Is Social Media Eroding Our Humanity?

[Zeusthecat]

First off, Idle Forums is the only form of social media (if you could call it that) that I have ever used so please forgive me if I have a naive perspective on this topic or come off as pretentious.

 

In the years since social media first became a thing, it has been really interesting to observe how discourse between people has changed. Like, it's fucking terrifying if you really think about it. Before the mass adoption of social media (and the internet, but to a lesser extent I think), people had a much smaller sphere of influence and most interactions tended to take place face to face. It actually took effort to maintain relationships and you only had a finite amount of time to spend with the people you valued the most. Trends and fads stuck around for longer and information moved a hell of a lot slower. Now, almost every human being with access to the internet is active or at least exists on some form of social media. The average number of friends some people have on Facebook or following them on Twitter is fucking staggering. Personal and mass communication between friends happens now with minimal effort and fads and memes come and go in the blink of an eye.

 

While I think there are a large number of very positive benefits that have come from social media being widely adopted, I can't help but feel that it is also doing a lot of damage to the way we interact with and understand each other as humans. Interacting with people and presenting opinions through text (often limited to 140 characters) is very different from doing the same thing with other physical human beings. There is just so little room for nuance and much less incentive to exercise restraint. It is much more common for people to be instantly judged as horrible human beings because of vile opinions they may spout on the internet. In a lot of cases, yeah, people that act this way on the internet probably aren't very nice people. But I think the increased tendency for people to categorize other people into neat little boxes based on what they have said on the internet is a significant downside to the broad adoption of social media. Although maybe there is an argument to be made that it is fair for people you have only interacted with on the internet to be fully defined by the words they type.

 

When I talk to people in real life, there is just so much more complexity to the interactions that I think gives me a much more informed and fair opinion on who they are. Hearing people's voices and seeing their body language as various topics are discussed makes for a much richer interaction and makes it much harder for me to instantly write someone off as a shithead. I will often find that I share a lot of the same opinions with a person and get along with them really well only to find out later they like to casually throw around racist remarks and have fairly shitty opinions on a lot of other subjects. When this happens with people I interact with face to face, I find it much harder to just categorize them into that nice little box that I might if I only knew them as a random internet person. They are more complex and there are factors and influences that go into forming their shitty opinions. In person, there is at least some chance of coming to understand some of those factors and maybe even adding your own positive influence to that person. The chances of this happening with some random asshole on the internet? Slim to none.

[Merus]

I want to colonise a part of the thread for the nation of Talking About The Shittiness of Callout Culture and maybe an alliance with the people of The Downsides of Simple Group Forming as they seem related. I don't have time now, though, but the victims of the information revolution are one of those things I find fascinating.

[Ben X]

My immediate, purely apocryphal reaction:

 

While I agree with most of the problems you've listed about social media interactions, I don't think they're damaging or eroding the way we communicate face to face. For someone to interact with people in person in the same way they do on Twitter or even on these forums would point to autism or severely retarded social skills, I think, due to the differences you point out such as body language and increased empathy.

 

I think the most important thing is to be aware going in of these differences and limitations and adjust our expectations and behaviour accordingly, just as everyone should be aware that, say, porn is unrealistic and news media is biased. For instance, on these forums a lot of debates will go on and on, "deep diving" into the semantics or ramifications of every sentence typed by the other participants, whereas this wouldn't happen discussing the same subject in a pub because face to face it will get too heavy and threaten to overshadow the evening. The people in the pub will, if they have good social skills, agree to disagree and move onto discussing other things, whereas a forum thread can, if conducted well, continue indefinitely and concurrently with other conversations without overshadowing the entire board. So I think that good conduct includes being aware of that difference and not getting sucked into the temptation to try and 'win' a forum debate, and also clarifying stuff that might otherwise be communicated by body language ("this is only a minor quibble, but...", "I'm not confident of my view here but..."). It's also very easy to slip into sarcastic responses as default, as it feels more interesting than simply and sincerely stating your opinion and social media lends itself to quipping and a pressure to be entertaining; while it would be easy to judge when one has reached one's acceptable douche level face to face by the other people's facial expressions and tone, and immediately dial down the snark, on social media you have to self-police a lot more.

