Whither Social Media?
Whither Social Media
My compulsive side signs me up for everything. I can’t remember whether I signed up for MySpace, but I probably did. When I first heard of LinkedIn, I thought it was something like Link Eden – a heavenly place to meet like-minded people – an experience I actually had to some extent on Compuserve at the end of the 1980’s. A son’s father-in-law and I reminisced about that one recently. Twitter had an interesting feature at its inception – a limit of characters = putting it into the kind of structure that might appeal to a writer of haiku. I joined there as well. I read about Jack Dorsey and he seemed more interesting than the other computer moguls.
Things are changing fast. The new owner of Twitter is acting as a scoldng nanny to certain mainstream journalists for infringing on his privacy, though he seems less concerned about the transgressions of others. Though he is the sole decision maker here is also polling others to justify it - probablycollecting all the free speech crowd to agree with restricting freedom. It’s like a Wizard taking over a world and we are not in Kansas anymore.
Earlier this week I noticed a recent article by Ezra Klein on Twitter and summarize what he has to say here. He starts with the common assertion that Twitter is a digital town square. He then dismisses the metaphor on three counts:
Such a place can’t be global. A town has limitations relating to size and culture with hundreds or thousands of years of history that produced it. Different locations have different concerns and ways of relating.
Town squares have governance that doesn’t depend on the views of whims of a single person. The governance of such a town is sometimes the necessary antidote to such views or whims.
It’s not just existence that creates a good town square. Klein reminds us that such places can be used for brawls and lynchings. It’s the character of the participants that determines the practices and attitudes that determine them
And a key attitude of our era for many appears to be victimhood. In some cases this is totally legitimate; but I have to remind myself how lucky I am when the temporary breakdown of the old boiler that heats my apartment building gets fixed in hours, while those in Ukraine don’t enjoy the luxury of an easy repair. The very idea of the pursuit of happiness has led too many of us to think that things should always go our way.
Just because we can have attention with ease, I’m not sure we should. I am sometimes amused by how often some people change their profile picture on Facebook. Does it mean they feel undervalued and a new picture will do the trick? Does one clever tweet or retweet mean that we have made the world a better place? Does my lurking rather than posting in these places make me a superior or better person? Klein has many things to say in the article about the rightful place of attention – and reminds us that it is a collective responsibility - not just an individual one.
What he turns to after that is somewhat surprising – a Quaker meeting. The ritual involves silence and speaking only when one is moved to do so out of a whole other level of consciousness or reflectiveness. I got the opportunity to attend such a meeting some years ago and it was very moving. It was the very opposite of my flitting from one thing after another that even the mainstream news feeds us every moment flooding us us with trivia about the lives of others. I really don’t need to know the reason that the Royal Family is not responding to Harry and Meghan as both the New York Times and CNN want me to think about last night and today – but the fact that this story is covered by both is is a perfect illustration of the problem. How do we guard our attention to preserve the best of us collectively? At very least is means constant recognition of our shadow side and a choice to move away from it. Democracy depends upon that.