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> | The day our internet best friend betrayed us | | | | |
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< | Polarization and the Division of Society | >
> | Introduction | | | | |
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< | Social Media and the Masses | >
> | The rise of the internet best friend | | | | |
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< | Process of Polarization and Potential for Progress | >
> | The apple, or the loss of innocence | | | | |
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> | The tumor | | | | |
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< | Polarization and the Division of Society | >
> | The day our internet best friend betrayed us | | | | |
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< | People used to rely on news outlets to know what's happening around the world; now, most of us get our news from social media. For example, we used to read articles to determine 'what' is happening, and then we used to think for ourselves on 'why' this happened and 'how' we should feel about it. Now, with convenience at our fingertips, we are in the midst of a reversal. The politics we are partial to already define for us 'what' has happened. This is a product of the increasing bipolarization and division in our society. To a large degree we already know what we will believe and what we will not accept, establishing a dangerous dichotomy of thought. Along these lines, the convenience of social media - the content of which is continually shaped by unseen forces and algorithms that prey on our technological footprints - has fed into this dichotomy. Now most follow their news to better understand the 'how'--how should we feel? How should we react? What fits the narrative of the rhetoric we've already accepted? And because we share articles that fit in with our beliefs and connect with others who have similar views to our own, social media makes it easy for us to bolster this mindset of finding support for our biases rather than allow new information to broaden our insights. The news we intake becomes recycled based on our previous biases. Here lies the ultimate danger of social media without due regulation: the guided polarization of digital news only exasperates the existing divisions in our society. | | | | |
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> | Introduction | | | | |
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< | Social Media and the Masses | >
> | Fear, suspicion and aversion to pain are the evolutionary senses that have driven our survival as a species. In today’s world, where technological advances including the internet have fundamentally changed the way we live, these senses are no longer adequate to ensure the survival of the human race as we know it. Changes in our minds are occurring without our knowledge or detection because things that should inspire fear are now pleasurable, and things that do violence to our bodies are now painless. This essay seeks to reveal but one such instance of this painless violence in the form of the internet best friend and hopefully, offer a moment of clarity. | | | | |
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< | The idea of our influences directing us toward belief and action is not new. Le Bon, a polymath dedicated to the work on crowd psychology, makes the case that since the dawn of time we have always been under the influence of religious, political, and social illusions (See The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind). He states that because the masses have always been under these influences, we are ingrained to seek out an illusion to grasp to under any and all circumstances. He noted that while philosophers in the 19th century have worked greatly to destroy these illusions, they have not been able to provide the masses with any ideal that could effectively sway them. Accordingly, the masses now flock to whichever rhetorician wets their appetites. Le Bon may have written his seminal work at the turn of the 20th century, but his words seem appropriate now more than ever. Social media has become a universal outlet to which we grasp onto our illusions, and refuse to diversify ourselves to viewpoints that differ than our own. Living in this new digital age, we are thereby narrowing our visions of reality and widening the divisions we have from one another and, perhaps even, from truth. Truth itself has become fragmented, relying on the whims of the reader. All the while most of us remain clueless to the puppeteers behind the curtains. | | | | |
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> | The rise of the internet best friend | | | | |
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< | It's natural for our experiences to dictate our way of thinking in the Lockean framework of epistemology, but the problem with polarization in social media today is that it leaves little to no room for genuine discourse. What social media offers us is a steady and consistent affirmation from our peers who think similarly to us. Social media is intrinsically designed to connect us with others who will encourage our way of thinking, even if our logic is flawed or our news misguided. In other words, for many social media has made home to a great convenience of getting the assurance we want from others who already agree with us that productive speculation or positive self-doubt becomes a foreign process. Many people then become so encouraged by their opinions that they begin to confuse them for facts. In order to bridge the gaps in our society, we must, at the very least, understand the diverse markup of our communal struggle for survival. | >
> | The internet best friend, like the internet, began innocently. With the launch of YouTube? in late 2005 under the banner ‘Broadcast Yourself’, a ground-up, egalitarian community was formed where tech-savvy youngsters could make videos about almost anything. This inclusive, fertile, womblike interface lent itself to much experimentation by users and became birthplace of the video blog or ‘vlog’ as we now know it, which effectively transformed the wildly popular early 2000’s blog into video form. These videos, usually of a longer nature, documented the everyday life of the vlogger and could contain anything from exciting adventures to what they were eating for breakfast. | | | | |
