The Perils of Social Media
How it hampers our rationality and suppresses our thoughts
The title of the article might suggest that I am going to bash social media to no end. That won’t be the case at all, rather I am a fan of social media and the things it has done for our society. It has brought the world to our fingertips, making people famous and rich, connected people in ways nothing in human history ever has, etc. I am sure we all are aware of its advantages. If not for social media, I probably wouldn’t be here and getting a chance to be a part of this wonderful community.
Alas, like almost every other human invention to come into existence, this too has its downsides. A few of the widely accepted harmful effects of social media are -
- It hampers the user's mental health drastically as it is addictive and makes them prone to sadness, stress, anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression, sleep disorders, etc.
- Social media creates a detachment from the real world and real people. We start projecting what we see in our day-to-day life, which can never live up to what we see online.
- Hate thrives on social media. One of the ugliest of human emotions is expressed without a single thought and is available in abundance. Social media gives a platform to this as it becomes humanly impossible to monitor everything that is posted online. This is the reason why most countries plan on bringing rules to regulate hate speech.
- Social media makes it pretty convenient to spread misinformation, falsehood as truth, as is evident during the Covid-19 pandemic.
These are just a few. But we are not here to talk about them, we are here to look at what effect it has on our minds and thinking capacities.
Let us dive into what I feel the real long-term harm of social media is. It has become a marketplace, with all the big companies having algorithms to monitor our usage and prescribe content based on our choices to learn more about us. Why do they do that? The answer is simple, to sell us products or acquire our information which is then sold to companies, organizations, political parties, etc.
By controlling what we see on our feed, what I feel it does is that it creates an echo chamber around us. We keep on hearing similar arguments, similar videos, similar people having views similar to us. Feed on our social media accounts turns into nothing more than a validation for our thoughts, no matter how wrong, problematic, uninformed, or downright hateful they might be. And the worst part is that you can’t even get out of it unless you make a constant and conscious effort to break out.
What this control on what we see does is, that we might lose touch with forms of opinions, views, information, arguments, etc. that are different from ours. We feel strangely cozy and comfortable in our cocoon of thoughts and ideas that are being repeated over and over again and are being amplified to such a degree that no other voice is audible. We fail to interact with ideas and beliefs that are diametrically opposite to ours. It is this interaction with opposite ideas which I feel is the essence of how human civilization has evolved over the millenniums.
It’s the constant exchange of ideas between people from different parts of the world having a different set of thoughts, beliefs, and explanations of life which has brought human civilization to this point in evolution.
I am writing this with the intention that it reaches hundreds of thousands of readers across the globe, while a global pandemic is ravaging the world. All this could only have been made possible when people interacted, learned, made mistakes, innovated, unlearned, re-innovated, and so on.
And don’t get me wrong, I am not insinuating that people do not interact on social media. It’s not the mere interaction that counts, it’s the interaction(civilly and cordially) with people we disagree with that makes the world of difference. No human in this world is entirely wrong, and similarly, none of us can be entirely right. We are all just learning along the way and making sense of things as we trudge along.
Horror movies are a metaphor for life
We’ve all seen horror movies, haven’t we? What's the first thing that comes to our minds? And what is the first thing that the characters do? They either set out alone or divide into small groups. At that point, we all are screaming internally and some externally, that please for the love of God, “just stay together”.
Life, in general, is beautiful, but it can in parts be equally scary as well. That’s just the way the human condition works. When it is so clear to every one of us to think that the characters in the movie should stick together. Why does it suddenly become so difficult for us to do that in real life? The answer, I feel is to an extent hidden in our digital echo chambers. Once you bury your head inside them, rationality and acceptance for differences go out of the window. It gives rise to herd mentality which is nothing but an extension of peer pressure. And we all have succumbed to peer pressure at some point in our lives, haven’t we?
What happens to the ones that aren’t part of the herd?
I am not implying that these outliers don’t use these social media platforms. Rather, what I intend to say is that they know how to use it to their advantage. These outliers can be seen everywhere, and they are usually the ones that have already or in the future will be the creators of something amazing. Even the first human to light a fire by rubbing stones would have been an outlier, and so was the inventor of the wheel for sure. History is filled with instances of persecution of great thinkers like Socrates, Galileo, etc. The times have changed now and the persecution is less severe.
What I mean to say is that it's not that bad to be an outlier. Sure, you would not get as many likes on your tweets or posts on social media, but you will have something different to say. It’s up to you to decide what to say. It could be a well-informed thing or just some gibberish, but at the very least it would be different. Of course, being an outlier comes with an asterisk sign, to not be hateful.
The outliers do not do anything that different from us. They simply keep themselves open to all ideas. They make sense of these ideas based on merit and employ rationality, not on preconceived notions fed to them by their peers. And that is where they thrive and do wonders. Some of the biggest outliers in the contemporary world are Dr. Michael Burry (the man who predicted the 2008 financial crisis), Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, etc. The list is long, yet we all know of them and are touched by what they have done in some form or another.
I feel it becomes paramount for us to decide which category we want to belong in. The one that is divided into small groups, not willing to listen or accept the people from other groups. Or the one that is open to the limitless possibilities of building upon the knowledge that each one of us carries within ourselves.
Personally, the decision is simple, I live by the lines said by Caesar in the movie “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”
Apes Together Strong.
