The Loss of Collective Reality

May 26

The Power of Tech + Media + Social Media

On June 29, 2007, our lives would never be the same: the iPhone hit the market. The tagline read, “Apple reinvents the phone.” This was 100% true. Personally, in 2009, I was tired of getting lost in New York City. I would map out my destination from my home computer, write the directions on a Post-it note, which I’d stick to my Samsung slider phone. This was not sustainable, or cool. I finally caved and purchased an iPhone 3 in all its curved glory. Apple unleashed the iPhone 4 in June 2010, with another truly prophetic tagline: “This changes everything. Again.” (Seriously, what a marketing department.) This phone had a front facing camera. The selfie was born.

We are witnessing the fastest technological progress in the history of mankind. As of February, 2021, 85% of Americans have a smartphone. That’s approximately 280 million people. In 2011, that number was 35%. In 2006, less than 20 years ago, that number was zero.

Tech, social media, and the 24 hour news cycle have redefined society, from business to dating. While the innovation is truly remarkable, there are a myriad of unforeseen consequences. Politically and sociologically, society and government are faced with questions of ethics and censorship, regulation and responsibility. The lines between public and private entity have become blurred. The news media has become partisan and largely editorial. Neurologically, the exponential rise of algorithm-driven social media has transformed society’s collective reality into individual personal realities. The result? Perpetual tribal division, with Big Tech holding power that surpasses governments, profiting from the currency of our attention.

Social Media vs. Your Brain

Expanding our social circles to include everyone we’ve ever met seemed like a great idea, but it turns out we may not be mentally equipped to handle that amount of data in our brains. Tech writer Alan Martin explores this in an article for Tech Radar. He cites Dr. Anna Machin, an evolutionary anthropologist who postures that our brains have not evolved to cope with the magnitude of connections available to us via social media networks. We are programmed to be close to a small number of people in our lives, with our “village” totaling approximately 150. Social media expands our networks to millions of people. Facebook has over nearly 3 billion users, and Twitter 314 million. Neurologically, in our “normal” human to human interactions and relationships, in person and even speaking on the phone, our brains produce a number of neurotransmitters like dopamine, oxytocin, and beta endorphins. Social media interactions, like the Facebook “like” button, primarily deliver dopamine.

Like sex, drugs, and rock n’roll, the dopamine hit is short lived and shallow. (Well, I personally find rock n’roll very satisfying.) It is the feeling of being rewarded, which is highly motivating to our brains. It’s like constantly nibbling on chocolate cake, as opposed to enjoying a satisfying meal complete with salad, a main course of protein and vegetables, then enjoying the chocolate cake. So we’re continually….snacky. We do not concurrently receive the sustaining levels of oxytocin and beta endorphins from our social media interactions. Martin explains that oxytocin (not to be confused with the opioid oxycontin) is the “trust” hormone, which calms the fear center of the brain, the amygdala, to lower inhibitions. Beta endorphins, the good feelings also released during exercise, help relieve stress and pain. Dr. Machin says,

“It’s like oxygen. You wouldn't say to somebody 'Oh, I'll drain the oxygen in this room by 50%, don't worry you'll be fine' – because you wouldn't, you'd die. And that's basically what's happened with social media. We removed how you're supposed to do social interaction, which is in person giving you all the wonderful neurochemistry and with all the benefits of your massive social network, and we're suffering.”

So we keep coming back for more dopamine (chocolate cake), not understanding why we don’t feel more nourished.

We were universally shocked and horrified by the documentary The Social Dilemma that came out in 2020. We had not realized to what depths social media has affected the inner workings of our brains. But since then, what has shifted? By the same token, the connectivity of social media allowed us to keep in touch despite the lockdowns of the COVID-19 era, so it is impossible to answer this question fairly. Would we have pushed back against these restrictions if we didn’t have our phones to communicate, even though we knew we were suffering acutely by not seeing each other in real life?

In addition to connectivity, social media is our new currency for personal and professional popularity and success. It’s the game we need to play in order to “win” at life in our modern society. It plays into our very basic need as humans to be accepted, loved, and valued. We are caught needing validation from platforms that monetize human vulnerabilities.

If you’ve ever read the young adult novel The Golden Compass, humans are gifted with daemons at birth, which are creatures that are inseparable companions to the human in animal form. To be severed from one’s daemon is to be severed on a soul level. How do you feel when you leave the house and forget your phone?