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> | The vlog was thus born a splice of public and private. On one hand it was a raw, confessional, intimate and incredibly detailed record of everyday life through the sheer detail that could be captured with a single swoop of the camera. And yet it was also performative and entertaining, designed to capture attention. In the abstract, the prospect of watching someone go about their everyday business could not seem more boring - and yet, the vlog form flourished. From a human need perspective, the vlog satisfied viewers’ voyeuristic desires as well as viewers’ innate yearning for human connection. For perhaps the first time, ordinary users of the internet could peer into a stranger’s life and observe not only their trials and tribulations, but also the intimate details of their homes. Indeed, to follow a vlogger was to go through a process of metamorphosis whereby the viewer transforms from momentary voyeur to consistent voyeur to developing a one way, but very real, human connection with the vlogger as they experience the minutia of everyday life, growing up, falling in love, breaking up, getting married and so on ‘together’. In teenage girl parlance, this relationship could only be described as that of a best friend and thus the internet best friend (IBF) was born. | | | | |
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< | Process of Polarization and Potential for Progress | | | | |
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< | Social media and similar digital mediums largely influence our thinking through targeted advertisements. Every time we swallow the mental pill on Facebook, Reddit, and the like, the databases on those sites store our personal and private data to their advantage, keeping close track of what we search and what our interests are. This misuse of our privacy and the self-selective filter bubbles social media creates for us works to keep the masses addicted. We connect with others who have beliefs aligning to our own, we 'like' their posts and share their posts, and without second though allow behemoth companies to track our personal information and internet consumption tendencies. Social media works by continuing to offer us exposure to our interests; unfortunately this is the problem. Since we are more likely to accept ideas that align with our pre-existing beliefs, and thus continue to scroll down our social media feeds, the posts that pop up first on our accounts are the news sources that work with our existing confirmation biases. Under such a system, what should be expected except for a widening of the rifts that divide us? | >
> | The apple, or the loss of innocence | | | | |
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> | The loss of innocence occurs when the vlogger becomes a tool for the amplification and normalisation of the panopticon through which the State subjugates its citizens. The act of surveillance on the vlogger is obvious. The vlogger’s work is the work of being watched. Although the vlogger believes that they are not subject to constant, comprehensive surveillance because they choose what content they publish, surveillance becomes total through the vlogger’s continuous need to produce new content that reveals more and more about their existence. | | | | |
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< | If we want our society to progress more efficiently towards unity, we must depolarize our social media. To do this, we must begin by introducing legislation and regulation that prevents companies from providing overly filtered access to misguided illusions. It is not enough to fault the masses alone. If we read more articles from various news sources, share those with friends that hold our current viewpoints and create further connections to others with entirely different perspectives, we may begin to undo the process of polarized information that has so heavily influenced our social media and negatively impacted our society. But to be truly successful, we must target the unseen as much as the obvious. | >
> | The act of surveillance on the viewer manifests in two different ways. The first is through advertising, a product of the viewer watching while being watched. Indeed, the IBF is now considered to be one of the most versatile and effective advertisements ever made. Having taken on the role of the trusted ‘best friend’, the IBF is able to leverage this relationship of loyalty and trust to be an ultimate source of word-of-mouth advice. Each second of the IBF’s video is either an advertisement for a product that can be found and bought or of the IBF’s general lifestyle which seems within reach if you just purchase X items. Data on an IBF’s viewer engagement is powerful in that it tracks viewers’ purchases through discount codes and has the potential to predict what is happening or will happen in viewers’ lives through analysing the IBFs that the viewer engages with. This phenomenon feeds into the damaging effects of surveillance capitalism and instrumentarian power (Shoshanna Zuboff). The second act of surveillance occurs when viewers normalise the existence of surveillance itself. The process begins with the viewer observing the IBF sharing intimate details of their life, which bears a key behavioural message: that it is now permissible and normal for people at large to know the everyday details of our lives. This act of normalisation then amplifies surveillance, as the viewers emulate this behaviour and become the producers, so too engaging in the production of overly revealing, everyday content. As Foucault wrote, “the panopticon… has a role of amplification… its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.” All at once there is more production of content, more surveillance of that content, amplification of surveillance on existing content, and thus multiplying surveillance throughout society. The final stage is when the sheer prevalence of surveillance leads to the viewer’s adoption of the notion that surveillance is merely a side effect of modern life and needs not be challenged or removed.
The tumor
The IBF is thus a collection of paradoxes. It is an advertisement, but not; a reality, but also a fantasy; a voyeuristic experience, but also an exercise in surveillance. Viewers are so distracted by what the IBF purports to be and the sheer pleasure of consumption that the silent changes within us go undetected. By the time we realise, the tumor has already formed. Our apathy towards surveillance will be so deeply engrained in our tissues that it will be impossible to remove. All that remains is for mankind to be subjugated by the state, divided into little cells flooded with light. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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