What Do We Do About Them?

The advent of social media was supposed to call forth our better angels, Instead, Neal Gabler writes, it has unleashed our darker angels and made Donald Trump possible:

It is by now a given that social media have changed and continue to change the way we interact with one another and even with our own selves, the way we use our time, the way we prioritize and value things, the way we respond emotionally, the way we assess information and a thousand other components of our lives. For the post-millennials, nearly everything is refracted through social media, but the spillover effect is huge.

There is no room here to enumerate each of these transformations. But a few are worth mentioning because whether we recognize it or not, they can, and I believe do, have vast political implications. To begin with, for all the boasts of connectivity, social media actually isolate us and drive us back into ourselves. Facebook alone may be the largest platform of self-promotion ever devised by humankind, but of course, Facebook is not alone. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and many others are ostensibly dedicated to sharing when they are really dedicated to solipsism: You are always the star of your page, always centralizing what you are doing. Worse, social media encourages an anonymous meanness that actively splinters us. There probably always were trolls, but they had no platform for their poison. Now they do.

Put bluntly, social media has encouraged and amplified all kinds of anti-social behaviour:

MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle, one of the leading experts on the effects of social media, has even written a book titled Reclaiming Conversation, in which she notes not only how the retreat to the smartphone has atomized us, but also how, through separation and self-centeredness, it has endangered empathy, which is the very core of a civic culture, perhaps even the very core of humanity.

And they encourage us to stare at our own navels:

Another technological savant, Eli Pariser, the founder of MoveOn.org and UpWorthy, in his prescient 2011 book, The Filter Bubble, shows how social media, with their plethora of algorithms, give us customized, curated information that never takes us outside ourselves or our own biases, but only reinforces them. In effect, social media create an informational onanism, which, again, destroys a sense of community and circumscribes national conversation every bit as much as it aborts personal conversation. And it does something more: It makes all information that doesn’t conform to one’s biases suspicious. Social media — the “social” here is practically ironic — disallows us from accepting anyone else’s arguments — that is, disallows us from being social. In fact, it delegitimizes not just arguments but all information by seeming to legitimize all information.

The bottom line is that social media was tailor made for a man like Donald Trump -- who has been staring at his own navel for 71 years. Gabler writes that it was no accident that Trump was elected president:

You may begin to see a theme developing here. Self-centeredness and solipsism, division and tribalism, disinformation and misinformation tailored to one’s predispositions, the need for constant stimulation (FOMO) without reflection, bullying against those who disagree, a lack of empathy — these are all hallmarks of the “alt-right” and of the Trump presidency. Trump is not, in reality, their master, though he has learned to use the tools of social media to his benefit. He is actually their product — the product of the social and psychological dynamics that fuel social media. This is why the right was almost destined to use social media more effectively than the left. It was made for social media.

It's obvious that social media will not disappear. So the question is, "What do we do about them?"

Image: theconservativetreehouse