Social media degrades humanity. What solves our problems is understanding, empathy and human interaction.
An old friend once said, “It’s my movie. You’re just in it.”
She was joking. I think. But it’s an honest description of how most of us move through the world. We’re the lead actor, and everyone else is an extra, a nameless day-player, an NPC: Man Standing in Line Ahead Of Me, Woman #3 Walking Past My Chair, Random Zealot On TV. Of course, no one on this planet is an extra. Every person on this planet has a gripping story of gravity and yearning, love and struggle, as full as our own. A reason they are who they are. A reason we would empathize with - if only we experienced it ourselves.
We just have a remarkable talent for forgetting all that.
Behind the windshield
In a 1995 field study, researchers had a car pull up at a stoplight and then just sit there after the light turned green, and they recorded how the drivers stuck behind it used their horns. The drivers who were anonymous, hidden from view, honked sooner, longer and more often than drivers who could be seen.
Inside a box of glass and steel, the person ahead of you stops being a person. They become “the Honda.” “This idiot.” An obstacle. And because they can’t see you either, it doesn’t feel like you’re being cruel to anyone in particular.
Behind the screen
Social media is the windshield, perfected.
Same ingredients: no face, no voice, distance, speed, almost no consequence. But it gives us something a car doesn’t have. A car doesn’t reward you for honking. Social media does.
Most feeds are ranked by engagement, so whatever gets the strongest reaction gets shown to more people. And the strongest reaction is contempt. A 2021 study of about 2.7 million Facebook and Twitter posts from news outlets and members of the U.S. Congress found that the single biggest predictor of a post being shared was whether it talked about the other side. Each word referring to the political opposition raised the odds of a share by about 67%. It held for liberals and conservatives alike, and “angry” was the most common reaction.
The study shows correlation not cause, but anyone who has spent ten minutes online knows the incentive. A careful reply that tries to understand someone maybe gets a few likes. A cutting dunk goes viral. These systems aren’t optimized for understanding each other’s thoughts and ideas. Understanding of naturally complicated thoughts is near impossible. They’re optimized for reaction, and nothing gets a reaction like an insult. The person on the other end is reduced to a username, an avatar, “them.” On the road, we forget other people are people by accident. Online, we’re rewarded to ignore it.
Who’s making all these toys?
My father worked for the American Red Cross for most of his life, so as a boy I was surrounded by natural disasters: earthquakes, floods, mudslides, hurricanes, fires, tsunamis, tornadoes. The list goes on and on. Catastrophic emergencies were normal dinner conversation in the Hladecek household. It turns out there are countless horrific ways for people to suffer desperately en mass and die.
From a very early age, that taught me what an undeniably rigged game life on Earth is. It taught me that humanity is little more than an invisible organic film on a rock in the middle of infinite emptiness and cataclysmic power, a human film that can be wiped away forever by the simple nudge of nature. None of us chose to play this game. But the rules are set in stone before the game begins.
Rule one: you will definitely lose.
Rule two: along the way, you will absolutely experience pain and suffering that feels unbearable.
So the idea that human beings, facing odds like that, would turn and fight each other has forever confounded me.
When I was six, I truly couldn’t comprehend why every waking hour of every person on Earth wasn’t spent working ceaselessly to keep us safe from the catastrophes we knew were coming.
One night while I was happily eating SpaghettiOs, I overheard my father mention that at any moment a meteor could strike the planet and destroy all life on Earth. The thought put me off dinner. Later that night I was sitting alone on my bedroom floor, contemplating meteors, global destruction and my mortality for the first time, idly looking at my toys, and six-year-old me realized something that felt profound.
“Who has time to make toys? Who’s making all these toys?! You’re wasting time! Good god what are the adults doing!? Are they idiots, or insane? How am I the one realizing this!? “
I would gladly have given up every toy to know we’d be safe. I’d have given up so much more than that. There are over a hundred million 6-year-olds across the globe today who’d agree.
But then look at us. Using time to type away snarky insults on social media aimed at whatever person or group of people we don’t like today. As though we’re playing some vital role in making a change.
Platforms of degradation
That is our failure. Not that we disagree, but that the mediums we’re using to engage with each other are wrong. They are not built for the success of the human species.
They’re built for reaction, and reaction is easiest when it’s cruel. They are platforms of degradation, and we feed them our time, our attention and our best energy in exchange for a little hit of validation. You know who you are.
What has pushed me away from most social media was realizing that even the people I once looked up to - big very important people in business, politics, news, the arts, who frankly should know much better than I do - these big very important people engage in the same passive aggressive schoolyard pissing matches as everyone else. It’s embarrassing. It’s sad. It makes me feel sick. When in fact I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this type of engagement is not helping the world. The brief dopamine boost makes each of us feel better, but at a cost. Reinforcement of this unproductive activity, time and energy away from what matters.
Understanding between people is the first and most important solution to every problem humanity faces. Understanding, empathy and education. Not gotchas. Not insults. Not passive-aggressive backhands.
Get off the machine
So if you’re one of those of us who suckle at the validation of social media, who spend real time and energy devising ways to smack the other side, here’s my ask: stop. Get off the damned validation machine. Find something more meaningful to do with that energy, something that builds empathy with other people instead of eroding it. Something that actually matters.
The game is still rigged. The floods and fires, earthquakes and pandemics are still coming. And the six-year-old in me still can’t believe we’re spending our one turn at this life insulting each other through glass.
Put social media down.
Start something that brings people together. Learn a new language. Travel. Experience another culture. Share yours. Be curious about the stories and reasons of the person you disagree with. Because if you actually understood them, and I mean really understood that person, their life and background, who they love, why they hurt, you’d either agree, or have the insight necessary to help them see a different idea.
This is what engagement should be.
These are what make the world better.
That six-year-old you, the one who wondered who you’d become, will love you.