[elmuerte]

I think the cause is that most of the "social media" is about glorification of the ego. Forums/mailing lists/bulletin boards, are discussion platforms. Facebook, Twitter, etc. is about "me" and how awesome people think I am and the shit I post. There is little room, or functionality for discourse.

 

In real world you are not going to say "LIKE!" when somebody makes a remark. You might nod, but your main contribution would be respond with additional information.

[Apple Cider]

I am probably going to post a lot in this thread, just a heads up. I have a lot of fragmented thoughts on this, especially as someone who's been heavily involved in social media (and I am assuming a lot of the point of reference here is Twitter) for a long time. 

 

I started out in places like IRC chats and message boards, livejournal where most of the interactions were still in the form of comment strings but I think Livejournal was the place that really gave you a place to both express yourself personally and invite comment on it. Communities were similar to message boards but personal journal posts were the closest thing you had as an abstraction of self. It was really unreal as someone who grew up in the very early ages of personal Internet use. It isn't surprising to me that Livejournal split into two camps - people who went to tumblr for fandom and people who went to Twitter for personal discussion. I was personally more of a Twitter person.

 

As someone who was part of a message board community for a good deal of my 20s, Twitter was a radically different place. People came to talk to ME, and I navigated it as a persona, versus a message board where you develop an identity but it's still part of everyone jumping in to talk to eachother. But Twitter had some benefits that really hadn't been on a thing on message boards: freedom. Message boards were and still are ruled by general consensus on mores. You can experience pushback if you buck this in any way, any codified idea of what is acceptable behavior. Obviously this is for good reasons if you're a troublemaker but as someone who started developing radical politics from Twitter onwards, I started seeing the cracks in the system. If mods or other members start seeing you as a problem, it can be very hard to say what you're really feeling. A lot of nerdy messageboards were run and mostly populated by men - do you know how hard it is to talk about burgeoning feminist beliefs with a bunch of nerd men? So I left countless message boards because I felt like I couldn't say how I felt about things.

 

This is why Twitter was really formative in my development of radical, leftist feminism ideas. Suddenly social media allowed literally anyone marginalized by media and internet spaces to have a voice. It was a place where you could to talk to a lot of people very much like you when before it felt like the internet was largely white and male, etc. However, this does have consequences and I think social media definitely developed the kind of fractured identity politics you see now. But I digress. I think I'll tackle problems in a later post. 

 

It is just incredibly freeing to have a place where you can express your feelings, bounce them off other people and you can't really be silenced (in some ways, yes, harassment does exist, etc) except in some very extreme cases. It's really amazing to feel like people enjoy you and your work. 

 

However, I've dealt with what people derisively call "call-out culture"/toxic feminism which is often a cudgel to stamp down intra-community issues from the outside. I do think there's problems though. I had to move away from the idea that people can enforce my Twitter content or who I talk to by mere shifting political boundaries. But again, this isn't really understood by people who aren't in that sort of thing. It's gotten stressful sometimes, because I think a lot of people take it to the extreme and get into trashfire fights on Twitter because they come to it with their personal grievances and don't adhere to the kinds of social decorum that you expect out of people when conversing with them offline. In that way, online is a liminal space of the real persona and the unreal rules of interaction.

 

To answer your question, Zeus, no, I don't think it's eroding our humanity. If anything, it has given us greater access to many more types of humanity. In the same way that taking Instagram pics of ourselves isn't destroying our ideas of humility (which was ridiculous anyways), social media has destroyed a lot of antiquated ideas on what comprises humanity by letting us see so many types of people at once. We just need to negotiate the negatives as they come because it's all brand new. The idea of glorification of ego (as elmuerte said) is why people also scoff at selfies, despite the fact that the people building their egos are frequently the people that were told they shouldn't take pride in themselves at any point. I love having people tell me I'm awesome. Don't you? The idea that pride is a sin (to some degree) seems to come from people who absolutely will throw a tantrum if you don't believe they are awesome and so forth. But this belief that thinking you are neat and drawing attention to yourself is something I find a lot in misogynistic tracts because marginalized people taking value in themselves when the world tells them they are shit is radical, to me. 

[Twig]

Social media has affected me in exactly the opposite way that you suggest. The more social media has exposed bullshit people being bullshit assholes, the more strongly I've come to believe that I have to fight against it.

