Bobby Awful

We Don't Understand Social Media Putting the Israel/Palestine question aside for a minute, let's talk about the veil of ignorance that these pro-Palestine activists are labouring under. How is it one could be unaware of the Hamas attack on Israel that is being used as the cassus belli for the invasion of Gaza? The answer is that we misconcieve of what social media actually is, and the effect that it is having on us. Prior to the internet age, you would be constantly bombarded by media that you didn't choose to watch. Access to media would often be quite public: you would hear a radio playing music in a store, or you'd be watching TV with your family. The range of options one had to watch or listen to were either outside of your personal control, or came from a relatively narrow selection of media that could be chosen. For example, when I was growing up as a child, not only was I not in control of what we watched on TV, there were only 4 channels to choose from. The advent of a fifth channel was actually a very noteworthy development. The same effect was drawn from media you did have agency over selecting. If you wanted to watch a movie or play a video game, you would have to physically go to the store and you would have a choice of what the store stocked, and this limited selection was what everyone had to choose from. So even if you didn't choose to watch X movie or Y video game, you would have still been exposed to it whilst browsing the selection, you would have at least known of its existence. A similar effect happened with news. The daily news bulletens on TV and radio were shared by a much more densely concentrated audience, and most people will have at least seen the day's headlines on the newspaper stands as they went about their daily life. Some kind of impression of what was happening in the world was shared by almost everyone in your society, and this was so normal you just didn't think about it. What this does is create a kind of unified media paradigm that is shared by the entire society; everyone has some frame of reference for what has happened or what is being referenced. This narrow bottleneck of mass media has many negatives, of course, but one benefit of it is that it created a social fabric in which almost all people were a part without having to actually do anything. The internet initially did something similar, as there was a limited selection of things you could find, search engines were not very effective, and often you would have to know about a website before you could even go to it. Knowledge of websites was often transmitted by word-of-mouth. However, social media radically upsends this paradigm. When we post on social media, we know that other people can see it. Therefore, we naturally assume that we are engaging in a public space, and we assume that this means we are having some kind of shared experience with the other people also engaging in that space. However, this doesn't seem to be the case at all. We are no longer having shared experiences with the people around us. Instead of not having shared user experiences of media, we are in fact having a multitude of curated individual experiences that overlap with people who are not in our physical location. We have the total freedom to seek out and indulge in any entertainment content we desire, in an unlimited amount. Instead of having a broad, though relatively shallow, understanding of many topics, as it used to be, now we have quite a deep understanding of a narrow range of subjects, and live in total ignorance of things outside of these social media silos. Algorithms also drive this problem, a problem of which social media companies are well-aware. If you owned a social media platform, your incentive is to get people on your platform as often as possible and keep people on your platform for as long as you can. Naturally, then, you will want to ensure your content recommendation algorithms will present content tailored to the user based on engagement metrics that reveal what kind of content that particular user wants. Is it unreasonable for the social media companies to promote more of the same kind of content to users? No, of course not. In fact, it seems unreasonable to suggest that social media should present uninteresting content to their users; its not a model that could work. This creates a kind of infinite opium den effect, in which users are just scrolling for things they enjoy and the algorithm can provide everything they ever desired. What social media is doing is to unintentionally destroy the collective understanding of the world which society shared in the pre-internet age. The continuity of a culture suddenly interrupted and burst apart, so that now individuals are like free radicals moving every which way with little understanding of one another and carrying with them a very specific frame of reference that is almost unintelligible to the rest: each siloed community has its own set of references, its own terminology, shibboleths, and propriety. We are at the beginning of this paradigm now, but we can see what it will end up like with the younger Zoomers. Zoomers are uncurious about the things they don't know because there is no impact on not knowing these things. Other people won't know them either, and they won't know you don't know them. There is no expectation of a shared culture or shared society. There is no drawback or punishment; the failure will be when they don't know something about the wierd niche community they engage in online. They know how to engage with the disparate community that shares their niche interest, and that's where they receive their validation. Why should they have any interest at all in things that are outside of their preferences? The younger Zoomers are the social media natives who do not recall a time before social media. They are trapped in this world where some people simply don't understand one another, which is why Zoomers seem so culturally disconnected from other generations; they literally are. The two young ladies below are the future of our culture. Their social media feed is deliberately curated by themselves, and reinforced by the algorithms that feed them content, to promote a narrow worldview which is constantly reinforced by more of the same. Information that is unpleasant and disturbing to that worldview is omitted, and information that confirms that worldview is decontextualised whilst it is being flooded into their feed. This is how these women know literally nothing about a terrorist attack that provoked an invasion. It is not a question of misinformation or disinformation, it is a problem of a lack of information and that is going to be a continual problem as we move forward into the future. It seems to me that, in a few decades, when the world is mostly populated by people who are social media natives, that there will be a strange kind of effect in which terrorism occurs that basically nobody understands. For reasons unknown, some random weirdo will scream a string of strange and novel words, make absurd demands about a bizarre subject, then murder a bunch of people for a cause that nobody else has ever heard of. We see the first glimmers of this in incel terrorism; how comprehensible is the idea of murdering people because you're unable to get laid to the average family man or woman? They don't know what the niche terminology is, nor why someone has stewed on this problem for such a long time, let alone why it would drive them to violence. Yet, here is that weirdo with a gun, shooting people. It doesn't seem that there is a practical way to get people to know about things they simply aren't interested in, either. People are totally free to ignore, block, or avoid things they don't want to hear, and it is unreasonable to suggest that social media should force them to be exposed to it, in the way one was exposed to media in the pre-internet age. People always have the choice of closing the app and opening another one. I don't have an answer for this, of course, but I think it's important for us to have a better understanding of what we're doing, so perhaps a solution could be identified.