The Attention Economy

“If you’re not paying for the product, YOU are the product,” says Tristan Harris in an interview on the DarkHorse podcast with Bret Weinstein. Harris is a former Google design ethicist that co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, and had an integral role in the documentary The Social Dilemma. He has a strong and intelligent voice whistleblowing the dangers of social media and technology, while also supporting their use for good.

The social media economic model profits from our attention. Our attention is the product. This is surveillance capitalism. Facebook and Twitter, some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world, offer a FREE SERVICE. Red flag! Everyone knows there is no such thing as a free lunch. The companies compete for our screen time, passively track our individual movements in order to deliver content to maintain our attention, then advertise products tailored to our wants and needs so they get paid. In 2019, Instagram made $20 billion in advertising revenue—more than one fourth of Facebook’s earnings. Advertising is significantly more invasive today because it delivers potential products based off one’s online habits. We carry computers in our hands and are online virtually all our waking hours. Says Jon Seidman, founder of Small Ax advertising firm, in Forbes:

“The (advertising) climate these days demands the creation of video assets that can run not just on traditional television for 30 or 60 seconds, but on streaming services, websites, connected TVs, tablets, phones, and social media outlets as widely different in user expectations, length, production values, even aspect ratio as Instagram Stories, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter…And the tempo of creation and output needs to be much higher, to keep up with all the content on those new platforms, viewer impatience, and fast-evolving culture.”

Not that all advertising and products are bad; innovation does improve the quality of our lives significantly. However, billboards in Times Square don’t collect your data. It is a Catch 22—the more information collected from you, the better the recommendations for your life. This is all well and good when the data is held by someone responsible. But what if that data got in the wrong hands? And how do you know when it has?

Artificial intelligence algorithms have been developed to identify human behavioral patterns that predict our online actions better than we do. These algorithms have run thousands of simulations to sharpen their predictive power. We may not want to keep scrolling, but….sometimes we struggle to discipline ourselves. If I enjoy kitten videos, they will multiply, and I will have the opportunity to connect with a community of fellow kitten video lovers. This is called a “positive feedback loop.” While this is great for kitten lovers, replace the kittens with something more sinister (Pizzagate), and the echo chambers have consequences. Harris notes that apparently 64% of extremist group members on Facebook were in extremist groups due to Facebook’s own algorithmic recommendation. It is grouping people into tribes more than we would in face to face life.

No two social media feeds are alike. The model delivers content that ensures maximum individual human attention, not collective social cohesion. This has spawned a kaleidoscope of realities. We see this manifested in our political viewpoints, and how one side simply cannot understand the other. Harris explains that social media has created “A breakdown of our shared reality due to a profit motive in which personalization is profitable—giving each person their own Truman show reality is more profitable and better at keeping your attention glued than creating a shared reality that is not personalized.” So not only are we in the Matrix, we are all in our own individual matrixes. Instead of adhering the population to a collectively shared reality or truth, it reinforces our preexisting individual beliefs.

Any business needs to first and foremost satisfy its customers in order to draw a profit. While these platforms are large and powerful giants, we are not forced to use them. We can discipline ourselves to spend less time on them, or shift our business to other outlets. If these outlets do not exist, we can create new ones. Mastadon is an open source project that functions like Twitter. It is part of the “Fediverse” of open sourced platforms that serve the functions of Instagram and YouTube but do not have centralized servers like Facebook, etc. While their user-ship is smaller and their platforms are currently less sophisticated, they are certainly worth exploring. There is a cost to everything: giving up the major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram is not ideal for business and social networks in the short term since they offer such broad connectivity, despite the drawbacks. Everyone will have to determine where their individual boundaries lie for themselves, and fight the FOMO.

24/7, 365

Technology has afforded an abundant new frontier for the broadcast news media. The 24 hour news cycle started in 1980, spearheaded by Ted Turner at CNN. Today, between an outlet’s television news channels, website, app, and subsequent accounts on all social media platforms, there is demand for a tremendous amount of content. To fill in the time, news channels feature shows with popular anchors who have reached celebrity status, and hold debate forums full of opinions that attract viewers. Rachel Maddow, Tucker Carlson, etc. come to mind. The mainstream news outlets have also largely chosen political sides. Why? This method has a much different feel than Edward R. Murrow broadcasting the nightly report. While they gain loyal viewers, there is a high cost in societal partisanship, which plays into the split realities enforced by social media. If one watches Fox, he or she probably does not watch MSNBC. The news reported and the views of the stories are very, very different.

