Social media as portrait of human nature
Mirror mirror on the wall ...
Back in the day, people read newspapers and magazines and watched 30 minutes of the evening news read by a guy with great hair. Everything those writers and anchors wrote and said had been edited and (sometimes) fact-checked and edited again for grammar and style. Viewers passively consumed that content and assumed they were getting an accurate representation of reality because … Walter Cronkite (you can Google him).
And then the world changed.
When the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency decided (c. 1969) to link a few hundred computers (ARPA-net) of its scientists and engineers for better data sharing and communication across distances, they could not have imagined what would happen to networked systems after two big bangs happened:
A computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee devised a protocol (hypertext markup language/HTML) for different computers running different operating systems and software to communicate with each other. This was the tech equivalent of a universal translator that would end the Tower of Babel and enable each person to talk with/to/at EVERY person in the world. (NOTE: the universal translators already exist and will be available everywhere soon). He chose to not patent his invention so everyone could benefit from its free use. And billions came to play.
For-profit corporations realized that they could make huge profits from the assembled internet hoards if they could capture and monetize their attention. And so they did.
Size matters
Humans beings are social beings. Group membership confers powerful survival advantages. Navigating social networks is key to surviving and thriving.
Human groups used to travel small and light. In pursuit of bigger, better and more powerful, leaders devised a set of human resource management practices (rigid power/role hierarchies, reward algorithms) that enabled armies and businesses to break through the evolved group size ceiling of ~150 people (Dunbar’s number where members could all “know” each other).
Mass communication technologies (telegraph, telephone etc.) removed the variable of physical distance as a barrier to the growth of group size. “Social media” platforms (Facebook, Xitter, Instagram, Substack) enable 2-way communication at infinite scale. The result is mega-groups where nobody really knows anybody but everybody sees/hears everybody. No gatekeepers or referees allowed.
Big data
It took a while for students of human nature (anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, historians etc.) to recognize that the internet and its platforms contain a treasure trove of information about BILLIONS of people, and that data can be mined with various crawlers, algorithms and now “AI”. When we hoover up those terabytes of human behavior, we can #code them and count them and analyze them.
And this is what we find:
MAIN CATEGORIES OF INTERNET BEHAVIOR (in order of magnitude from more to less)
Social status checking (“gossip”, who’s up/down) and status signaling/enhancing (Look how beautiful, rich, successful etc. I am!)
Sex (porn)
Commerce/consumption (selling/buying stuff)
Rage/hate (the “-ism’s”)
Art, science, philosophy, charity etc.
3 QUESTIONS FOR YOU:
What does this composite behavioral sketch look like to you?
What does it tell you about human nature?
What does it foretell about how we are likely to manage the emerging political and economic and climate and other complex challenges we are all facing?
Comments welcome.
I received this just as I had hung one of my pieces on the wall of my office (I wish I could attach photos to comments!). It is of two swallows coming at each other and an empty speech bubble above their heads between them.
I called it "Into the Twitterverse", it is a statement of how we have a tendency to come at each other on social media with not a whole lot of substance, empty words that seek power and lack the accountability to one's own agency.
Social media puts onto display the absolute worst of humanity, but, at the same time, offers a light to shine into the darkness that is constantly bombarding our souls every time we log on. Finding balance can be difficult, finding truth, even harder.
Depressingly, it's not a surprise that the biggest category is social status checking. This is one of the things that constantly surprises me; how people, and not just young people, cannot curb themselves from boasting. It's almost as if they have lost their ability to monitor themselves (their superego missing in action?). I find such blatant bragging as fascinating as it is embarrassing. People never fail to disappoint one in their ridiculousness.