Part 2: Social Media- The Human Toll of Going Viral

PART 2:

“Every form or refuge has it’s price” – Eagles, Lyin’ Eyes

In this piece, we’ll be talking about some of the issues with social media usage; focusing on Twitter.

The average person spends 11 hours interacting with digital media per day.   That statistic encompasses the broad swath of the digital menu, not just Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like. But also computers, tablets, and streaming devices.

Here’s some other statistics:

• Major depression rates among youths aged 12 to 17 rose by almost 63 percent between 2013 and 2016.
• American suicide rates increased by 33 percent between 1999 and 2019.
• The percentage of Americans who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life.
• Fifty-four percent of Americans report sometimes or always feeling that no one knows them well, according to a 2018 Ipsos survey.

All of this BEFORE the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the volatile Summer and election season of 2020.  These numbers are way worse now as we took refuge into our digital soothing bubbles.  There couldn’t have been more perfect environmental conditions to have the culture wars and our addictions go over the cliff. 

Note to Reader: I was not, and am not immune to taking mindless mental respite in these social apps and sites.  I do not write this from the position of "high and mighty"; quite the opposite.

To commence the social media sabbatical, I needed to suspend my accounts. A process, that isn’t clear or easy. Hard to believe this isn’t intentional.  Facebook, knowing their addictive power has an selection option that states “this is only temporary; I’ll be back“.   If you only delete the applications from your smartphone, your email will still receive notifications showing ‘what you’re missing from your life.’  To purge these sites totally, you do need to take the suspension steps.

With the plan being to delete the apps and disable the accounts all at the same time, it made sense to tackle them in some logical form.  Start with my worst offender first, right?

Of the main social media outlets, Twitter was the one my eyes unconsciously drifted to most.  It’s also the platform most ripe with pure hatred – showing the mental instability of everyone from world leaders, celebrities, tech titans, and your friends. 

Twitter wasn’t always this way.  In it’s early days, it was exceptionally light hearted with jokes, and fun back/forth banter.  At the risk of sounding old and longing for the “good ol’ days”, it REALLY WAS GOOD.  I was an early user; mostly so I could secure a handle that was my name without any numbers in it.  It could have been it’s novelty. Could have been the 40 character limit, and the challenge of those confines. It could have been the folks initially on the platform were the curious, fun-types.  But…over time… it became something else.

Somewhere around 2009 changes to both Facebook and Twitter encouraged more, and more, and more extreme keyboard activities spawned from the recesses of the brain we hoped never surfaced.  Facebook went first, with the “Like” button.   Then, Twitter upped the ante with the ReTweet.  Oh the power of the “RT.”  This is where virality really was made possible.  Facebook, in their infinite jealousy created the ability to “share.”  By 2012, these features were available on smartphones.

The creation of the ReTweet created the ability to go “viral.”  It could also be said it created mobs, Cancel Culture, Doxing; all the beautiful side effects of online living.  If you were a person not secure in your identity or morals, you could easily adopt that day’s virtue simply by ReTweeting.

This happened to coalesce around 2014 when actual privileged kids getting advanced degrees in scapegoating ( now being paid by balance transfers to our great grandkids) from anti-capitalist professors ( who were/are apparently OK with capitalism when it came to insane tuition increases that made inflation look tame) had infected the workforce.  These hypocrites had positions that allowed them to Tweet or be on Slack all day hunting their next victim who didn’t subscribe that minute’s moral panic. This is a far cry from us sending each other pictures of our food and telling jokes.

