I’ve been a bit too sparse on Printculture lately. Blame deadlines, children, moving, administration. It’s not for lack of things to talk about– but it’s in the nature of a notebook or a blog that if you let the moment pass, the thought that was gathering in your mind, like a droplet on a leaf, has already cascaded and can’t be hauled back up the track. “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them.” The blogger’s life should be full of temporal bubbles. How about twenty minutes set aside every two hours to capture those roving thoughts? There must be a scheduling app for that…
If the widely-reported tendency of electronic media is to let Facebook and quasi-Facebook applications absorb the heretofore distinct media of email, blogging, news and shopping, I’d like to lie down athwart the tracks of progress. In the name of what? Well, like all the Luddites who’ve preceded me, in the name of “silence and slow time.” Over the last year or so I have been unable to repress an ever stronger urge to turn up the nose when glancing at my friends’ postings on the inevitable FB. The form is a composite of vices. Binary thinking: you “like” something or you write to denounce it. Competitiveness: you are encouraged to brag about your successes, your cute children, your artfully disposed lunch. Conformism: to post something that garners vast numbers of “likes” and “followers” is how you win the game of FB. Triviality: spend your time clicking on silly symbolic matters rather than getting together with people to deal with the root causes of violence, racism and drastic inequality. And most of all, snap judgment: you’re supposed to spring out with an instantaneous reaction to postings, before they scroll down and away, but that means posting before you can do any research, find out the background, do your own thinking. Short of being a troll, you are encouraged to conform, or to gravitate toward the group of people with whom you can most easily conform by “sharing” and “liking” the same things. I know social media are supposed to democratize, and in some ways they have acted to bring vast numbers of people together who might otherwise be moving in their separate channels, but the quality of interaction is low and causes people to act stupid. (I don’t mean to call anyone stupid; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in the constraints of the medium.)
Thus, in the last few months, we’ve seen rushes to condemn people as e.g. racists on the strength of somebody else’s say-so, or a generalized eagerness to mark oneself off from those racists over there; hasty approval and disapproval of public figures because of some kind of imputed association; threats of mayhem (amply “liked” by the like-minded); the joys of hyperbole and denunciation. Oh, did I fail to accuse so-and-so of some alleged bad attitude? Then I must share that bad attitude.
Although I was grousing two paragraphs ago about the instantaneous character of the medium, imposing rushes to judgment, I have to acknowledge another dimension of social-media temporality, and that is repetition. The pile-ons of self-approving approvals are never sufficient in their moment. If you go around in the same circles as me, you probably are likely to vote for B rather than T, are generally in favor of policies X, Y and Z and have a dim view of issues P, Q, and R. But if you are somebody I see in work or life, you probably don’t bother telling me what you think of (B+T+X+Y+Z+P+Q+R) two or three times a day; as a Facebook self-fashioner you probably let pass no opportunity to do so. On the surface of things, FB operates in its own sandbox, but if it’s true that FB users are getting most of their political news from it, that sandbox spills out into pragmatic public life. And it just works to flatten opinion, to make evidence-based thinking with room for history and exceptions impossible, to turn each of us into an obedient member of this or that mob.
Room for thinking, room for “play” (which means: considering the possibility that things are not what they seem). Blogs allow for these– books even more so– so it will have to be blogs and books for me. Reflection doesn’t need a faster chip. It needs more space for maneuver.
(Hat tip and thematic overlap to Evgeny Morozov.)
It’s a reason to keep up a rich email correspondence, which mitigates some of the right-now-or-else force of Facebook. Yet I have seen many of my correspondences wane over the past year or so, to the point where the only way to communicate is to “instant message” the friends involved on Facebook. I think we could all benefit from the ability to reflect before we speak or perform speech-acts; immediacy can bring out the worst in us. (Guilty as charged on trumpeting; there is precious little occasion otherwise.)
One other thing I should say, which is that the vices you describe have migrated from medium to medium throughout the history of the Internet. Usenet, for example, was the site of the kind of human toxicity that nowadays you would find on Facebook, Twitter, or those apps the kids are using that I don’t know about yet. (It was also a good place to learn about experimental fiction. I rather miss those days.) Human nature finds its natural expression within or despite its constraints. I think of a young child of my acquaintance, who, denied gun toys by his well-meaning, liberal-minded parents, eventually started biting his toast into the shape of a gun. Facebook’s characteristics can be used for good; if not, Partners In Health would not have a social media team to make sure its images and messages are “liked” and “shared.” I think the end is closer than you think for Facebook, and definitely for Twitter, as places of human expression. When the only thing we can post to our timelines is video — as Mark Zuckerberg has expressed an interest in making happen — we’ll be on to the next watering hole, enjoying the fresh air before the next IPO.