Media Diet (Version 1.0) - Social Media
Every so often I get asked about my media diet so I put a little list together by category here.
At the conclusion of that list, I promised further iterations expanding the list to cover blogs, audio, video, and social media.
After a hellish week of social media, I thought it was an excellent time to talk about it.
In my prior post on media diet, I prioritized sacred, humanistic, and scientific books over print and digital news, opinion, and criticism. The reason is that there is a great gulf between them in terms of quality, artistry, and authority. Part of that is due to the inherent limitations of journalistic media. The best news, opinions, and reviews are deeply informed by civilization’s sacred, humanistic, and scientific heritage. Essays and reviews can be the place where the world’s greatest wisdom can be popularized, applied, and appreciated. The same is true in theory for social media, but as New York’s greatest Yogi observed:
In theory, there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is.
The most comprehensive answer for why is provided by the legal scholar Eric Posner in his concise “Twenty Theses about Twitter”:
1. People sign up for Twitter for two reasons: to obtain information and to exert influence.2. Twitter serves these functions poorly. If you want information about a specific topic, a Google search is a more efficient way to obtain it. If you want information about current events, you do better by reading a newspaper.
3. Twitter provides information poorly because tweets are mostly driven by the latest outrage and are hence redundant. The rare tweet that contains an interesting or unusual idea is lost in the cataract.
4. Twitter is a poor device for exerting influence because of #5.
5. No tweet has ever persuaded anyone of anything.
6. Twitter’s real function is not to help people obtain information or exert influence.
7. Twitter’s real function is to enable people to obtain validation for their beliefs.
8. People send tweets with a single overriding purpose: to get the tweet “liked” or retweeted.
9. When your tweet is liked or retweeted, you enjoy a dopamine surge.
10. It doesn’t matter why the tweet is liked or retweeted, or even if the person on the other side read your tweet. You enjoy a fleeting illusion of mastery.
11. People retweet tweets that validate their own beliefs.
12. For this reason, the most effective tweet is a clever formulation of a view that everyone already believes. If one lacks cleverness, forcefulness provides a second best.
13. Tweets are either snide or outraged.
14. The effortlessness with which one obtains a dopamine response results in excessive use and a weakening of the response over time. Hence Twitter’s addictive quality. People increase Twitter usage in order to maintain a constant dopamine response.
15. Unfortunately, people might respond negatively to your tweet. When that happens, the self feels threatened, stress levels rise, and the organism engages in fight-or-block, resulting in either case in a form of infantile regression.
16. In the non-virtual world, successful people take care to keep up impressions, for example, they avoid making controversial statements to friends, colleagues, and strangers except when unavoidable, and even then do so in a carefully respectful way.
17. In Twitter, the same people act as if their audience consisted of a few like-minded friends and forget that it actually consists of a diverse group of people who may not agree with them in every particular on politics, religion, morality, metaphysics, and personal hygiene. Hence tweeting becomes a source of misunderstanding and mutual hostility. The Twitter paradox is that one seeks solidarity but is constantly reminded of one’s solitude. Fortunately, there is always the mute button.
18. Without realizing it, people who use Twitter damage the image of themselves that they cultivate in the non-virtual world.
19. The sense of validation that Twitter provides is as a potato chip is to a meal. A Frankfurt school theorist would say that the tweet is a commodified form of social engagement in Late Capitalism. Its effect is to alienate its users while immersing them in advertisements.
20. But Twitter doesn’t even make money for the capitalist class. It’s a black hole of value-destroying technology for all concerned.
I suspect Kevin Munger is also correct in his observation in his short essay, “Yes, Xxit”, that not just individuals but institutions can degrade themselves in a similar manner by participating in social media:
the quantified feedback provided by social-media platforms is both seductive and addictive. So many corporate, governmental, and nonprofit organizations have been tricked by ever-increasing view counts into thinking that they’re communicating better — while, on an ecosystem level, it’s clear that our status and capacity has been diminishing every year. Competing for marginal “views” with charlatans like Andrew Tate is a net negative; it damages our reputation for excellence. By commodifying our output, by accepting the platform protocols which treat our scientific or institutional communication exactly the same as trolls and hucksters, we are reducing ourselves to their level.
Posner and Munger are each speaking particularly about Twitter which, at its earliest stages, had higher concentrations of academics and writers. It was more text and link centered than its rivals. This was why I joined twitter long after I had left rivals Facebook and LinkedIn.
Those days are long gone, and it has since been rebranded as “X”, the everything app. And by everything, I mean EVERYTHING. It is increasingly video and photo centered. The quantity of sexually explicit and graphically violent photo and video has gotten so bad I now employ “Data Saver mode” full time to prevent videos and images from loading while logged into the everything app. Bots, automated accounts that tweet and retweet for various purposes, are endemic and the signal to noise ratio has never been worse.
A recent column in The Economist, “Can you make it to the end of this column?”, sums up the present situation by appealing to the work of the economist Herbert Simon:
Herbert Simon, who won both the Turing award for artificial intelligence in 1975 and the Nobel prize in economics in 1978, coined the term “bounded rationality”. Instead of an all-knowing optimiser, economics should model people as “satisficing”, he argued, choosing options that are simply good enough, rather than perfect, given the limits of their informational environment. “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients,” he wrote. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and the need to allocate that attention efficiently.” Endless information distributed through smartphones creates such a world. And as Simon pointed out, unlimited wants and scarce resources are the definition of an economic problem…
Resisting brainrot is hard. Simon used the two blades of a pair of scissors to illustrate his concept of bounded rationality. Decisions come from a combination of the individual’s own limitations and the informational environment in which they operate. Asking which blade of the scissors did the cutting is a mistake, since it is always both. Willpower alone is unlikely to defeat perfectly tuned distraction machines with algorithms that constantly adjust to maximise user engagement. The environment is hostile.
Social media is now, and perhaps always has been, a hostile information environment. I am on Twitter (“X”), and only Twitter, for professional reasons. The cavalcade of horrors which unfurled over “X” in the aftermath of last week’s tragic assassination has me questioning if even limited engagement is worthwhile.
I would not recommend anyone make social media a regular part of their media diet.
