I have previously mentioned that I do not frequently indulge in social media. I thought it might be worthwhile to explore this in a bit more detail.
The Geopolitics of Social Media
Late middle and early high school are a perpetual arms race for popularity and social power. This is a well known and widely accepted thesis, and my experience during adolescence, in addition to my study of the high schools of past ages, and of other countries and cultures, has led me to treat it as a given. Social media hasn’t changed this. It has amplified this effect, however, in the same manner that improved intercontinental rocketry and the invention of nuclear ballistic missile submarines intensified the threat of the Cold War.
To illustrate: In the late 1940s and into the 1950, before ICBMs were accurate or widely deployed enough to make a credible threat of annihilation, the minimum amount of warning of impending doom, and the maximum amount of damage that could be inflicted, were limited by the size and capability of each side’s bomber fleet. Accordingly, a war could only be waged, and hence, could only escalate, as quickly as bombers could reach enemy territory. This both served as an inherent limit on the destructive capability of each side, and acted as a safeguard against accidental escalation by providing a time delay in which snap diplomacy could take place.
The invention of long range ballistic missiles, however, changed this fact by massively decreasing the time from launch order to annihilation, and the ballistic missile submarine carried this further by putting both powers perpetually in range for a decapitation strike – a disabling strike that would wipe out enemy command and launch capability.
This new strategic situation has two primary effects, both of which increase the possibility of accident, and the cost to both players. First, both powers must adopt a policy of “Launch on Warning” – that is, moving immediately to full annihilation based only on early warning, or even acting preemptively when one believes that an attack is or may be imminent. Secondly, both powers must accelerate their own armament programs, both to maintain their own decapitation strike ability, and to ensure that they have sufficient capacity that they will still maintain retaliatory ability after an enemy decapitation strike.
It is a prisoner’s dilemma, plain and simple. And indeed, with each technological iteration, the differences in payoffs and punishments becomes larger and more pronounced. At some point the cost of continuous arms race becomes overwhelming, but whichever player yields first also forfeits their status as a superpower.
The same is, at least in my experience, true of social media use. Regular checking and posting is generally distracting and appears to have serious mental health costs, but so long as the cycle continues, it also serves as the foremost means of social power projection. And indeed, as Mean Girls teaches us, in adolescence as in nuclear politics, the only way to protect against an adversary is to maintain the means to retaliate at the slightest provocation.
This trend is not new. Mean Girls, which codified much of what we think of as modern adolescent politics and social dynamics, was made in 2004. Technology has not changed the underlying nature of adolescence, though it has accelerated and amplified its effects and costs. Nor is it limited to adolescents: the same kind of power structures and popularity contests that dominated high school recur throughout the world, especially as social media and the internet at large play a greater role in organizing our lives.
This is not inherently a bad thing if one is adept at social media. If you have the energy to post, curate, and respond on a continuous schedule, more power to you. I, however, cannot. I blame most of this on my disability, which limits my ability to handle large amounts of stimuli without becoming both physiologically and psychologically overwhelmed. The other part of this I blame on my perfectionist tendencies, which require that I make my responses complete and precise, and that I see through my interactions until I am sure that I have proven my point. While this is a decent enough mindset for academic debate, it is actively counterproductive on the social internet.
Moreover, continuous exposure to the actions of my peers reminded me of a depressing fact that I tried often to forget: that I was not with them. My disability is not so much a handicap in that is prevents me from doing things when I am with my peers in that it prevents me from being present with them in the first place. I become sick, which prevents me from attending school, which keeps me out of conversations, which means I’m not included in plans, which means I can’t attend gatherings, and so forth. Social media reminds me of this by showing me all the exciting things that my friends are doing while I am confined to bed rest.
It is difficult to remedy this kind of depression and anxiety. Stray depressive thoughts that have no basis in reality can, at least sometimes, and for me often, be talked apart when it is proven that they are baseless, and it is relatively simple to dismiss them when they pop up later. But these factual reminders that I am objectively left out; that I am the only person among my peers among these smiling faces; seemingly that my existence is objectively sadder and less interesting; is far harder to argue.
The History of the Embargo
I first got a Facebook account a little less than six years ago, on my fourteenth birthday. This was my first real social media to speak of, and was both the beginning of the end of parental restrictions on my internet consumption, and the beginning of a very specific window of my adolescence that I have since come to particularly loath.
Facebook wasn’t technically new at this point, but it also wasn’t the immutable giant that it is today. It was still viewed as a game of the young, and it was entirely possible to find someone who wasn’t familiar with the concept of social media without being a total Luddite. Perhaps more relevantly, there were then the first wave of people such as myself, who had grown up with the internet as a lower-case entity, who were now of age to join social media. That is, these people had grown up never knowing a world where it was necessary to go to a library for information, or where information was something that was stored physically, or even where past stories were something held in one’s memory rather than on hard drives.
In this respect, I consider myself lucky that the official line of the New South Wales Department of Eduction and Training’s official computer curriculum was, at the time I went through it, almost technophobic by modern standards; vehemently denouncing the evils of “chatrooms” and regarding the use of this newfangled “email” with the darkest suspicion. It didn’t give me real skills to equip me for the revolution that was coming; that I would live through firsthand, but it did, I think, give me a sense of perspective.
