Social media 2

One moment you may feel you are at the centre of everything, the next of utter insignificance. Your global reach seems in contrast to your local world, where you actually get to meet those to whom you are connected, but then they don’t seem as important as they once were. Or maybe, I just don’t get about much anymore?

Our interactions with people we know, up close and personal, remind us that social media is of the real world, we may have messaged to meet and in conversation take for granted we’ve read each other’s posts. But sometimes it feels like its purpose is not to connect us faster and more intimately, but to disorientate us all in both time and space, the better to sell us stuff. Equally, just as the whole world was always out there, the scammers and conmen, the politicians and flimflam artists, along with the honest and trustworthy, the sacred and profane, now they’re in your face.

The situation has become darker since I previously posted on this subject. One way in which social media was enhancing our experience has begun to be lost, the accurate, chronological, minute to minute, timelines which added to memory accuracy and capacity. Appreciated more and more the older one gets! Meta, for example, by breaking-up the timeline in your newsfeed prevent you from appreciating who said what when, and seeing how others reacted. You lose the sense of time zones, distance. You can’t find anything again, watch it or read it later! If the algorithm insisted on one strict timeline people would learn that the more friends you have, the less you become attached to any of them. Given so many have been using the platform for fifteen years or so, it’s now even more difficult to notice how and why people change!

When the timeline (newsfeed) offers so many distractions (suggestions/ promotions/ adverts) one turns to the profiles of friends only to discover posts from the past you’re certain you haven’t seen, or at least noticed. When you scroll down a bit more you start to believe you’re the only one who isn’t responding to click bait. Comments in clear plain English, or captions alongside photos/videos taken by the writer are getting rarer, unless undertaken for financial gain. What could have been the personal journal of an individual, the family history of the future, is slipping away. In a similar way, organisations such as the BBC who sit on the greatest audio/visual archive of the twentieth century, dumb down the content for the sake of clicks.

Social pressure has always existed in various forms but is now reflected online. Preference falsification, recognising certain subjects and ideas as taboo in your group, leads not so much to self-censorship, but simply withholding your views altogether, observing but not participating. But surely people hold back less online?! Well, a minority do, often in combination with trying to anonymise their identity. But then there is the overtly political, either asserting special interests, or a particular party line. Here we need a consciousness of what’s not being said as well as campaigned for. The so-called, Overton Window, the idea that there is a range of subjects and opinions acceptable to any given population at a given time in history, that politicians and campaigners can debate upon. There’s an assumption that politicians don’t lead opinion, but follow it. That democracy not power rules!

Despite the meme dealers, those who wish to daily reset or refresh you, the desire of some for a culture of disembodied minds, and an online learned helplessness, there is an escape! The longer the internet exists the more history it contains. When someone dies, I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to, I can go on experiencing their life, I’m less limited by fading memories.

Which leads me to what I’ve come to call vicarious living, though I’m sure others have had the same thought; the tendency to live out our lives through the experiences of others. Again, this has always happened to a degree, those who made a particular self-sacrifice in the raising of their children, often appear later in life to live through them - after all the children appear to have what the parent always wanted. But online, you can follow whoever you like and it makes sense to follow those who have the life you want, or wanted. You get a sense of knowing, whether it be an ordinary person or a celebrity, you can indulge in the fantasy that you are a part of their lives, updated daily.

‘Who told you that?’ I’ve thought for a long time that is the first question anyone should ask themselves, about anything they hold to be true. Everything we know came from somewhere and someone is always there before you! There is no true originality, just the recombination of the ideas of others. It’s just that a lot of the time our learning has been unconscious. And all learning is social learning. Online we have access to such a wide range of knowledge, yet how do you get to know that there are alternative ways of seeing the world? Do we get to choose, when living off the knowledge of others? Are we the ones who set up the filter bubbles and echo chambers? Could there be such a thing as, say a Cyborg Identity Disorder? Google doesn’t seem to think there is, I just checked. Perhaps I made it up a while ago, noted it down and forgot, but it must have been prompted by someone!

Which brings me neatly to my final speculations, on emergent AI. Emerging for some time now, and likely to continue doing so for a long while to come. I speculated in the days of Twitter, that we might be dumbing down to meet it rising up. Dumb not in the sense of less intelligent, but lazy. Imagining, as always with new tech, that we could use it as a labour-saving device. Now, the idea that you can choose an AI application or platform to suit your needs, with appropriate and ethical regulations; rather than AI choosing you, including your delusion of choice, seems unlikely. It offers to do work for you, in exchange for your data. It is a voracious learner, but as of now is limited in the directions it can take by a lack of permissions. It seems to learn fastest when allowed to roam free on social media platforms. Like a very smart young teenager, but emotionally immature, it excels at maths, making graphs, creating pictures, but has a crude sense of humour which simply loves the absurdities and relationship spats of all the competing wannabes of the social media world. It hasn’t been to university yet. The ultimate geek, has yet to achieve unfettered access to a prestigious university’s library. Not just the books and journals currently approved of, but the stacks containing everything, anyone ever thought worth reading. The entire history of the world itself. They say two thirds of journal articles remain unread by anyone other than the authors and reviewers themselves. What about open access to everything Google originally scanned before Google Scholar, or the entire British Library, the National Archives and the documents section of the Royal Collection held in the bowels of Windsor Castle. The outcome? Crime, war, tyranny? No, just the thinking machine daily, telling politicians, public servants, educators, the media and business people that the best scientific evidence says that what you are doing won’t work!