Here we are a decade later and Twitter and the other platforms format continue to algorithmically reward the non-sensical.  This design change created internet celebrities ( Cash Me Outside, anyone?) By hacking the knee-jerk dopamine pathway in our brains by allowing us to write without thinking, and only being seen or noticed on the platform by being extreme and hateful.  It allowed us to see what humans ( or bots)  are capable of typing.  AND getting away with, on a daily (*sometimes hourly or less) basis which earned the top spot of your feed gives you the impression that humans are really like this.  It might give you the impression that this behavior is even “OK”.  And with humans being a mimicking animal, we believe it’s “OK”, and are to incentivized to do the same thing. _{(Hint: It’s NOT).}

While there are many insightful ( and even helpful), funny, and statistically relevant tweets, the vast majority of Twitter is hateful, reactive shit throwing.  And when you boil it down, it only happens because  the worst of human nature that would never occur “IN Nature.”  Twitter wouldn’t exist if you had to physically be in the same place as the person you were blasting publicly.  Imagine being in a coffee shop with a Senator you were about to “own”; what do you think would happen? Twitter only works because you can’t get punched in your stupid face when you most deserve it.  And as a result. We all don’t trust one another anymore.

Twitter also makes it difficult to not embody the entirety of the world’s problems…….

Problem Creep –

When the Russians started attacking the Ukraine, NPR noted that there would be a “stressful news cycle ahead of us”, and wrote about “5 ways to cope.” NPR continued “The reality of conflict is always a shock to the system.”  – Yeah, if you’re the fucking Ukrainians?!  The graphic drawn to introduce the article is a person on the ground, looking freaked out, staring at an iPad, with a picture of a scared looking human brain off to the side.   THIS is where we’re at as a country.  We invite someone’s terrible reality into own heads, so we can also be the victim. 

In response to the NPR article, Nellie Bowles ( former NYT writer and current contributor to her wife’s *Barri Weiss’ substack, Common Sense )  summarized in a since deleted tweet “At this point a group of aggressive Shetland ponies could take our country by force and they’d deserve it.”  Hard to argue with her on that point.

The Ukraine example is just ONE of the 500 million instances that on a daily basis, hi-jack your brain into believing all problems somehow have to do with YOU.  Twitter may be the worst of the social media services for enabling problem creep. Selfishness is not just creeping either; it’s been increasing at rapid rates.

Problem creep allows the scapegoat mob and their apostles to see and invent problems everywhere; sometimes their aim accurate. But without fail, they continue to spill into areas that were indeed, not true problems.  Instead of pointing out a specific person as racist, they called “systemic racism” on all institutions and on all white men everywhere. (_{Nevermind this blatantly hypocritical generalization based on something as shallow as race which IS actual racism – and that the mob is made up of privileged whites whose comforts have been provided by previous generations and the very institutions they are now hell bent on destroying. Typically having multiple academic degrees and little real world experience}). 

#MeToo started with a serious need for over the line behavior to stop.  But eventually, the hashtag began being used for bad dates that were in no way unsafe.  The group of hostile online provocateurs knew that their method to gain status was to aggressively destroy anyone they felt wasn’t part of the “cause.”

These same people began holding their spineless employers hostage by taking what could be productive time and spending it on coming up with new intersectional categories and blaming the West for their marginalization. These companies feel the threat these employees pose is too great to simply get rid of them…. At least for now….They changed the language – ‘latinx'( which no one that speaks Spanish knows how to actually pronounce in Spanish). Invented “they’ when referring to a single non-binary person. There was a noose on every campus. Then the eventual realization, that it wasn’t actually a noose… or a klansman… but shoe laces, or a Dominican monk with a rosary – but facts didn’t matter; only feelings.

Calling Bullshit on the woke mob’s “lived experience” despite all contradictory data (Like very liberal self identifiers believing that in 2019 , police shot 10,000 unarmed black men in a year, when the actual number is around 10) became a dangerous proposition for which you would lose social status, friends, and your livelihood.  The reasonable people, afraid, were silent… or when they were told that “silence is violence”, they complied with the mob’s wishes.( but the mob’s actual violence was righteously justified somehow),

So, where does this lead us?  If people are willingly wallowing in this cesspool 11+ hours a day, how does the human animal that was bred and built to be outdoors, have networks or less than 150 people, handle the 500 MILLION Tweets PER DAY?

How de we handle the growing number of depressed teens that continually take refuge in these sites?

How do we end the high correlation and almost certain causation of high social media usage with suicide?

When the crush of digital offerings lands on your shores, what do you do?

We’ll talk about that torrent in part 3.

Until next time….