News outlets like Ground News and All Sides News illustrate the political bias spectrum of the media outlets, featuring blindspots and biases in news reporting. They are helpful tools that broaden our perspective, so we can make more informed choices about what we take in. The website Media Bias Fact Check is also helpful to search the views of individual publications.

Above: Ground News and AllSides instagram posts.

Tech and social media busted the door down on journalism’s honorable role as the gatekeepers of information. News and current events can now be disseminated by ordinary citizens recording videos and posting from their phones. Do the media outlets need social media like the rest of us in order to be relevant in today’s world? Journalist Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times in 2020, and made her experience about the paper’s influence by Twitter public in her letter. She writes,

“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.”

Is The New York Times afraid of Twitter?

Additionally, content is heavily repeated. In 2013, when a bomb tragically exploded at the Boston Marathon, people who repeatedly watched the footage (6 hours a day for the following week), but were not physically at the event, responded similarly as those who were. These symptoms included stress, anxiety, and PTSD. In addition to endless television footage, the Pay-Per-Click online marketing model generates fast, cheap, and easy journalism to rack up the dollars. Research shows that humans respond more strongly to negativity than positivity. This makes sense biologically, because it has been essential for human survival to give greater heed to danger than happiness. After all, enjoying a sunny day does not save me from a lion. But now, anxiety dominates. Are we addicted to negativity? Does “outrage porn” give people purpose? Does “doom scrolling” appeal to our sense of societal responsibility? And, given this knowledge, how might the perspective of our mental health during the COVID-19 lockdowns change, as we were forced to view death counts and footage every time we turned on the tv or connected to a device? How much news is simply too much? Sensational things attract attention. Things that attract attention make money. Money is power.

The prevalence of partisan news has allowed for a void of collectively agreed upon facts, so there is no solid reality for us to share as a society. This allows conspiracy theories to breed and colonize. If both sides only operate within their own positive feedback loops and echo chambers, we run the risk of more extremism—and thus, more consequences of extremism. “Other-izing” the other side puts us in a place where we cannot fathom reaching their conclusions. They are deemed as “insane,” ethically “evil.” This relieves us of the responsibility of compromise. “Other-izing” is the first step of dehumanizing a group of individuals and severs our collective humanity. It enables one to feel morally superior and justified in punishment. This is dangerous territory for our society, and we have already been experiencing the violent results. We blither on about unity, but do we really even want it, more than we want to be right?

From Party Photos to Politics to Power

Social media used to be as innocent as party photos and relationship statuses, but 2011 marked a turning point. Twitter and Facebook were used as powerful tools to communicate when Egypt revolted against its oppressive ruler, Hosni Mubarak. Advocacy groups formed and coordinated events on Facebook, and when the Egyptian government shut down the internet, Google and Twitter developed remarkable technology to enable the protestors to post without internet access. The rest of the world was able to track events by tweet and video. This was significant. It meant that this casual platform could be used in a very serious way: these platforms were used to help overthrow a regime—and operate above a government.

Now, Facebook is moving towards international domination. It owns at least 72 other companies, most notably: WhatsApp, Instagram, and the VR company Oculus. It is bringing the internet to emerging nations, so “Facebook” and “The Internet” are synonymous. It provides free internet access; though, circling back to there’s no such thing as a free lunch, users must sign up for Facebook in order to receive the service, and Facebook is able to control their version of the internet. While Facebook promotes the message that it wants to connect the world and that every voice matters (except Donald Trump’s), there is something to be said for doing so all under the watchful eye of Facebook.

The United States Congress is struggling to manage social media’s impact on society. At one of multiple congressional hearings in November 2020, Facebook and Twitter CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey were questioned on content moderation (censorship) and Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Obviously the internet is a very different place now than it was in 1996, and Section 230 leaves loop holes wide open that protect the companies, depending on how they classify themselves: they either operate as a platform or a publisher. Publishers edit content. Platforms do not. When questioned about their actions on content moderation, namely allowing controversial posts to remain up, Facebook and Twitter claim to be operating as platforms, which removes their liability regarding individual user posts. If a post is offensive, other users can report it, content moderators may find it, or AI algorithms flag it. The nature of the platforms is reactionary—users post freely without prior approval. Facebook has 15,000 content moderators, Twitter 1,500. Facebook has also launched an Oversight Board, which is essentially an International Supreme Court for Facebook.