Even if that curriculum was already outdated even by the time it got to me, it helped underscore how quickly things had changed in the few years before I had enrolled. This knowledge, even if I didn’t understand it at the time, helped to calibrate a sense of perspective and reasonableness that has been a moderating influence on my technological habits.
During the first two years or so of having a Facebook account, I fell into the rabbit hole of using social media. If I had an announcement, I posted it. If I found a curious photo, I posted it. If I had a funny joke or a stray thought, I posted it. Facebook didn’t take over my life, but it did become a major theatre of it. What was recorded and broadcast there seemed for a time to be equally important as the actual conversations and interactions I had during school.
This same period, perhaps unsurprisingly, also saw a decline in my mental wellbeing. It’s difficult to tease apart a direct cause, as a number of different things all happened at roughly the same time; my physiological health deteriorated, some of my earlier friends began to grow distant from me, and I started attending the school that would continually throw obstacles in my path and refuse to accommodate my disability. But I do think my use of social media amplified the psychological effects of these events, especially inasmuch as it acted a focusing lens on all the things that made me different and apart from my peers.
At the behest of those closest to me, I began to take breaks from social media. These helped, but given that they were always circumstantial or limited in time, their effects were accordingly temporary. Moreover, the fact that these breaks were an exception rather than a standing rule meant that I always returned to social media, and when I did, the chaos of catching up often undid whatever progress I might have made in the interim.
After I finally came to the conclusion that my use of social media was causing me more personal harm than good, I eventually decided that the only way I would be able to remove its influence was total prohibition. Others, perhaps, might find that they have the willpower to deal with shades of gray in their personal policies. And indeed, in my better hours, so do I. The problem is that I have found that social media is most likely to have its negative impacts when I am not in one of my better hours, but rather have been worn down by circumstance. It is therefore not enough for me to resolve that I should endeavor to spend less time on social media, or to log off when I feel it is becoming detrimental. I require strict rules that can only be overridden in the most exceedingly extenuating circumstances.
My solution was to write down the rules which I planned to enact. The idea was that those would be the rules, and if I could justify an exception in writing, I could amend them as necessary. Having this as a step helped to decouple the utilitarian action of checking social media from the compulsive cycle of escalation. If I had a genuine reason to use social media, such as using it to provide announcements to far flung relatives during a crisis, I could write a temporary amendment to my rules. If I merely felt compelled to log on for reasons that I could not express coherently in a written amendment, then that was not a good enough reason.
This decision hasn’t been without its drawbacks. I am, without social media, undoubtedly less connected to my peers as I might otherwise have been, and the trend which already existed of my being the last person to know of anything has continued to intensify, but crucially, I am not so acutely aware of this trend that it has a serious impact one way or another on my day to day psyche. Perhaps some months hence I shall, upon further reflection, come to the conclusion that my current regime is beginning to inflict more damage than that which it originally remedied, and once again amend my embargo.
Arguments Against the Embargo
My reflections on my social media embargo have brought me stumbling upon two relevant moral quandaries. The first is whether ignorance can truly be bliss, and whether there is an appreciable distinction between genuine experience and hedonistic simulation. In walling myself off from the world I have achieved a measure of peace and contentment, at the possible cost of disconnecting myself from my peers, and to a lesser degree from the outside world. In the philosophical terms, I have alienated myself, both from my fellow man, and from my species-essence. Of course, the question of whether social media is a genuine solution to, or a vehicle of, alienation, is a debate unto itself, particularly given my situation.
It is unlikely, if still possible, that my health would have allowed my participation in any kind of physical activity which I could have been foreseeably invited to as a direct result of increased social media presence. Particularly given my deteriorating mental health of the time, it seems far more reasonable to assume that my presence would have been more of a one-sided affair: I would have sat, and scrolled, and become too self conscious and anxious about the things that I saw to contribute in a way that would be noticed by others. With these considerations in mind, the question of authenticity of experience appears to be academic at best, and nothing for me to loose sleep over.
The second question regards the duty of expression. It has oft been posited, particularly with the socio-political turmoils of late, that every citizen has a duty to be informed, and to make their voice heard; and that furthermore in declining to take a position, we are, if not tacitly endorsing the greater evil, then at least tacitly declaring that all positions available are morally equivalent in our apathy. Indeed, I myself have made such arguments on the past as it pertains to voting, and to a lesser extent to advocacy in general.
The argument goes that social media is the modern equivalent of the colonial town square, or the classical forum, and that as the default venue for socio-political discussion, our abstract duty to be informed participants is thus transmogrified into a specific duty to participate on social media. This, combined with the vague Templar-esque compulsion to correct wrongs that also drives me to rearrange objects on the table, acknowledge others’ sneezes, and correct spelling, is not lost on me.
In practice, I have found that these discussions are, at best, pyrrhic, and more often entirely fruitless: they cause opposition to become more and more entrenched, poison relationships, and convert no one, all the while creating a blight in what is supposed to be a shared social space. And as Internet shouting matches tend to be crowned primarily by who blinks first, they create a situation in which any withdrawal, even for perfectly valid reasons such as, say, having more pressing matters than trading insults over tax policy, is viewed as concession.
While this doesn’t directly address the dilemma posited, it does make its proposal untenable. Taking to my social media to agitate is not particularly more effective than conducting a hunger strike against North Korea, and given my health situation, is not really a workable strategy. Given that ought implies can, I feel acceptably satisfied to dismiss any lingering doubts about my present course.
