21st Century Culture - Social Media

Several weeks ago, when I was in the process of trying to sort my blogs out, I wrote this...

Engagement - it's something I believe most of us covet. The arrival of social media placed a magnifying glass over our lives and many of us liked the idea of having our own stage to stride about on - I know I did. For every wallflower there's a budding thespian and the Fear Of Missing Out was actually a human thing that social media very efficiently pounced on - if something that only exists in the virtual world can pounce on anything. The thing is we like to think our lives have some meaning, especially with fewer people believing in a god. Our existence must mean something, surely? That's probably just hubris talking; does a wood lice that lives in a quiet forest and never has contact with anything apart from other wood lice and wood have a meaning other than being part of the planet's ongoing ecology?

I have written blogs for over 20 years and while I tell myself that I do most of it for myself the truth is I have an audience and I want to entertain (or educate) that audience so that they come back and maybe bring someone else along. Once upon a time my blogs were read by a quite remarkable number of people (in my eyes) but over the years it dwindled from four figures to three and now, generally, between 50 and 80 people will read my blogs - sometimes it can be as low as in the 20s (other times it can get as many as 200 depending on the subject), and it sometimes makes me wonder if it's worth doing at all. However, it is a medium I enjoy because as someone who no longer considers himself a writer it allows me to practice and carry on doing something I have enjoyed doing since I was a kid - sitting down at a keyboard and bashing the keys. My blogs, to a certain extent, have relied on social media for them to be seen, but they're not beholden to it, not unless I want as many people to read them as possible - which, of course, is the reason for writing them... Before Facebook and Twitter I actually had more people read them than I do now, but that was more to do with people having to search for what they wanted to entertain them rather than having it spoon fed to them in a timeline or feed; that and subscriptions and bookmarks.

Like so many things involving social media the beginning doesn't always lead to the middle or even the end. I have a number of almost disparate thoughts about the entire world we call social media; for one I think it is a fantastic creation that could very well be used as a concept for good, but as a counter to this, I think it will be the downfall of humanity, will ultimately cause wars and has sown so much division across the world that it's abilities can never really be considered a positive thing. Social media is a horrid mirror that reflects everything that can be bad about humanity and then amplifies it. The world is a far nastier place now that social media is ubiquitous.

In my Culture blogs I've talked a lot about the Paramount+ TV show Evil, I came to it late and as a result, the wife and I binge watched the three available seasons across an entire month. It is very much a weekly TV show because if viewed continuously you unearth inconsistencies about the plot and story telling method that are not mirrored in real life. However, one of the show's myriad of subplots involves a company called DF - it is a 21st century operation dealing with a number of aspects and is probably a lynchpin in the entire show's raison d'être and one of the things DF specialises in is social media and probably one of the best aspects of this show is how it has managed to marry evil with social media. One of the departments of this Evil Corps is its Troll Section, which employs banks of people who spend their working days doing all the things we hate about social media - the people (we sometimes think of them as 'bots') who are deliberately provocative, whether subtly or forthright. 

Troll have existed in the on-line forums since the early days of the internet. Their function (if you want to give them an actual purpose) is to stir up and incite debate about emotive issues, or simply just start an argument. They rarely engage after their initial posts; they are the people who light the blue touch paper then get as far away as they can, then sit and watch how much they can burn down. A proper internet troll does just enough to sow a seed and will probably never been seen again on that forum or thread. As a result trolls create other trolls; people who see the amount of exposure a troll can get from posting something contentious or inflammatory and they want that attention, even if it's 100 people telling them what a wanker they are, because if people are concentrating on you they're not paying attention elsewhere. Think of a dog that is bad; most dogs are not bad, per se, they're seeking attention and even a backhanded slap for misbehaving is attention. Anyone who has had a dog will know that dogs crave your attention even if it's just you shouting at them, because you are shouting at them! This is what they want and in the case of most of 'unpaid' internet trolls, it's about inciting enough debate to take over a thread or a forum. The person who says the most outrageous and shitty thing is taking up your time, your anger and your thoughts, which means they're focused on what the troll has said and nothing else. It's like when you make a really valid point but someone mentions you spelled a word wrongly and the entire thread is taken up with people debating your validity because your spelling is bad.

