Moderation

After almost a year without social media—an experiment I began last October—I returned in full as of this past Friday. I want to reflect on some of the reasons I left in the first place and what I consider in terms of whether I want to stick around moving forward.

Things are always both better and worse with new technology—a phrase reflecting the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel but that I really picked up from my late mentor Ben Agger back in grad school. Social media, like any other technology, isn’t “all bad” or “all good”; it has some positives and negatives. It’s perhaps nice to stay in touch so conveniently with family, friends, and those who’ve been a part of the journey along the way. It’s also hard not to disappear into the constant hum of the Internet without steady engagement in the places where people regularly go. But it was the negatives that drove me away: that social media is habit-forming, and like other things that are habit-forming, hijacks our brain’s reward system over time. It is well-known via various whistleblowers that social media companies hire and retain “attention engineers,” folks who make their living by figuring out how to buy and keep our focus (and who brought us the wonderland of the Las Vegas strip).

But abstaining from things because they make you feel good will only get you so far—better, perhaps, to adopt an attitude of moderation toward things that are likely to be problematic in this regard. It’s simply not a good argument for leaving social media altogether; it’s an argument for using it sparingly, or less often, when it becomes too much a focus of one’s day. I like going to the Las Vegas strip, but I don’t want to spend more than a couple of days there. Moderation doesn’t mean always doing a fair to middling amount, or being mediocre; going back to Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, moderation requires ongoing rational self-reflection to determine the right amount, at the right time, and for the right reason.

The real issue that confronts me when I consider the role of social media is the extent to which it may reproduce or facilitate “binary” thinking—“this” or “that”; us and them (my least favorite four-letter word is “they”). It’s hard to say something with nuance and qualification in a tweet. Memes, propaganda, and conspiracy theories do well in this sort of environment because they stimulate our brains in certain sorts of ways that cause instant, unreflective emotional reaction—it takes just a second to share or post something that viscerally stimulates but often hours to properly examine the claims being made. Those willing to engage in the work of carefully and skeptically examining claims, to be “informed and not just opinionated,” are perpetually disadvantaged in this kind of media environment; truth is the first and biggest casualty. That we talk admiringly now about “his truth” or “your truth” or “their truth” and telling, or seeking, “the truth” starts to sound quaint and old-fashioned reflects the kind of world that this media atmosphere has created.

Ideally, having access to lots of different perspectives “bursts one’s bubble” and thereby prevents a worse tendency: self-righteousness. In practice, something more like the opposite seems to have occurred. Studying political movements and organized violence has led me to the view that people who do not seek the truth, but are sure they already know it, are often the most dangerous. That the world’s cultural and religious traditions and their prophets take so much time to warn about arrogance, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, idolatry hardly seems like an accident—this is wisdom worth seriously considering even if one is not religious. There is an expansive, perhaps infinite, gulf between the person who seeks the truth and the person who is certain they have already found it; the person who seeks imperfectly to do right and the person who is utterly confident of their own righteousness; the person who questions the binaries that are too easily taken for granted and the person who knows for sure who “us” and “them” are.

Computers are binary; they deal in 1 and 0, on and off. I can either be your friend or not; follow you or not; react to this post or not. I become a self that is comprised of all the 1’s and 0’s, a collection of the things I like and don’t like, respond negatively and positively to. Yes, such is life in a sense; living things dynamically respond to their environment in this sort of way too, but social media is what Baudrillard called a simulacrum, a model or simulation of reality that is a cheap approximation of the real thing but that comes to drive our beliefs about, and the shape of, the reality it simulates. Our participation in this simulacrum shapes the reality outside it, often in ways that amplify the worst tendencies in human nature. If it is the environment, the structure, the system, that is the primary cause of the problem, then unplugging, turning off, becomes not a solution but what the radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse called the “great refusal,” a simple unwillingness to accept the world as it is.

In real life (another increasingly old-fashioned concept) there is more room for nuance, skepticism, time to slow down and consider. The deluge of information slows to a crawl, lots of stimuli, but enough time to process them and reach what I am calling moderation. Moderation, as I use it here, isn’t a political ideology; it’s philosophical and mathematical. Between a stimulus that causes a response, I, a subject engaging in ongoing and careful reflection, become a third point of contact between the thing that happens and the way I react to it. Reacting after reflecting, insofar as this is possible, is the goal; not just “always being in the middle” on things. That this confusion arose in the past on social media merely reflects the extent to which such moderation is no longer possible in this environment; not readily taking sides with a self-righteous “us” in the cause of destroying an irredeemably evil “them” means I can only be cowardly or complicit and at its core reflects an inability to separate truth from authority.

I refuse to be defined by this system on its terms. I refuse to be a casualty of binary thinking, of unreflective reaction. In the interest of moderation, and this ongoing personal experiment, I will be logging off again until next Friday. I will tread carefully back into this environment, reserving the right to pull the plug and return to refusal at any moment. It is a right we all have, even if we have forgotten.

References in document. Image: Aristotle bust, public domain.