Why Social Media is Making us Narrow-Minded
When I wake up every day, my arm mechanically switches off my phone alarm, and my fingers even more mechanically start scrolling through my notifications (trying to break this habit). I get up and start getting ready for either work or school, and every 5–10 minutes in between of getting ready I’ll take a few seconds or minutes to check my phone, or refresh something I’ve already looked at (trying to break this habit). On the commute to work, I’m going through social media to look at what’s trending and look at other news articles that are popping out. In random pockets of the day, I’ll take my phone out and refresh something.
I’m not trying to sound like someone who doesn’t get work done because I definitely do, but I didn’t fully realize how much social media I consumed until I looked at my iPhone's ‘Screen Time’ randomly and that in one day I stared at my screen for 4 hours. After the initial surprise, I consciously went through that schedule of when I used my phone and started seeing the numbers add up.
Social media definitely represented the biggest chunk of time from my daily phone usage, and I wanted to piece together what value I was getting from it that made me impulsively consume it so much. Thinking about it, I processed how my interactions with social media largely define the news, content, and opinions that I take in.
I’m not saying that it’s replaced all other news sources, although I learned that approximately two-thirds of American (68%) get their news from social media. This train of thought of mine went from ‘I use social media a good amount’ to ‘social media is giving me news articles and headlines that I am directing my attention to.’ It doesn’t seem like an issue at first, but it stuck in my head for a while because I started getting the feeling that I wasn’t in control of what I was looking at. I was just scrolling and observing, and when I would click on an article then I would get more articles like that.
So, I’m going to present the problem now that hasn’t left my mind: social media giants have their algorithms that present to us what they think it is that we would most likely want to see. Because of that, we aren’t hearing opinions that are outside of the bubble that we’ve constructed.
I started looking more into how news articles were generated for me to read, starting with the Facebook timeline. According to the Facebook Newsroom:
“We are not in the business of picking which issues the world should read about. We are in the business of connecting people and ideas — and matching people with the stories they find most meaningful. Our integrity depends on being inclusive of all perspectives and view points, and using ranking to connect people with the stories and sources they find the most meaningful and engaging.”
We get content based on the “stories and sources [they] find most meaningful and engaging,” is a key statement. So how does Facebook decide which news articles and sources I care about?
Scrolling through my feed, I’d stop on a news title (from some news source that I subscribed to long ago) that seems interesting and I’d click on it and skim through it. I’d open the app sometime later, and more articles from that source would pop up whether they were political or not. I didn’t notice it at first because a lot of the articles satisfied my mind’s need for passive entertainment, like all episodes of “Friends” ranked from best to worst. Over time, I realized just how one-sided what I was reading was.
I’m speaking particularly to political articles right now, and it started bothering me when I realized the ideology and worldview behind what I was reading was the same for every article. Especially in the past few years with the political landscape being increasingly polarized where news articles from one side tend to ridicule the other, I was reading commentary on world issues from one political side.
According to Facebook Newsroom, their priority for their users is to “Connect them with stories that matter to them the most.” The problem with this is that when you establish to Facebook what kind of stories matter to you, you are fundamentally having them constantly reinforce to you the content in the domain of your beliefs. Because of that, walking through how much I would consume social media became important for me to understand: if I’m staring at my screen for so long throughout the day, I should at least be doing so productively and learning more about how others in the world think. I really didn’t like the feeling of being enclosed in a bubble.
So, here’s part two of the issue. It’s no secret that these social media platforms are addictive by design, with endless scrolling and push notifications. The consequence is that we are doing this scrolling aimlessly and not actively. When we hop onto the app, we’re not trying to learn anything (at least I’m not when I first go onto FB), we’re just seeing what’s being given to us. At the same time, we’re still internalizing one-sided political beliefs because, regardless of whether we read the article or not, the title is enough for our minds to accept the frame of the story. When I started processing this, it bothered me even more — I’m limiting the way that I think about what’s happening in the world.
If we examine the current political climate, it’s an understatement to say that it’s polarized. The theme that I consistently see from articles, regardless of which political side, is that they paint the other side as being unintelligent, and uncaring about the core values of the people reading the article. It’s taking away from the fact that people have a reason for what they believe in, and I see it as important to understand why people think how they do regardless of whether you agree with them or not.
One of my favorite shows on YouTube is “Middle Ground”, where the organizers get people from opposing sides of a controversial issue, and they all sit down and discuss their opinions. These kinds of productive conversations, to me, reveal the humanity of people. Everyone has a set of wildly different experiences that constitute them and their belief systems, and it’s startling at first to hear the humanity in people who you’ve antagonized in your mind before hearing their stories. The media does a great job painting the other side in a general way, and it damages how we connect with people before even listening to them. Listening to them doesn’t mean agreeing with them.
My problem, therefore, is how social media can limit our point of view and/or perception of people. We all, of course, have the ability to control what we see on social media by following/unfollowing pages. I don’t think that we think about this enough and, for that reason, are less understanding of the complexity behind how others see issues outside of our bubble. If we demonize those that we don’t agree with, we can’t work towards middle grounds where we can all move towards the betterment of the human condition. I think we forget that this is what most people want.
So, to wrap this up, what can I do about this? Simply put, step outside of your bubble and engage with other viewpoints. Being a part of, or listening to a fruitful discussion, we move towards empathy for people, a value that I think should define how we interact with anyone.
None of what I’m saying is meant to simplify the complexity and emotions behind issues because people carry different stakes with them. If you feel like your belief system is under attack, I advocate for protesting in ways such that your voice is heard. The point of me writing this right now is to express that I don’t think we push ourselves enough to hear differing points of view. Instead, we at times say that if this person doesn’t agree with me, that means they’re less caring or less intelligent.
Technology has the potential to reinforce this close-mindedness unless we go out of our way and make the effort ourselves to listen to people that we normally wouldn’t agree with. On top of that, to not be triggered by it, and instead, argue/discuss with them as to why you see yourself as being right. I’m writing this now because I see this as a growing issue with the upcoming 2020 elections, a year that I see as having the potential to continue to divide Americans. We’re all people at the end of the day, and it’s important for us to be mindful that we should acknowledge where people come from.
On a closing note, this is my first post, so I think it’s fair to close it off with this. I am someone who cares a lot about people. Above my passion for being part of the technological wave that is shaping the world is wanting to see people happy. Hearing people’s stories, struggles and understandings of the world are incredible to me. Technology is helping us do that, but we need to guide it so that we can use it as a tool to better the human condition and the relationships that we have with others.
