One should never underestimate the unconscious power of social pressure. Groupthink exerts a powerful gravitational force on individuals' thoughts. No matter how high one's IQ may be, how much knowledge they have amassed, what credentials they earned from prestigious universities, or how intellectually inclined they are, the violence of consensus overrides all.
- Peter Limberg in Private Philosophy > Public Philosophy
Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, recently discussed his upcoming book scheduled to be released March 2024. If you are not yet familiar with his current work, I highly recommend watching this short video. In summary, Haidt notes a significant decrease in mental health among children, but especially girls, starting in 2012 and attributes this trend to a surge in screen time, social media use, and video games. While scientific literature remains inconclusive, anecdotal evidence from teachers, psychotherapists, parents, and Gen Zers themselves indicates that these issues are very likely related to a shift from play-based childhoods to phone-based childhoods.
As a psychotherapist, I can attest to this trend. I find that many young adults today do not want to learn to drive, are reluctant to date or commit to a relationship, and are even afraid to make a phone call or order food in a restaurant. In other words, we are observing an anxious generation.
However, adults are not immune to the negative effects of social media. I find adults are becoming more anxious as well. Many report to me that they are reluctant to gather socially with family and friends because an increasing intolerance to differences has made it almost impossible to have civil conversations about issues that matter most to them.
How have social networking platforms designed to bring us together become avenues to push us apart?
Haidt explains:
Connecting everyone to everyone has had unanticipated systemic effects. It’s not just the quantity of connections that matters, it’s the nature of the connectivity. Social media was not particularly polarizing or consensus-destroying before 2009, which I’ll call the pre-Babel era. Social media enabled people to share ideas with strangers and organize collective action as never before. There was broad optimism that social media would be good for democracy, as so many of us thought in the early days of the 2011 Arab Spring.
In 2009, however, the major platforms introduced several fateful innovations. Facebook introduced the Like button and Twitter introduced the Retweet button. Both platforms soon copied each other, and both switched from chronologically ordered news feeds to algorithms that maximized for “engagement,” which in practice meant “strong emotions.” One of the engineers who worked on the retweet button for Twitter said, after watching Twitter mobs in action: “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
Because we have experienced the negative impacts of algorithmic bias toward outrage, some of us have decided to leave popular social media sites in search of alternative ways to connect with others and make sense together in an increasingly complex world. One of these alternatives is found in the emergent online subculture known as The Liminal Web. Here, communities are attempting to organize social interactions differently by giving participants room to straw man (and steel man) their arguments with the aim to seek broader perspectives while maintaining civility and sometimes, even convivality.
Unfortunately, these communities have proven to be no less vulnerable to the mindset influenced by social media that has been cultivated over the last decade. As a result, many of these new communities have waned, and some have even folded under the pressure of the polarizing effect that people with this mindset bring to their online interactions. In fact, I recently left such an online community because the interactions were becoming one-sided and inflammatory. Despite my attempts to bring attention to this issue and address it by suggesting some healthy boundary setting around how we interact with one another, my concerns were dismissed. I was told by one prominent member, “C’mon! We are in the Wild West of social media. Just deal with it!” Instead, I chose to leave.
Rather than being in the early phases of the social media era, I believe we stand on the brink of a new chapter, ready to implement essential changes that allow us to reclaim our minds, hearts, and the social connections fundamental to us all. Parents, like Jamie Wheal, are raising awareness about the challenges of raising children during this time, and organizations such as the Center for Humane Technology are working diligently to change laws and instill regulations. Furthermore, social scientists like Haidt are increasingly reporting their findings of the impact of social media on our mental health and social institutions. This knowledge is helping us understand where we are headed, enabling us to make the necessary changes and land in a better place than the current trajectory suggests.
While all social media share the characteristics of being asynchronous, disembodied, and transitory, it is becoming evident that not all social media are created equally. Networking sites like LinkedIn are tailored for information exchange and can be very useful for adults advancing their professional and personal goals. On the other hand, platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are designed to be performative, which means engagement takes the form of one-way relating. This one-way relating aspect is very concerning because it aligns with a characteristic feature of narcissism.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and author of the “Wizard of Oz and other Narcissists,” Eleanor D. Payson explains:
The word narcissism in its most fundamental sense means a tendency to self-worship. For the narcissist, their excessive self-absorption is a protection against unconscious but powerful feelings of inadequacy.
Imagine the effect that the cultivation of one-way relating has on our individual and collective psyches. We are born to be relational; that is, we are wired for mutuality. However, since the iPhone and, more specifically, social media, we are training ourselves and each other to be self-referential and this leads to self-absorption. No wonder we feel lonely, alienated, depressed, and anxious.
