e're all brought up to think “social good, antisocial bad,” but it ain't
necessarily so. An incident that happened when I was a teenager will illustrate
the idea.
I used to hang out with two other kids, where we'd try to figure out clever new ways to get into trouble. One day we came across a little boy. My two friends started arguing with him. One shoved the boy into a ravine and the three of us walked off, basking in the glow of victory.
As we walked, I remarked that I thought we shouldn't have done that: we were acting like bullies. The response, as anybody who's ever been a kid will recognize, was that if you don't like it, you don't have to be with us. I thought about that, realizing the implications—the likelihood of spending my teen years isolated and friendless, and the impact that might have on my psychosocial development—and I walked away and stopped hanging out with them.
A chess piece being un-friended
The same social dynamic is occurring on social media, but it's not always understood. An interesting article on Pjmedia says that social media is intrinsically dangerous because participants don't get face-to-face feedback. Without such feedback, the author writes,
all sorts of ideas can float through the brain. Misunderstandings proliferate without verifiable feedback other than mostly anonymous comments posted for a variety of reasons.
This is all true, yet I doubt that the love of ideas floating through the brain is really what motivates people on social media. Humans instinctively know they cannot survive without society. The bullies on social media use this fear to increase their own power. It might look like politics. It might even be politics. But deep down, for the bullies the ideas that others express are meaningless shibboleths: words whose sole purpose is to reveal which tribe you're in. Those who use social media know that if they challenge the mob, they will become isolated and vulnerable to even more bullying. They do the risk-benefit analysis and decide it's better to agree with the bully. Eventually they conclude that the bully is factually right.
Even in the adult world, this dynamic holds. Many of us work in places where expressing an opinion, no matter how benign, is dangerous. Where I work (for the moment), at a university, you do not crack jokes—ever. It's far too dangerous. I often suspect that when college professors and their students start espousing their ludicrously stupid ideas, it's their way of torturing those of us who have a sense of humor. My tongue has the bite marks to prove it.
Bullies raise themselves up by bashing their enemies. Victims must signal to the bullies that they are not challenging them by pretending to agree with whatever the bully says, whether it makes sense or not, or face the consequences.
For the vast majority of people, being part of the group is the top priority. This is how bullies gain power. It's why social media inevitably become cauldrons of social pathology.
By social pathology I don't mean maladaptive behavior, deviants, and social outgroups. I mean phenomena that occur automatically when people are in groups. Humans, like all animals, live their lives by cost-benefit analyses. If some action benefits them, they will perform the action. We often talk about ethics and their absence. But right and wrong are only meaningful when there is a cost and a benefit. When an ethical system is generally accepted, violating its rules allows other people to use those shared values to undermine an enemy's social status.
This works only in an unfragmented society, where all social groups interact with each other. When society is fragmented, whether by age, sex, race, or some other factor, different groups will discover that different behaviors lead to increased social status. Without shared interactions, shared standards of behavior cannot be enforced.
Fragmentation of society is the reason we get groups of people demonstrating in favor of policies that don't make any sense and can't possibly work. It's why we get activists closing down Christian bakeries while leaving atheist and Muslim bakeries untouched. Their real goal is not to achieve any sort of fairness; quite the opposite. The only goal is power.
That's also why Twitter, Facebook, and the rest ban dissent. Social status, not truth or a free exchange of ideas, is all that matters in social groups. As the power of one side increases, that side invariably consolidates its hold by expelling more and more dissidents, thereby becoming more and more extreme. In the end, there can be only one: one people, one realm, one leader.
If Zuckerberg wants to save Facebook, this is what he would have to fix. I think it's too late: the social dynamics have turned against Facebook. Zuck will probably never understand, but some of us saw it coming. There's no financial cost to being on Facebook, so people have no vested interest in it; it survives only so long as kids think it's cool. Over a year ago I advised my financial guy to short Facebook. He started talking about advertising revenue. I bet he's kicking himself now.
A better term for ‘realm’ might be social ecological niche, except for the fact that ‘social ecology’ has already been appropriated by environmentalists. So I'll stick to social pathology.
For intellectuals, ideas are their livelihood. These days, the facts upon which ideas are based are increasingly hard to come by: the news media only tell us those facts that support their narrative. Even in science, there are narratives that we must adhere to, and discovering a new fact that conflicts with them is always dangerous to one's niche in the science ecosystem.
For the vast majority of people, though, ideas are only tools that they can use to accumulate social status. This explains the absence of intelligent ideas in most social media, and it explains its popularity.
Social pathologies happen automatically because it's the nature of societies to be pathological. They'll also happen among artificially intelligent machines as soon as they begin communicating with each other.
“Social media is anything but social,” says Roger Simon in the Pjmedia article, and that may be true, depending on how social is defined. In my experience ‘social’ simply means one person trying to shove somebody else into a ditch. If they can't do it with words, they'll use bricks. That makes social media social in every sense of the word.
These days slamming each other with virtual chairs on the Internet is as close to interacting with our fellow humans as we ever get. If I weren't so cynical, the fact that the social media ecosystem is spiraling down into the misty void where all popular fads eventually go would restore my faith in humanity.
apr 07 2018, 8:38 am. edited apr 15 2018, 3:58 am