Free speech on social media has become a difficult and complicated issue. In the hearing, Democrats pushed for moderation to be pursued further. Senator David Blumenthal expressed that “hate speech deserves no free expression,” and that stopping the spread of misinformation is a moral and civic responsibility—not censorship. Chairman of the hearing, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, claimed that social media is in the position of telling citizens what is reliable and what is not, and compares them to tobacco companies denying that their products are addictive. As a conservative, he does not desire federal oversight to moderate these companies. Liberals are generally in favor of more diversity of thought and open borders, so theoretically more voices, yet are asking for increased speech regulation from a moral posture. Conservatives tend to defend the Constitutional First Amendment more literally, and do not want the government deciding for the people what speech is acceptable or condemnable. Despite these differences, there is a universal agreement between government officials and even the CEOs that there is a need for guidelines and accountability.

Defining misinformation and hate speech; deciding what the masses hear and see holds tremendous power. These topics require time and care to discuss and handle, as well as wise leadership. The questions remain: who is responsible for what people say online? What qualifies as “hate speech” and “violence”? How does one determine “misinformation” when all information has a political agenda?

Facebook and Twitter are private companies. But their user-ship is so broad that they essentially serve as a public square for citizens, government officials, and CEOs alike. Many citizens around the world go to social media platforms for news and current events. The companies have a unique ability to affect the information the masses receive in a very public way, as experienced in the US Presidential elections in 2016 and 2020, as well as COVID-19 information.

As a result, the organizations have found themselves under pressure to police content. However, they do not have any sort of due process system. They can cancel posts and accounts at their whim, claiming that they are private companies and users agreed to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policies, and that the violation fell under the nebulous umbrella of hate speech or misinformation. They are making crucial decisions about what we see and what we do not under discretionary perceptions of ethics and truth. This violates Rule 1 of a liberal society: freedom of speech and press. It is easy to cheer for censorship when the finger is pointed elsewhere, but what happens with the finger is pointed at you? Whatever our political affiliations are, the fact remains that the power of Big Tech effectively silenced the President of the United States. Still active are the hashtags #killtrump and #assassinatetrump, which sound pretty violent to me. Who, then, is the leader of the free world?

Bari Weiss continues in her NYT resignation letter, “What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.”

Mark Zuckerberg is worth $118 billion dollars as of May 26, 2021. He says that the internet is a fundamental human right, and he and his wife are hoping to end disease. While that sounds great, there is no possible way that much money and corporate power only deliver rainbows and unicorns for free. It will come at a cost, and the cost is us: our time, our data, and even our autonomy. It is time for a Constitutional Convention for the Internet.

With Great Power Comes Great…Blah Blah Blah

I am reminded of the fake commercial The Onion created for the “Apple Wheel”. It still holds up: “I’ll buy almost anything if it’s shiny and made by Apple.” We find ourselves in a bind, because the technology: FaceTiming, releasing music on Spotify without needing a record deal, communicating internationally from home during a pandemic, ordering a car ride and tracking its progress, reuniting with long lost friends on social media— is amazing.

Throughout human history, too much power consolidated into one person or group has been generally problematic. We should be mindful of how much our devices and social media control our autonomy, and the lens by which we view ourselves and the world around us. It is easy to accept new things because they make life more comfortable and entertaining. If we continue to be droids sucked into our phones, our power will be taken from us as individuals. We will be puppets of whomever is pulling the strings. Public or private, as humans we have margin for error, and the AI we build is the same.

The people working at these companies, our politicians, and advertisers know exactly what they are doing. Yet, in a functioning democratic society, our systems rely on trust. Theoretically, the journalism profession attracts people on a quest for the truth. We once trusted the people delivering us the realities of the world around us. Unfortunately, we cannot anymore. The news—concurrent with celebrity culture, humans becoming individual brands, and the rise of opinions as facts—has become more interested in towing party lines and emphasizing what will make the other side look as “other” as possible. We have abandoned objectivity for emotional appeals. We do not trust anyone or anything outside of our own tribe.

To date, social media has found itself in a remarkable niche for unregulated influence and power without a strong system of checks and balances. Evolutionary biologist and DarkHorse podcast host Bret Weinstein says, “We are running the greatest experiment that’s ever been tried, in real time.” Let’s open our eyes and see what’s really going on before we divide our realities even further, virtue signaling our way to a second American Civil War, or worse, World War III. We need to think critically about what information is presented to us, and agree on what is collectively true.