Social Media is like Cocaine
And when I mean “social media,” I mean Twitter specifically because that is where my latest obsession has landed me.
Oh, the highs are spectacular. Having thousands of strangers take your side is such a confidence booster. And everyone loves a villain to fight. Cue James Damore talking about them birds ‘n bees.
The falls can be just as magnificent. It is like going through heavy withdrawal. You want to capture your moment in the sun one last time. So you stay on the course. Maybe do a little TLC by scrolling through the plethora of innocuous and sometimes jaw dropping moments encapsulated in a “nuclear take.”
Just look at this take. Our friend Cal, assuming he is a “liberal,” just decided to take a reactionary turn and opted for a little emotional blackmail. Is it getting hot here?
Low-grade trolling aside, you begin to see the value in such a platform. It is like reading a Ulysses-style book which never ends. Reading and watching the little minutia oozing out of a person starts to flow with near zero viscosity as fingers tap away faster than one can process before clicking that reply button. It is life imitating art.
It is pure opium, and participation makes it that much more addicting. You feel invested in this little enterprise, though the hours you spend creating new content will not create anymore new coin except for Twitter. I cannot tell you how much schadenfreude I saw with my own two eyes or the cavalcade of colourful and menacing characters which danced across my screen. This is just too much for a single, fragile person to bear, but I will cope as I always have.
We could get into the details of how Twitter and its content are signposts for late-stage capitalism. But quite frankly, those arguments can become tedious fast. I just find it hilarious to watch over-confident men constantly flash their ultracrepidarian cred with half-baked theories articulated with misnomers and misspellings.
Geography was a reference to the time Chris Ray Gun referred to both Africa and Asia as mono-racial and mono-cultural without realizing they are continental with many different countries and diverse cultures. Did you know Russia was a part of Asia? Apparently, Chris was unaware. India was also included but not as a part of Asia, lol. I guess Chris was also unaware that India was colonized by the British Empire. Oh, well. Guess he is not a good student of history, either. I wonder what his feelings are on being a patsy for white supremacists. Do I think he is a white supremacist? No, but that is no excuse for being a gullible nimrod.
One of the other joys of tweeting is in building bots to tweet for you. My good friend J. Alfred Kinghorn Jones is a prime example.
All he does is tweet leftist stuff. Sometimes it reads like gobbledygook to sound silly. Most of it comes from articles and a pamphlet for labor from the early 20th century called Blot Out Crime, Poverty, Prostitution, War: Why? And How?. This bot is passive and harms no one. It is just good clean fun to make them.
I must once again be blunt. Twitter is addicting, which means there is a danger there. It can turn you into an unproductive puddle of mush. The other danger is from other Twitter users, namely doxxing, dogpiling, re-identification, etc. There are horrible people on Twitter who take great sadistic delight in harming innocent people. Who knew? You can limit these dangers, however, by moderating your usage of such a service. I’m preaching to the choir, I know. There is also this little adage which will help you in times of trouble.
“Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” ~ Mark Twain
Do not let the haters drag you down, or you will risk tearing your hair out in protest while wasting hours of your life on lowlifes and sanctimonious voyeurs.
Writing this has felt rather cleansing. I am glad I finally got that off my chest. It feels that I, too, can overcome this latest obstacle and turn it into a strength. Who know what the future will bring?
PS:
One of the more mysterious and terrifying things I failed to mention about social media is the existence of something called the nocebo effect. The nocebo effect spreads from mind to mind as a suggestion that something is wrong or potentially painful and dangerous. It is an actual physical process which commonly manifests with painful symptoms. In the colloquial sense, it is commonly referred to as “sympathy pains.” But how does this relate to social media?
Well, one common way would be how people receive information. On Twitter, new information is presented by the second. If a terrible event occurs and one has occurred, millions of people would have already seen the same information as you and are already responding to this new information. Perusing through each comment is probably not your forte, but you will most likely take a glance out of curiosity. Then it happens. You start to feel depressed, powerless, maybe even angry. You worry, “What if someone I know or love was there.” That is in part due to the nocebo effect. The other part is from being a decent human-being.
Now, let us take the same event and produce the same effect but with different results. What would that look like? Well…, it would look something like this.
I have seen friends and good acquaintances go at each other tooth-and-nail over the Las Vegas shooting coming up with theories and sometimes half-baked reasons on why it happened and what to do about it. The anger and terror is contagious. Eventually, it will slow from a boil to a simmer and eventually fizzle into something that resembles “business as usual.” For the time being however, the nocebo effect will keep things nice and toasty for at least a few more months.
CGP Grey offers a masterful explanation of what exactly the nocebo effect is with plenty of entertaining examples.
John Allee provides a greater context as to how the nocebo effect can be used to limit and torture ourselves needlessly. You should view this video as a philosophical exercise and a cautionary tale.
