Is Social Media A Public Threat?

There are several legislative moves currently around the country on the part of individual states to require age restrictions for the use of certain social media platforms. In essence, the goal appears to be prohibiting their use outright for those under 18 or, at the very least, to limit the length of time minors can spend on the platforms each day.

How these initiatives differ from state to state is in which social media services are targeted, or how that is determined.

But I have a different question:

Is it legitimate to assume that the danger of social media is limited to minors, as opposed to humans of all ages?

In its original intent, social media was created as an adjunct to personal interaction. Not all of us were capable of having the personal interactions we would desire, as often as we would desire them, or at all in some cases.

This would appear to be a noble cause on the surface of it. The assumption here is that no one would prefer using social media to personal interaction, so this was merely an expansion of the opportunities for this interaction, not a replacement for them.

That all might have been well and good if these services were managed by humanitarians rather than capitalists. But the reality is these are profit-driven services, and profits demand that every possible angle for increasing participation in, and the resulting revenue from, the use of these services, be pursued, regardless of their impact on the environment, or humanity at large.

What has developed with the evolution of these services is that they have been promoted as the evolution of personal interaction. But promoted or not, evidence is that people seem willing — eager, even — to use it as a substitute for personal contact; for actually sitting with and getting to know other people.

So, what is the impact of that in human terms rather than practical ones? There is no doubt that social media, and technology in general, is a logical advantage, but logic is not the question here.

What the reality of social media is teaching us is that logic is the enemy of humanity.

There’s a famous quote from Albert Einstein which goes, “You cannot hate someone whose story you know.” In the times when those words were first spoken, knowing someone meant spending time with them. In fact, you can’t spend time in the company of someone and NOT know them. Social media offers no such guarantee.

Why is our attitude toward certain people different depending on how well we know them? And, what does it mean to “know” someone? That is a subject for another time.

For now, just be aware that this is a tendency in all of us.

Until the age of social media, we would rarely have the opportunity to hear a person’s words or ideas without spending time with them. Until then, they were, essentially, unknown to us. Now, we must differentiate between knowing their words, and knowing their story. With only remote and digital interaction, we are easily fooled into thinking that we know others when it is only their words we know, if that.

Pictures have also become a substitute for being there. You see evidence of this in how people respond to being somewhere new, interesting, exciting, dramatic, etc. Rather than being still and taking in the grandeur of what they’re seeing, a modern human’s first response is to reach for their phone and take a picture. Once the photo is taken, they will turn and walk away, as if the only value of being there was a Facebook post.

Searching for a picture to accompany this article, I searched the term “social”, thinking that it would produce images of happy people having coffee together or otherwise engaging with one another in some activity. What did I get instead? Images of people staring at their phone screens or screen shots of various social media apps. Try it for yourself and you’ll see what I mean. Has even the word — not to mention the experience of being genuinely — social lost all meaning?

How long has it been since you saw 2 or more people sitting together without a cell phone in sight?

What was implicit in Einstein’s quote — but left unsaid — is that humans have a strong tendency to distrust people who’s story we do NOT know and cannot know. Such is the case with social media. That is, our natural distrust of people who are strangers to us is only multiplied by the sheer number of those who are social media contacts only.

The real essence of knowing another person’s story is entirely missing from the digital version. In spite of our near constant digital interaction, we remain very alone in the world without time in the company of others. That part of our humanity has not changed.

What has changed is our motivation to be in the company of others and, therefore, nurture our humanity. When we buy into the suggestion that social media contacts satisfy our need for human contact, we isolate in our daily patterns instead of socialize. Our world begins to close in around us and feels empty and unsatisfying, and we don’t know why. We don’t even realize this is happening until our despair is deep and wide. We don’t know how we got here, and we don’t know how to retrace our steps.

What prompts this article is the recent news report that several prominent psychologists sense that loneliness has reached epidemic proportions in modern culture. If the promise of social media was true, this would not be possible. What we find instead is that it is a likely suspect in the search for a cause in this epidemic of despair.

The lesson is this: every person with whom we come in personal contact changes us in some way; makes us richer and more understanding.

We don’t have to decide if they are good people or bad, we just need to know that they — in some way — add to the tapestry of our lives in ways that are make like richer, whether or not we recognize that consciously. Each of them has a story.

Social media has taught me the lesson of how precious life is, in all its forms. This occurs in ways that I can’t possibly dissect, and in ways that social media cannot satisfy. I now recognize that time spent on social media is time not spent discovering how to be a fulfilled human.

Given that being a fulfilled human is the on-going goal of my life, I spend virtually no time on social media. When I tell people this, the reaction is near-universal, and something to the effect of, “OK Boomer!”

The implication is that social media is now just a fact of life, so I should get used to it. I would agree it is a fact of modern times, but I would object to the use of the word “life” in anything having to do with the internet or digital media.

It’s not that I want to check out of life and cut myself off from the world; as is the presumption. It is that the world I want to be a part of is a very, very different one.