|
|
Musings Report 2019-51 12-21-19 Is a Countercultural Rejection of Social Media Inevitable?
You are receiving this email because you are one of the 800+ subscribers/major contributors to www.oftwominds.com.
For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
Thank You, Contributors!
Thank you, Sudheer B. for your continuing extremely generous support of my work, and welcome new patrons / subscribers Chris N. and Jean-Pierre A. --thank you very much!
Is a Countercultural Rejection of Social Media Inevitable?
After reading this article, you may well join me in wondering if a cultural revolt against social media is possible, or perhaps even inevitable:
Alienated, Alone And Angry: What The Digital Revolution Really Did To Us (via GFB)
We were promised community, civics, and convenience. Instead, we found ourselves dislocated, distrustful, and disengaged.
"The longest-running measure of alienation in American life is the Harris Poll’s Alienation Index, which has been calculated annually for more than 50 years. It’s a simple survey that asks whether respondents agree with these five statements:
-- What you think doesn't count very much anymore.
-- The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
-- Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself.
-- The people running the country don't really care what happens to you.
-- You're left out of things going on around you."
You probably won't be surprised that the Alienation Index has hit a new high of 69, a remarkable reversal from the low in 1966 of 29.
How do we characterize the broad cultural, social, political and economic trends touched upon in this article?
One is that the digital connections enabled by the Internet that were supposed to be positively transforming socially, politically and economically, transmogrified into negative, fragmenting and alienating forces with the rise of monopolistic social media platforms/data-collection, search/data-collection and sales-transactions/data-collection.
Note that the function tying all these together is the monetization of transactions, financial, social, and search, via the mass collection of user data to be sold to the highest bidder, without regard for the social, political or economic consequences.
Another is the addictive union of smartphones and social media I discussed in last week's Musings (Is Social Media the New Tobacco?).
A third is the perverse way in which the worst elements of social interaction--trolls, toxic tear-downs, personal attacks, etc.--have not just been enabled by social media, they've been magnified and expanded into the dominant experience.
Yes, Facebook and other social media platforms still enable the harmless exchange of photos of kittens and puppies, graduation, family reunions, etc., but the positive additions made to social life are overwhelmed by the enormous destruction and disruption generated by the flood of toxicity that is implicitly encouraged by social media platforms because this toxicity increases "engagement," a code-word for addiction, which is highly profitable.
A fourth is the limited substitution of social media exchanges (photos of kittens, etc.) for actual social interaction in the real world. While digital communications such as lengthy emails are a form of real social interaction, as are collections of photos embedded in long-term social relationships based on shared histories and interests, these attributes don't "port over" to social media. Social media posts are intrinsically limited in intimacy because they are social broadcasts.
In a profound way, they are simulacra of actual social interactions, mirages, simulations and facsimiles that cannot replace (or be substituted for) real-world relationships.
This social broadcasting function--what I've termed "two billion channels of Me"--distorts social interactions into a game of presenting oneself as larger than one is in the real world, an inauthentic self that's carefully packaged to appear "real" while being unreal.
Broadcasting such a heavily edited narrative of our lives opens us up not just to trolls but to the obsessive insecurities of feedback--did our audience buy our narrative? Were they enthusiastic in "liking" us? Or did our narrative fall flat, which we interpret as rejection?
Last week I addressed the addictive appeal of broadcasting a channel of Me in a world of diminishing real-world opportunities, and this raises the question: is a cultural rejection of social media even possible?
Generationally, youth is especially sensitive to the desire to be accepted and liked, and conversely fearful of being mocked, rejected, shunned, jilted.
No wonder youth are especially addicted to social media, as they seek to relieve their anxieties of "being accepted" through social media, which only heightens their addiction, loneliness, and anxiety over not being "good enough."
Countercultural movements tend to start on the margins, of course, in small groups of rebels, misfits and outcasts who reject the status quo, partly because they found no positive role, no sense of belonging, no identity and no livelihood in the conventional hierarchies.
Naturally, these margins of society attract many intellectuals, artists, musicians, poets, etc. At some point this ferment generates an intellectual framework that explains the dead-end nature of conventional standards and outlines a new movement based on a rejection of conventions.
This framework then attracts recruits, typically among the youth who are idealistic and impressionable.
Could social media be framed as a toxic pool of addiction and exploitive profiteering that's now the opposite of "cool"?
Were this framing to take hold, then rejecting social media and an obsessive addiction to smartphones could arise as a countercultural youth movement that sought to restore authentic human connections.
If history is a pendulum, clearly the addiction to smartphones and social media is reaching an extreme. The conventional view sees this as a permanent feature of technology and modern life. If history is a pendulum, an equally powerful movement in the opposite direction is only a matter of time.
Highlights of the Blog
Our Fragmentation Accelerates 12/20/19
Skyrocketing Costs Will Pop All the Bubbles 12/18/19
OK Boomer, OK Fed 12/17/19
A "Market" That Needs $1 Trillion in Panic-Money-Printing to Stave Off Implosion Is Not a Market 12/16/19
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Poured two-thirds of a new concrete floor for a storage/work area beneath the house; hauled the dirt/rocks out in 5-gallon buckets, mixed the concrete by hand (Sackcrete). Good exercise, solid sense of accomplishment.
From Left Field
From Iran to Hong Kong, the World Is Becoming Ungovernable: The dominant political trend of the past year has been popular uprisings that are jolting the ruling institutions. But anarchy isn't the worst that could happen.
Was Humanity Simply Not Ready for the Internet? A 1990s cyber enthusiast considers whether he’s to blame for our digital woes.
Global oil discoveries far from breaking even with consumption
Despite Startup Millionaires, the Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America Deflate
The Great Flood...
1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place--Vienna, heart of a fading empire....
Responding to Collapse, Part 14: adapting to life without the grid -- or more likely, a grid that's no longer 24/7 reliable....
The Economic-Oil Nexus (EON) Part 1: Why have low oil prices and various economic stimuli over the past several years failed to restore global economic growth? -- don't forget demographics and diminishing returns....
Tight Oil and The Willing Suspension of Disbelief -- we want cheap oil forever....
Prime Mover: How Amazon Wove Itself Into the Life of an American City -- worth a close read for how monopoly functions behind a veneer of competition....
Google "Machine Learning Fairness" Whistleblower Goes Public, says: "burden lifted off of my soul" -- expect more whislteblowers to emerge from Big Tech's tens of thousands of employees...
I thought that family was best avoided – until I had children of my own
'It’s putting us out of business': Denver business owners say they're being squeezed by property tax (via Thomas D.) -- from $5,000/year to $42,000/year--what's your problem, buddy? We need more money, pay up and shut up....
"All problems are either clocks or clouds." Karl Popper
Thanks for reading--
charles |
|
|
|
|
|
