clear up conceptual confusions at low-levels, in a genuine, community-like fashion.

So, what’s the assumed problematic look like then?

1. Conflicts of communication and relating to others via SM reflect underlying linguistic and epistemic problems people encounter with each other: impoverished environments, where SM users make poorly justified judgements about others, allow for perpetual misunderstanding of SM behavior.
2. People internalize the occurrences and results of these conflicts, the ensued misunderstandings, and feel afraid to act as they’d like, and behave in or endorse inauthentic or otherwise unhealthy behavior.
3. Though peculiar structures of stifling power-knowledge relations are inevitable in any environment — where an SM user’s information-sharing behavior is determined by their conscious awareness of who’s watching them — if SM platforms were to offer more dynamic environments (as shown in the prefatory assumptions), the problems of communication could potentially be lessened, allowing for more authentic behavior, and possibly healthier psychological dispositions toward user interaction on SM.

Background Thoughts:

1. Linguistic and epistemic problems run amok everywhere. Specifically: problems of misunderstanding the meaning and intentions of others’ statements, language, or engagement in particular discourses; and the subsequent beliefs — and justifications made for them — which cause people to behave negatively toward or reluctant to interact with others. On SM platforms, these problems seem to be derived from impoverished virtual environments and cognitive obstacles for social agents: e.g. semantical ambiguities and conceptual confusions occurring between SM communication lead to instant alienation and/or arguments (imagine seeing a tweet, post, or hashtag that you believe is hostile or stupid, when in reality it’s coming from a good place); and the intentions of certain types of SM behavior is often taken to be purely insincere, infelicitous, in bad faith, or some form of “virtue signaling” (in a negative sense). This is often a function of conflicting political-social associations, as well as SM users naturally operating outside the framework of other SM user’s language-games — or, as I like to call, language-semiotic-games — which necessitate these linguistic and epistemic problems. Echo chambers and Epistemic bubbles are both logical antecedents and consequences of this problem.²
2. On SM platforms, it’s not enough to see images of others, styles of language, or music tastes shared by others — or even to be “well-acquainted” with an SM user in real life — to make adequate or correct judgements about new behavior: an indeterminacy of meaning and a confused sense of other’s intentions occur even when explicit data (bios, pics, stories, posts, tweets, etc.) is shared by an SM user. There is always an unfortunate cognitive gap between the behavior of SM users and their SM audience, even when seemingly successful interpretations occur.
3. Indeterminacy of meaning is causally twofold:
   1. Not being directly acquainted with or understanding certain strands of an individual’s unique “web of belief.”³ Inferences about the meaning of another person’s statements or sharing behaviors on SM are tacitly judged, without suspending beliefs until further clarification of the contextual background (presuppositions and stimuli necessitating an action), or without understanding that one SM user’s expression may not have been the optimal form of what they were aiming to get out. Sometimes individuals make correct interpretations of the meanings or intentions of other SM user’s statements or posts, because of supporting heuristics (or background information that facilitate quick judgements); but often they’re wrong, because strands of an individual’s “web of belief” can often times not be composed in an explicit, meaningful, though digestible, story-like manner for others, and the presuppositions to render them meaningful are not organically inherent or available in the epistemic environment — which seems to be, partially, a consequence of epistemic oversights seen in SM platforms which are only recently being attended to, and partially a natural property of people not being acquainted with different viewpoints, data, or knowledge which dwell outside of their own communities.⁴
   2. Problems of intention follow from this. Without being properly acquainted with particular strands of an SM user’s “web of belief,” the contextual background for a given expression or action, it’s easy to find confusion over the underlying intention for an SM user’s style or use of certain language or manners of sharing behavior. SM users may often ask themselves “Why?” or “For what purpose or use (meaning) is that post supposed to be for?”, whenever an SM user’s post seems puzzling, out-of-character, controversial, or when a post “doesn’t go with the flow” of an SM environment. The post of an SM user, its expression, and its sense then fail to be interpreted correctly, or in a meaningful way that gets interaction and/or feedback from other users. This then reinforces inauthentic behavior assumed to allow for more engagement with other SM users. The extra variable in this problem seems to often concern values. Values of a person aren’t easily apparent on SM (as they can be highly abstract, nuanced, and more elusive than the meaning of a linguistic/symbolic expression), but they are very much at work in the way people approach SM, and, subsequently, how SM users express themselves or relay information to their audiences. Dealing with other values or value-systems is a highly challenging problem in itself; on SM, however, it appears be wholly ignored, or, worse, dramatically mishandled.⁵

Ending Statements:

Obviously there are many things at play here which go into a full, rigorous account of why social interactions between humans are often not optimal; these thoughts of mine only account for a portion of them — insofar as they’re close to being correct at all. But the focus here is on the environment of social media, where subtle or latent problems, which hinder social relations in the real world, are highly saturated and compounded, 24/7.

Seeing that social media is indeed a huge part of our lives, what I have been essentially wondering is: How can individual social media users enjoy themselves better? This question entails another, more specific, question: How can other social media users become better acquainted with the language, beliefs, values, intentions, and behavior of each other? The answer to this one, of course, relies on the initiative of social media users themselves doing the epistemic work of learning more about their social media neighbors, in order to form better beliefs, thereby being able to make better judgements, inferences, and reactions toward the actions of others. But on the part of the actual social medium apparatus itself, this is an integral question entailing a problematic of behavior constrained by the limitations of virtual environments, psychological discomfort and conceptual alienation, confusion over the behaviors of others, epistemically irrational judgements, and internalized inauthentic behaviors. There are many underlying causes or phenomena attributing to this overall problem of problems, but essentially any critical analyses of social media should first focus on the ways current and potential social media environments can essentially shake things up and offer new, open ways of being.

[1]: See Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of a language-game in his Philosophical Investigations (1953). A good account of Wittgenstein’s concept of a language-game is explained in Sandy Grant’s article “How playing Wittgensteinian language-games can set us free” on Aeon. My use of “language-semiotic-games” is just a playful way to refer to the fact that a lot of behavior on social media isn’t always expressed linguistically, but through a myriad of symbolic gestures. Sometimes we share songs, memes, or pictures of things, like pages from books, or quotes, or we leave certain symbols or emojis in our SM bios. These are all signs which meaningfully refer to different dispositions, states of mind, or lifestyles — traditionally studied in the fields of Semiotics.

[2]: C. Thi Nguyen. (September 13 2018.) Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles.

[3]: W.V.O. Quine. (February 1 1978.) The Web of Belief.

[4]: With the prevalence and ease of spreading misinformation, or “fake news,” on social media, it appears that over the past year or so, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have put their technologies to work in prohibiting misinformation or alerting social media users of potential inaccuracies. See the following articles on the issue: Initiatives to Counter Fake News: Comparative Summary, WHO Is Fighting False COVID Info On Social Media. How’s That Going?, Fighting Fake News On Social Media | Verizon.

[5]: See Kwame Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2007), which is a great work that really digs into how troubling or difficult conflicts of values and moral language can be to deal with, especially in a globalist world.