 

There are days when I want to just turn it all off, but I always, in the end, decide not to. Because as much as it depresses me (and I'm already a depressed individual, so it's... really probably not good for me?), I wouldn't want to go back to being completely ignorant of the state of the world.

[itsamoose]

To me most conversation on social media starts off promising but quickly gets turned into a shouting match, even by some of the most reasonable people I know.  There seems to be this desire to be able to articulate an opinion, and an expectation that you will be rewarded in some way for doing so, and then some need to prove one thing absolutely correct/good and the other absolutely false/bad.  Ultimately I feel as though everyone knows how to start or propagate a conversation on social media, but those conversations rarely go to a meaningful place.  Something gets posted, next there is some back and forth mixed with grandstanding, then buzzwords, then a barely comprehensible diatribe on one's personal philosophy, etc.  No one seems to want to solve the problem, they just want to be recognized for being aware of it without really developing an understanding of it, which often coincides with meme-responses or quoting famous people.  This is exactly why I'm on Idle Thumbs, it's the only place I know of where that kind of thing never happens for long, if at all.

[deleted user]

_

[Apple Cider]

I could counter that message boards breed the same sort of social conformity by consensus as twitter does at the personal level, it's just that you have to get a larger group of people to agree on what's acceptable and it makes the margins way wider. Being new here, I've already run into a couple of times where people are not used to how I talk about things (which was strengthened by Twitter, actually!) in a pretty aggressive manner. It's been interesting to be on Twitter because it has kinda forced me to strip a lot of the hugely feminized cruft from how I talk (I'm sorry, but/I think/I feel like/you know what I mean) to just get straight to what I think. 

 

For the record, this is the first message board I've been on in a couple of years because I do not like message boards anymore and it's been an alright (sometimes frustrating) experience that I'm coming to enjoy more lately.

 

"Outrage" is a word I have really grown to hate lately, along with "rationality" "emotional" and "objective".

 

I'm also okay with blocking people who don't agree on the basic premise that I'm a human. I know that I get a lot of flack for unfollowing or blocking people on social media and I definitely try not to do it over things as disagreements but I'm okay with blocking people who can't meet my basic requirements for respect and empathy. It is my twitter feed and my timeline and I do like that I can enforce boundaries as I see fit. As someone who's struggled with a lot of abuse over my life, it's a really interesting thing. I know that comes off a lot (and it can even be the case with some people) as "forcing an echo chamber" but I see it as "requiring people to come to the table to not dehumanize others."

[Zeusthecat]

My immediate, purely apocryphal reaction:

 

While I agree with most of the problems you've listed about social media interactions, I don't think they're damaging or eroding the way we communicate face to face. For someone to interact with people in person in the same way they do on Twitter or even on these forums would point to autism or severely retarded social skills, I think, due to the differences you point out such as body language and increased empathy.

 

I would argue that for a lot of people, interaction on social media has replaced a lot of social interaction that they would have normally had face to face. It's definitely not true for everyone but I think it would be hard to deny that, on average, face to face interaction between two people has become diminished and a lot of that interaction has shifted to taking place on social media.

 

 

Social media has affected me in exactly the opposite way that you suggest. The more social media has exposed bullshit people being bullshit assholes, the more strongly I've come to believe that I have to fight against it.

 

There are days when I want to just turn it all off, but I always, in the end, decide not to. Because as much as it depresses me (and I'm already a depressed individual, so it's... really probably not good for me?), I wouldn't want to go back to being completely ignorant of the state of the world.

 

And I think this is one of the really good things about social media. It is certainly important and should not go away. The main issue I am getting at is the negative impact social media has had on the way we debate and disagree with each other and how we categorize the other person as a result of those interactions. There seems to be this thing where once you have posted an opinion or thought on the internet, it forever defines you and a lot of people might find themselves relentlessly defending a poorly thought out or not very well articulated (and this is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of people probably aren't great at translating their opinions into a text based format) opinion because internet pride. Luckily, there are places like Idle Forums where there is a community and format to the discourse that allows for a lot more nuance than would be allowed on a site like Twitter.