Furthermore, like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," we find ourselves manipulated not only by the images of others but also by the algorithm itself. Payson elaborates:
Dorothy's journey through Oz is a remarkable metaphor for the seduction into the narcissist's illusory world.
Though we believe we are exercising our free will, there is a growing realization that we might not be, and this is disconcerting, to say the least. As a result, many of us seek explanations for this sense of powerlessness by wading back into the very algorithmic whirlpools that initially caused the problem. Predictably, some individuals end up embracing conspiracy theories in their endeavor to comprehend this unconscious loss of personal agency and self-worth.
So how do we reclaim our sovereignty from the powerful technological forces that permeate our lives to seek the connections we desperately need to maintain our health?
Haidt provides a potential explanation. He discovered that children raised in close-knit conservative communities, especially those with religious affiliations, experience fewer negative impacts on their mental health from social media compared to children in secular, liberal areas. In essence, there appears to be a significant correlation between the protective effect of community on the mental health of children, particularly concerning exposure to the performative effects of social media platforms. This finding is crucial. Even though Haidt’s research focuses on children, we can probably confidently assume that in-person socializing has a positive impact on adult well-being as well by fostering the continued development and maintenance of healthy interpersonal skills that aid us in getting along with others.
While I believe many of us are aware of this phenomenon, we often find ourselves lured back online by forces aimed at maintaining our engagement and inciting outrage, ultimately resulting in a decline in mental health and social fragmentation. Haidt highlights this as a collective action problem. Rather than waiting for the enactment of laws and the implementation of regulations to reshape the design of social media, Haidt suggests that parents, for example, unite to limit their children's exposure to iPhones and social media.
I propose a similar approach for adults by suggesting that we challenge ourselves to reevaluate how we interact online. The goal is to recreate dynamics that mirror the benefits of in-person interactions, where healthy communities prioritize and value how individuals relate to one another. I recommend initiating this process by reassessing our relationship with the like button and the act of resharing (equivalent to retweeting or reblogging).
There are several reasons why we should rethink our connection with the like button, ranging from how tech companies gather information about us to its mimicking the addictive reinforcement of a slot machine. One of the most notable findings from research on asynchronous communication is the observation of reduced viewer engagement with articles that feature an upvote or downvote option. Daniel Sude, the author of the study, explains:
When people are voting whether they like or dislike an article, they’re expressing themselves. They are focused on their own thoughts and less on the content in the article.
In short, prioritizing self-expression overshadows the effort to genuinely consider the content and formulate our own responses. The act of resharing has a similar effect. The Center for Humane Technology’s (CHT) #OneClickSafer campaign points out:
When it's so easy to share, thoughtfulness drops and reactivity rises.
According to the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook files, something that has been shared 20 times in a row is 10x or more likely to contain nudity, violence, hate speech, misinformation than a thing that has not been shared at all. To mitigate this, CHT suggests adding friction after 2 levels of sharing by removing the reshare button. Users can still copy and paste posts to keep sharing but adding a bit of effort can increase the quality of what is being shared.
These suggestions are just a few of the many possibilities that may help us begin to orient ourselves to what matters most to us, rather than being swept away by what the algorithms and market mechanisms are aiming to extract from us. The key is to start noticing what we pay attention to because what we attend to reveals our values. And our values dictate our decisions, and our decisions constitute our life.
When we understand this, we can begin to ask ourselves what kind of a life do we aspire to live and consequently, what kind of decisions must we make now to ensure life thrives far into the future?
While there are no easy answers to these questions, I appreciate online publishing sites, like Substack, where we can start to coalesce around some of them. I believe the next step involves creating small communities of coherence, both online and in-person, that nurture healthy relationships to sustain constructive dialogue. I am exploring this possibility with a few friends and I hope that you will consider doing so too. Because together, I trust we can make a difference.
Speaking of narcissistic -four- year- old- loaded -weapons a certain very well known ex-President who is an in-your-face example of extreme narcissism apparently has the speech patterns of a four year old. He is also apparently very popular with tens of millions Christian true believers who pretend that he is "god's" chosen vehicle to restore/renew Christian America.
This essay and website provides a unique disturbing assessment of the origins and state of the now all-pervasive zombified TV anti-culture
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/article/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-comes-to-life
Check out the authors essay re his book on The Wetiko Psychosis
Please also check out these three related sites which in one way or another describe the bodily based origins of our collective psychosis
http://www.wombecology.com
http://violence.de/index.html
http://ttfuture.org