I’ve been thinking about “social media” quite lot lately. And here I’m focusing on twitter-like systems more than, say facebook. Services, that is, that are for short messages that are widely distributed, the authors have little control over once they’re posted, and that have such a massive flow of data that the focus of the system (and the users) is necessarily on immediacy because it’s quite difficult to refer back to past messages. The structure of the messages is also very simple. The scope of these systems — at least the ones called “social media” — tends to be global, even though there are many similar systems in use in more constrained user groups, such as organizations, institutions, and companies.
A group of people communicating together in person rarely devolves into “hateful speech.” There are, of course, groups that meet where hateful speech is probably the point (I’m thinking of the KKK, for example), but I think it’s different when that’s the idea at the outset. Twitter-like systems did not begin with fostering hateful speech as the objective. Neither did the Internet itself. You can find hateful speech on the Internet in systems that are not “social media,” but I would suggest that the whole Internet has not become awash in such communication, although it can be found. “Commercial speech” is more the norm, it seems to me.
So why does “social media” foster and amplify hateful speech? If something is to be done to remedy that — and I think it should, before things go any further — understanding what kind of remedy might work depends on understanding what the real problem is.
I don’t know, but I have some ideas. It doesn’t take much, if any thought to participate in “social media.” In fact too much thought might be bad, because you lose immediacy, and the system rewards speed. Reaction, not reflection. This is combined with the automatic assumption that the scope of a message is global. Anyone posting a thoughtful analysis gets exactly the same potential audience as someone else reacting with a sophomoric “nyah-nyah” reaction.
In real life, such as an in-person gathering, “nyah-nyah” reactions are mostly repressed, and when someone just can’t help themselves, the other folks in attendance tend to help reduce, not amplify, that kind of reaction. Why is social media different?
I think it’s *locality.” The scope of an in-person gathering is very local; it includes the people who are there. You may know some or all of them. Even if you don’t, there’s all that context that humans get from being physically present. Even if you’re socially inept, like me, you get at least some sense of the people around you. That context helps shape what you communicate and how you communicate it. With social media none of that is present; it’s much more like talking to yourself.
The united states is one of the earliest examples of a society that was designed. The design specification is the constitution. The designers gave enormous consideration to how the society was intended to function, and one important aspect is inclusion of locality. A very simplified aspect of the design is a set of localities (towns) federated into larger units (states), federated into a top-level unit (the nation). This federated network operates so that most communication is very local, for example in town meetings. In such a meeting one idea might reach concensus, and be communicated to the next higher node, the state. It arrives along with other ideas from other first-level nodes (other towns). Some of the ideas propagated to the state level will be agreed at that level, and those can be propagated to the the next-level node, the federal government, where they compete for agreement with ideas that have arisen from other parts of the network (other states).
There are other channels for communication to flow directly from the first-level to the top level, but those channels are also constrained, such that if you want to bring your ideas directly to the top level, you have to have a fairly significant committment in order to do so. And your idea still has to compete with others through consideration, debate, and discussion.
There is no “social media” system that has anything like this method of percolating or filtering ideas. When you post a message to a twitter-like system, it’s global by default. There is competition between ideas, but it’s not a competition of consideration, discussion, and debate; it’s competition of attention. Traditional media like newspapers have a form of that attention, and it gave rise to expressions like “if it bleeds it leads.” In this case every user is the journalist and there are no editors or filtering systems other than attention. What you need, to win the attention competition, is called “click bait.”
What if social media systems did work more like other human systems that inherently filter and edit ideas, passing the best of them at one level or tier up to the next level or tier, while anything considered lacking is not passed along. The social media systems we have today have tried (and may be still trying) to do some sort of “moderation”, it’s all at the top level, where it becomes a near impossible task because messages at that stage are too numerous to really cope effectively with, and have lost any context that local origins would have provided.
