Social Media is a Thing Full of Humans Sadly
I wanted to write this piece for a while.
I remember when I started university back in 2007, Facebook started to be popular after MySpace. Then came Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and all other social media outlets.
These outlets changed our lives for the better in many ways. It’s now easy to connect to anyone, anywhere in the world in seconds and find people with your common interests. I remember being in Vietnam in 2005, and it was difficult to communicate with people overseas and you needed to basically go back then to Saigon central post office (see picture below) to call internationally. Now everything is done in seconds you have cellular or Wi-Fi access and voilà…you’re connected in seconds.
But social media have a dark side. This dark side is not only the one that social media companies sometimes have moderation policies that are not clear and based on arbitrary grounds (that’s another story for later) but also that social media made society more segmented into sub-cultures with sensationalism and pettiness being like a sort of currency.
Basically, to be popular on social media if you are not a celebrity based on your name or you are a super-funny person by nature, you need to be petty and sensationalistic in order to get a following in your sub-culture and in the general public. And that’s why social media creates a sort of pseudo-religious bubble where nastiness and being someone else is encouraged.
People say that politics nowadays is a lot about ‘‘owning’’ your opponents, but social media have created this mindset where ‘‘owning’’ your opponents become more important than anything else.
Donald Trump has invented nothing in terms of political boss-ism or in terms of his brand of national-populism, but the people who are the most ultras of his followers live with this quasi-religious mindset. The worrying thing with having American society which is becoming less and less religious for conventional religion is that the alternative to more ‘‘mainstream’’ religions is political groupings or conspiracy theorists like QAnon. Especially in a pandemic, people want to find their own way as a path to happiness—and sadly like for those who will rot in jail for a long time because they stormed the US Capitol—it’s sometimes very risky to be in a pseudo-religious mob-like grouping without any guardrails.
I would say that social media is a great thing all depending on how you customize your experience—but sadly like in everything based on humans (or perhaps super-intelligent bots)—you can see the best and the worst of human nature in social media in real-time where everyone is Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde looking behind a screen.
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