As I said, these kind of people have existed since Usenet first become a thing. we're not really talking about people who are argumentative here, we're talking about people who are deliberately provocative with a thought or comment that either goes against the general opinion or divides those opinions. In the TV series Evil, the Troll Section exists to do just this - to divide the audience, to make the person looking at their products love the product but hate the other people using it because, if we want to be honest about this, social media would be no fun if it was all about people agreeing with each other - wouldn't it? The purpose of the troll isn't just to anger and upset, it is fundamentally about sowing division and making people take sides. The best thing to do is not feed the trolls, but human nature is to challenge beliefs or comments that go against our way of thinking about something. It goes against a lot of peoples moral conviction to allow an inflammatory statement go ignored. Part of us doesn't want other people to think or believe the same way, so we feel it is our moral obligation to challenge these comments, when really we're doing the work of the trolls for them and if like in Evil many of the trolls are working for corporations that are dependent on interaction whatever they pay a troll is peanuts compared to the actual interaction it causes in real time. Oh and of course, if people agree with the troll's comments, they tend to take up the chalice and do even more of their work for them. 

Social media is, like I said, a fantastic thing, especially for keeping in touch with people, many of whom you might not even have remembered if it hadn't been for social media. The problem with it is that as a result of social media you actually lose touch with more people than you gain. This is mainly down to the algorithms that drive whatever social media app you're using. Have you ever noticed that sometimes you get adverts that you can't fathom why? This is probably down to your cursor or finger hovering over something for a split second longer than it does elsewhere; it might not even have anything to do with you; you might have gone for a wee, but your cursor or phone is on a certain post and the algorithm extrapolates this as something you're interested in. It also works in different ways; such as when you look at a post or something and then try to find it again. This is down, again, to the amount of time you spent and if you can't find it then you're likely to use the search to find it again and the search is the grail for algorithms and the task of finding how to target advertising to you specifically. Whether you ever find the post you're looking for is immaterial, because social media companies are hoping you simply fall down a rabbit hole and start looking at everything it suggests because eventually you might click on a suggestion and buy something. This is the holy grail for social media and a way of proving to potential advertisers that sites work for them.

Social media might keep all your friends and acquaintances in one place, but what you like, what you hover over the longest, what you type into searches and what you're seen as focusing your attention on is what dictates what you see. You've been friends with Joe Blow for years, but if Joe doesn't post much on Facebook and you haven't clicked like on what few posts he does put up, then the chances are he'll slip down your priority list, even if you have him or her in your 'favourites'. This is why you never see some people in your timeline; it has nothing to do with anything apart from your own viewing habits and the fact they don't post stuff you want to react with. It's also why when you snooze someone, when they un-snooze you appear to get everything you've missed all crammed in one place. This is because the algorithm doesn't realise you want to see less of this person, it's because you have spent time on this person so when the switch is turned back on it remembers that you have interacted with this person's account more than you have with someone you actually want to see the posts from. It's not supposed to make sense. In the world of social media algorithms, not wanting to see someone means you have to do more with their account than someone you do want to see and because we're talking about computer algorithms, it 'sees' this as you - the individual - actually wanting more of the person you want to see less of. Like I said, it isn't supposed to make sense, in fact, it's supposed to confuse and obfuscate you more.

Some people will argue with much of what I've said, possibly even suggesting I'm falling into the conspiracy theorists trap, because some people get fulfilment and joy from social media; they keep in touch with their friends, either by Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, WhatsApp or whatever is popular or the kids are using. These people might not give a shit about the advertising they're subjected to; they might not even realise that some of the people in their circles of friends are conspicuous by their absence. They might not realise the person they used to telephone or text with isn't in their lives as much as they once were, but life has a habit of dividing people through the demands of every day living. Social media has made us simultaneously aware and unaware of the people who mean the most to us and once where we weren't subjected to their every thought, we become influenced by them. "I didn't know so-and-so believed that?" Might not be something you consciously believe or think, but if you suddenly discover that a good friend is secretly a Nazi or is a fan of Cliff Richard when you thought they were punks, then these things influence you, whether you want to believe it or not. Social media allows you to know more about your closest friends without even asking them; however it also reveals things about people that prior to social media might have just sat in a darkened closet where no one else knew about it.

