There are two implicit rules that social media (in their corporate controlled, un- or dis-regulated state) want you to learn.
(By “want,” I mean that these are the tendencies being encouraged by the systems themselves. And by “rules,” I mean norms, habits, or learned impulses meant to be followed instinctively.)
The rules are these:
1: I am right. On whatever issue I am commenting, my view is correct. (Look at all the people who think so. Look at all the news and information that supports me.)
2: I should say so, loudly, clearly, and forcefully. (The louder I say it, the more people will hear me and will approve of it. If I don’t say it loudly and clearly… um, what just happened to my friends and followers?)
Social media companies monitor us in order to give us more of what we want, or at least more of what will keep us plugged into them. Their modus operandi is an addictive model that understands human nature all too well. Its objectives are essentially the same ones that William S. Burroughs had mapped out (somewhat surrealistically) in his 1959 novel Naked Lunch.
When political debates get ramped up, as they have recently around the various Democratic presidential candidates, these impulses get pretty obvious. If you are for Bernie Sanders, you may also have come to believe that Joe Biden is an awful, racist, sexist, corporate lackey, and that Elizabeth Warren is a “neoliberal corporate shill.” If you are against Bernie, it’s because you believe him to be an angry, hardline “communist.” (As a Vermonter, I know the latter is far from true. That he calls himself a democratic socialist, rather than, say, a social democrat, is a kind of peccadillo that doesn’t really reflect how he has operated when in power. I’m less sure about the details of the first point, about Biden. But let’s leave it at that.) Things get even weirder when you open the terrain up to Republicans.
Some time ago, I posted some pointers toward a “Media hygiene 101.” Howard Rheingold’s recent Public Seminar piece “Democracy is Losing the Online Arms Race” gets at some of these things, adds a few more, and refocuses the conversation around the more consequential, larger point (which I didn’t mention because I was focusing on what we can do as individuals): that of media regulation.
Rheingold writes:
Microtargeted computational propaganda, organized troll brigades, coordinated networks of bots, malware, scams, epidemic misinformation, miscreant communities such as 4chan and 8chan, and professionally crafted rivers of disinformation continue to evolve, infest, and pollute the public sphere. But the potential educational antidotes — widespread training in critical thinking, media literacies, and crap detection — are moving at a leisurely pace, if at all.
In his 2012 book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Rheingold had focused on the “skill sets” we need as consumers and users of social media — those “literacies of attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network awareness.” Wizened somewhat by the failure of the cyberlibertarian promisers of “net democracy” (of which he was an early and vocal representative), he is now amending the list to include regulation of social media companies.
Unfortunately, the presidential candidate who made that a central plank of her campaign, Elizabeth Warren, is now out of the race for president, and Bernie Sanders (for whom it’s at least up there on the to-do list) is falling behind rapidly.
Whatever happens in November, this need will not go away. Rheingold suggests a “panel of experts” approach to developing legislation for regulating the digital public sphere, and recommends including “danah boyd, Zynep Tufecki, Cory Doctorow, Ethan Zuckerman, Shoshana Zuboff, Brewster Kahle, Tim Berners-Lee, Renée DiResta and Tim Wu.” That, to my mind, is a great starting list. As I prepare a course on “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics” for the fall, I’ll have more to say on this topic.