 

I think it is a lot easier to see this negative impact on Twitter specifically than with any other form of social media. So many debates and disagreements have moved to Twitter and it is a fucking madhouse. People are forced to use their best wordsmithing skills to get their point across in 140 characters and because there is little room for expanding on that, it commonly devolves into people just slinging shit back and forth and misinterpreting each other and just stressing each other the fuck out. If Twitter was only actually used just for dissemination of information and for people to post random thoughts and opinions without having to go through an insane fragmented debate afterwards, it would be much more useful in my opinion. These debates are better had in a different format. Face to face would obviously be ideal but since that isn't always possible and these are important debates to be had, it would be better if they at least happened in a place like this rather than a place like Twitter.

 

Another thing I am curious about: do you guys think Twitter is truly necessary for high profile people? Like, let's say if people in a position like Anita Sarkeesian abandoned Twitter, would that be a net positive or negative impact to their lives? I imagine a lot of the stress and frustration of seeing a constant feed of shit would be reduced but would it actually hurt their business or limit the capability to send their message? I'm curious what others think and I'm sure there are a lot of complex factors to consider.

 

Edit: I see megaspel and Apple Cider kind of touched on some of this as I was typing it.

[Bjorn]

For the record, this is the first message board I've been on in a couple of years because I do not like message boards anymore and it's been an alright (sometimes frustrating) experience that I'm coming to enjoy more lately.

FWIW, I appreciate you having joined these boards. These forums are honestly the only really good long form discussions I've ever had online with people I don't already know offline, and you've been a welcome addition to those conversations.

On the general subject, I fall on the "social media is a double edged sword" line of thought. Yes, there are major fucking problems with it. But it's also introduced me to ideas, perspectives and people I wouldn't otherwise know. It's allowed me to maintain relationships that otherwise would have lagged, to the detriment of my life.

[Twig]

FWIW, I appreciate you having joined these boards.

(Me too!)

[Zeusthecat]

To answer your question, Zeus, no, I don't think it's eroding our humanity. If anything, it has given us greater access to many more types of humanity. In the same way that taking Instagram pics of ourselves isn't destroying our ideas of humility (which was ridiculous anyways), social media has destroyed a lot of antiquated ideas on what comprises humanity by letting us see so many types of people at once. We just need to negotiate the negatives as they come because it's all brand new. The idea of glorification of ego (as elmuerte said) is why people also scoff at selfies, despite the fact that the people building their egos are frequently the people that were told they shouldn't take pride in themselves at any point. I love having people tell me I'm awesome. Don't you? The idea that pride is a sin (to some degree) seems to come from people who absolutely will throw a tantrum if you don't believe they are awesome and so forth. But this belief that thinking you are neat and drawing attention to yourself is something I find a lot in misogynistic tracts because marginalized people taking value in themselves when the world tells them they are shit is radical, to me. 

 

Sorry, I missed this. I agree with everything you are saying here. On the other side of that coin though, while we may have an increased opportunity to experience other people's perspectives, I think having people abstracted behind a wall of text causes us to think of each other less as people than we might otherwise and often results in less fruitful conversation. But who knows? In a lot of cases these conversations might only be taking place because of social media and it might not be fair to just say that they shouldn't happen on social media.

 

I am conflicted I guess.

[Horse Bag]

Whilst a somewhat ironic response, this prescient exchange in The Longest Journey is a pretty pithy visual representation of my feelings on Twitter:

 

 

In theory I appreciate the service as a kind of interpersonal RSS feed, where people have direct access to individuals they might not otherwise, but in practise I simply find its penchant for teacup storms and context-stripping microscopy to be incredibly draining and often times depressing, Not because it represents an erosion of humanity, rather the nagging feeling that it's an accurate representation of it.

 

I appreciate that this isn't a particularly constructive post, but perhaps it can serve as an example of how our increasingly 'social' existence can end up leaving some feeling evermore isolated.

[Argobot]

I strongly dislike the Twitter echo chamber where it's often the loudest voice, not the most thoughtful or nuanced, that gets rewarded. There are clear delineations between communities on Twitter, and while I ostensibly share the same values as others in the Twitter community I belong to, I often have a hard time with the way issues are discussed. Largely because it's not a discussion; it's a contest to see who can make the fastest quip. The power that comes with having a group of supporters who are already predisposed to agree with you even if what you're saying is only a shallow observation of a more complex situation is incredibly intoxicating, and I know that I have fallen for it on more than one occasion, but the frequency and predictability of this Twitter flareups have definitely soured me to the whole experience at times.