Social media is a multi-billion dollar thing where almost every aspect is taken seriously and before you scoff at this notion, it wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar thing if it just depended on what you - personally - thought; would it? It's a place that encourages disagreement and divide because that gets people involved and social media wouldn't be social if that didn't happen; yet it deceives us into thinking it's about bringing everyone together when the algorithms and people who write them couldn't care less what altruistic effect it has on societies. The world is a massive capitalist experiment otherwise it would be doing something about climate change, about hate and about subversion and manipulation of all forms of media - the bottom line is it is about making corporations money, otherwise there would be some way to challenge or approach them; there would be a 'contact us' section on their webpages; there would be a human being able to deal with problems. Think of it this way, if Facebook alone had interaction with the general public, with it's alleged 6 billion users [read: accounts] then it would need to employ 100,000 people minimum just to deal with every complaint, challenge or issue, this is why you can forget about them actually doing anything. They ignore governments, so why should they care what you think?

Freedom of speech will always be the label that social media hides behind even if it's a cop out and offensive, because while the media manipulates what we think is offensive or not, social media doesn't care about causing offense because that creates more people looking, liking and interacting and that makes money for someone, somehow. Social media is the single biggest threat to the planet since the creation of the atom bomb because it not only creates division, it gives the dividers a platform, whether they're private or public and as long as there's no gratuitous nudity, blatant beheadings or the threat to kill anyone - rhetorical, real or as a joke - they don't care what you're planning as long as you use their planning calendar to do it. If the people who ran social media had a conscience they wouldn't be working in social media.

It's remarkable that in a little over 15 years the human race has become so dependent on social media. Facebook went down, worldwide, for five hours at the start of March and a reported 50 million people changed their passwords because they believed they had been hacked or that changing their password would miraculously bring it back. Social media essentially runs our lives and in the USA there's a problem with the Chinese owned TikTok, which the Senate wants to ban because it might be harvesting data for the Chinese government. There are over 2 million businesses in the USA alone that depends on the platform for its business, because it is the easiest app to use if you have a business. Trying to run a business on Facebook is akin to throwing money down the toilet, but we don't hear about the US government trying to shut that down, despite the clear fact that Meta - the parent company - operates like a rogue country, literally holding the rest of the world to ransom.

We're hearing about the imminent threat of AI - especially in a year that promises both a UK and US election - the problem is, because of social media, you don't need to create falsities to convince the public of what's right or wrong, what is a lie and what is the truth, because social media already does that for you. The Flat Earth Society has over 100,000 members on Facebook - that's a drop in the ocean compared to the Big Picture, but that's still the population of a town like Dagenham or Bedford and when you look at it like that, that's a lot of people believe the earth is flat. This is just an example, but if you have a platform for the hateful or the ridiculous then you will attract people. In the good old days, if you had right wing extremists, their groups were small, they relied on the telephone or leaflet campaigns to drum up interest - marches and demonstrations by fascist groups rarely were large enough to raise the interest of a journalist or a news reporter. In 2024, we might use social media to attract 100,000 people to a Pro-Palestine march, but we also attract 10,000 people to racist demos or English Defence League events. The presence of these things doesn't diminish over time because social media is there to help promote them and to help them push an agenda.

Are you aware that if you get hacked or cloned on Facebook, the company isn't interested. Approximately one in a one hundred thousand people get their issue resolved. Facebook might not have a company policy of supporting scammers, hackers and fake IDs, but they actively make more money from these criminals than they do from you, therefore they take minimal, if any, action. Social media might give you a platform, one to share things with your friends, family and people you don't see any more, but it isn't and never will be your friend and there is no alternative. It's like someone has got you hooked on a drug that only that someone can provide you with.