But why should such filtration and editing be helpful? And in what sense is it actually “helping?” Maybe the natural state of humanity, and all we can reasonably expect, is cacaphony, chaos, hostility, and hatred. If you go by the minimalist definition of “democracy” offered by Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, we’re still living in a democratic political system, and so are the poulations of Hungary, Israel, Turkey, and arguably even Russia. Schumpter described democracy in a very simple way: political parties compete for the largest number of votes, and the winner gets to rule. This isn’t what we, at least in the US, generally think of when we talk about democracy. We generally associate other things, like equality, the rule of law, and freedom of expression without consequences other than disagreement and debate. We might even have in mind what we think of as the highest and best moments in our history. But what I think of as the best moments include things like ending slavery, equal rights, and universal suffrage, To me these are achievements. To some they have always been failures. If democracy is nothing more than whoever gets the most votes gets to rule, then whoever is ruling, if they believe my list of achievements is a list of failures, can try to eliminate them.
That’s what’s going on in the US now. The current regime really did get the most votes. And those other values most people in the US seem to associate with democracy? The regime doesn’t share them, and sees nothing wrong with eliminating them simply because they have won the right to rule by winning the vote, and that’s all that matters.
There’s a lot of evidence that a great many citizens who voted to give the current regime the right to rule expected the regime to share much more of their world view than seems to be the case. My own reaction, which seems to have been pretty widely shared, has been to think of those citizens as misled, gullible, and in a word, stupid. Stupider, of course, than me or the people who hold views similar to my own.
But if the natural state of humanity is cacaphony, chaos, hostility, and hatred, then expecting to change someone’s views by calling them misled, gullible, and stupid is certainly not going to help. In fact I don’t think any sort of “rational argument” is going to help very much. Dispassionatly considering rational, logical arguments is not a skill that comes naturally to humans. It’s something one learns, either implicitly during childhood or explicitly in school, or (usually) both. But there are other things that can be learned through those channels.
We are now generations into a nation where significant numbers of citizens, who overall have learned just as much and are are just as intelligent as anyone, have very different views about this nation, the world, other people, and everything else. As you go through life you learn. Maybe you’ve learn by attending schools and universities and discussing topics with your friends and family who have also attended similar schools and universities. Or maybe you’ve learned by attending churches and discussing topics with your friends and family who have also attended similar churches. Or maybe you’ve learned by watching televised and streamed content, and maybe discussion for you is not the same thing as it is for me. But everybody learns. That’s another aspect of the natural state of humans.
there’s another aspect of human nature though. In person, most of us are capable of emphathy and kindness. It can be difficult or even impossible to “other” someone you’re personally acquainted with. We’re all acquainted with some people, and we’ve connected with them in lots of different ways. People use any means available to form communities. That used to be limited to ways to meet phyisically, but we have many more choices now. There are communities formed from websites, from online games, from films, from appreciations, from skills. I think this is a key to finding an “off ramp,” as Utah’s governor put it. A way to mediate the cacaphony, chaos, hostility and hatred. Community and an aspect of it I’d call locality are good for us. It’s hard to ascribe “otherness” to people you’re acquainted with. That’s why I think acquaintance, community, and locality are solutions to the growing polarization and hostility in public life.
Nobody can thrive in a crowd of 330 million people. Bigness, of societies, of corporations, of concentrated wealth, has gone too far. Humans are better able to thrive in smaller units. Towns, just for one example. And towns can thrive in collections like states or even counties. And those units can thrive in collections too. Back in 1956 the psychologist George Miller wrote a memorable paper about “the magic number seven, plus or minus two.” He was talking about memory and recall, and the idea of cognitive limits is much more nuanced and complex than “Miller’s Law” originally suggested. But there are other kinds of limits besides how many items you can easily remember, and I think one of them has to do with living happily and productively in a locality; a community. You can enjoy membership in any number of communities, but I think they work best within certain size limits. Posting messages with global scope has little or nothing to do with community. And for that matter, it has little or nothing to do with conversation, discourse, or constructive debate. It’s only about attention and emotional reaction. Beyond that, twitter-like systems really aren’t any use to anybody. Except perhaps as another tool for manipulation. Another facet of manipulation is suppression. And in the century-old words of William Allen White, “suppression leads to violence.” And the only people who really want violence have no expectation of taking part in it themselves. It’s for “others.”