 

That said, many of my closest relationships were born out of Twitter connections (including, hilariously, my boyfriend). There's definitely space for having interesting discussions on Twitter that are not wholly dissimilar to what you can have in real life, as long as no one is trying to Win the conservation by saying the pithiest thing that will get the most faves, but wouldn't hold up to scrutiny if it were a real face-to-face discussion.

[itsamoose]

There seems to be an overwhelming desire for people to label themselves.  These labels aren't necessarily bad things but I feel like it feeds into a desire to present a heroic version of yourself, as if you are not just a member of that group but it's vanguard.  The discussion is immediately and always framed within a few restrictive, often prejudiced or in some way loaded labels.  There are a number of people in my social media circle that have become so engrossed in this they use labels like feminist or liberal as if they were an insult.  Although I can't say if this is how social media is used everywhere or just in western culture, which is really my only reference point.

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, it sounds like a lot of you folks know some jerky people. >_>

 

On the other hand, I think there's definitely some issues with how concentrated communication has to be, how many tonal and contextual indicators get stripped away. It's a shift in communication and we have to adapt to it. A lot of people's personal flaws that we tend to overlook in the every day are magnified online, particularly if people "gain a following" and so on. I see this a lot with Facebook too, which feels to me like basically a "have awful fights with your relatives" machine, especially if you're interested in social justice. 

 

I also think the ability to become a personality with less friends and more an audience is super-easy and it's often very isolating, just from my personal end of it. I like having friends, I hate having people who treat me like an opinion dispensing machine. 

 

It's hard because I do agree with a lot of what you guys find as negatives, but a lot of those negatives get foisted back onto me as a reason why I shouldn't be on social media versus it being a problem (see: being a feminist, etc.) 

 

Tumblr culture is a whole other kettle of fish than just Twitter Culture. 

 

ETA: Also thank you folks for saying such nice things, hah!

[deleted user]

_

[twmac]

I dropped out of Twitter due to gamergate and gamergate discussion and have been leaning really heavily on this forum for information and links that I would normally go to Twitter for. So far, I think I have been doing okay and I don't think I will return to Twitter.

 

I almost dropped out of Facebook at the same time because of gamergate. It was actually more painful there because it was people I knew (friends, co-workers, even some family) that were parroting this stuff and it was a horrible shock to realise that they had actually always been that way but I had ignored the signs or chosen not to acknowledge them when we had been in close proximity to each other.

 

I eventually caved when I realised that it was one of my main ways that I communicated with a lot of people (I don't own a phone) that I only saw 3-4 times a year and it is how my parents stay in touch with me. So Facebook, after a lot of blocking and unfollowing, stayed.

 

As for eroding our humanity? Seeing some people in that extremely harsh light was pretty heart breaking.

[sucks2Bme]

As for eroding our humanity? Seeing some people in that extremely harsh light was pretty heart breaking.

 

I tend to stay pretty far away from social media. Twitter is there so I dont have to log in to read tweets/twitter profiles when they are linked on webpages, facebook is basically a glorified address book to me, and thats about it. 

 

But if someone you know says hateful, toxic, ignorant things online, is that a side of the person's character? I feel that a lot of people online tend to talk in extremes because  you are talking to a crowd of people, not a single individual, and posting things in the public social media sphere is more like a performance. And given the short attention spans people have on the internet, it seems almost easier or even necessary to make a point or express a feeling by being extreme. 

 

I doubt a lot of these people would act and say these things in public and face to face or among their irl peers, because to me that this kind of communication does not have the same social standards or cues that in person communication does. Does that mean that there are monsters hiding in some people that are only exposed when they interact online? 

 

Talking through machines does make you less empathic, i think, but I don't know if through use that would carry over to the real world. 

 

I don't know really what I am trying to say, just that when reading social media posts, a lot of the time I think very lowly of human empathy and humanity in general, to the point where I am not sure humans should have the privilege of free speech, but I guess a part of me is a hopeful optimist. 

[zolen]

I rarely log in at my social media account simply because I don't have much time to look at posts there by my friends. However, I see social media not as just a way of communication. But, also as sign of expressing each man thoughts and character. Yeah, there were comments that sounds bit harsh or sounds criticizing. On the other hand, it was just their opinion. People may sounds judgmental in posting comments but their comment is base on what is posted there. So, we are solely responsible in whatever we post.

[Gaizokubanou]

Having worked in retail before, I don't see much difference between general human behavior online and offline.  So I don't think social media is adversely affecting anyone beyond what any other social interaction would.

[twmac]

I tend to stay pretty far away from social media. Twitter is there so I dont have to log in to read tweets/twitter profiles when they are linked on webpages, facebook is basically a glorified address book to me, and thats about it. 

 

But if someone you know says hateful, toxic, ignorant things online, is that a side of the person's character? I feel that a lot of people online tend to talk in extremes because  you are talking to a crowd of people, not a single individual, and posting things in the public social media sphere is more like a performance. And given the short attention spans people have on the internet, it seems almost easier or even necessary to make a point or express a feeling by being extreme. 

 

I doubt a lot of these people would act and say these things in public and face to face or among their irl peers, because to me that this kind of communication does not have the same social standards or cues that in person communication does. Does that mean that there are monsters hiding in some people that are only exposed when they interact online? 

 

Talking through machines does make you less empathic, i think, but I don't know if through use that would carry over to the real world. 

 

I don't know really what I am trying to say, just that when reading social media posts, a lot of the time I think very lowly of human empathy and humanity in general, to the point where I am not sure humans should have the privilege of free speech, but I guess a part of me is a hopeful optimist. 

 

I tried to look at it like that but when all I was seeing from them was these posts about UKIP/Britain First or Pro-Gamergate over  4 months I just started to realise it wasn't worth it. Likewise, there was one guy that really enjoyed arguing with me about stuff. I also did, at first, but then when I would post a comment on someone else's facebook he would jump in and start messaging me private messages in duality and I realised that it was getting to the point that this was his personality - latch on to a dissenting voice and then bury them.

 

I can believe that this is/was part of their personality before that blossoms online but when my only interactions are now online it makes it depressing that this seems to be the thing they have focused on.

[Zeusthecat]

Having worked in retail before, I don't see much difference between general human behavior online and offline.  So I don't think social media is adversely affecting anyone beyond what any other social interaction would.

 

I also have a number of years of experience working in the restaurant industry and I disagree with this assessment. Although I do think it is a good situation to look at when comparing how people treat total strangers face to face versus how they might treat a stranger online. 

 

In my experience, even with the worst assholes that come in and try to make your life miserable, there is almost always a way to get through to them. Being able to see their body language, hear the tone in their voice, make eye contact, and observe the body language of those around them I think makes a person more equipped to respond to the situation and reach some kind of resolution or appeal to their sense of empathy to cool the situation down. With interactions online, I think this is the case far less often. It actually takes some mental effort to recognize that what you are interacting with is an actual person and not just a wall of text.

[Gaizokubanou]

I also have a number of years of experience working in the restaurant industry and I disagree with this assessment. Although I do think it is a good situation to look at when comparing how people treat total strangers face to face versus how they might treat a stranger online. 

 

In my experience, even with the worst assholes that come in and try to make your life miserable, there is almost always a way to get through to them. Being able to see their body language, hear the tone in their voice, make eye contact, and observe the body language of those around them I think makes a person more equipped to respond to the situation and reach some kind of resolution or appeal to their sense of empathy to cool the situation down. With interactions online, I think this is the case far less often. It actually takes some mental effort to recognize that what you are interacting with is an actual person and not just a wall of text.

 

if you want to put it like that, I would rate offline far worse.

 

People have physically assaulted me in face-to-face situation for no provocation, and obviously that's not a possible outcome if entire engagement is done online.

 

You say that having a person attached to online behaviors can improve communication and I agree, but it can also 'improve' the degree of abuse that can be directed at them.

 

All social media does is let people communicate.  The world didn't get more rude with it, we can just hear all that garbage stuff louder if you were lucky enough to not have them near your physical location.

 

Like I would so much prefer any online abuse that comes with typical competitive multiplayer match over the ones I had to risk facing in an actual physical arcade of my youth.  You thought modern DLC were robbing consumers?  How about actual muggers instead?

 

Apologies if this sounds bitter.