Tech No Phobe
TRIGGER WARNING: The potentially dangerous effects of social media on the human brain and how many of you wingnuts may actually be budding sociopaths.
Yo, fuckslice! Can we talk about how a healthy distrust of social media is often wrongly conflated with technophobia? ‘Cause I feel like we should.
It shouldn’t take a genius to work out that I love technology. I’m so into videogames that I develop my own in my spare time. I get all my work through the internet and the only reason you can access any of my writing is because of that same piece of technology. I’m constantly amazed by the fact that I walk around with a tiny little box in my pocket that has more songs and better sound-quality than most jukeboxes (though jukeboxes are still intrinsically way cooler than my MP4 player). I practically salivate when I hear about some new piece of space tech that brings us one step closer to colonising other worlds or achieving interstellar travel. I’m optimistic about the prospect of full brain emulation (also known as mind uploading) and the fact that it represents a chance to indefinitely extend human lifespans. As soon as they’ve advanced to a level where I can have a proper conversation with one and it wants to cuddle in the afterglow, I’m definitely getting a sex robot. Oh yes: I fucking love technology (emotionally now; physically one day), But I have some very negative opinions about social media. Including the platform I’m using to write this blog.
Don’t get me wrong: I think social media is a great way to find likeminded people you wouldn’t otherwise have met and it facilitates communication between people who- for whatever reason- can’t meet in real life. But there are a lot of creepy social media fanatics in the tech commentary world who spend a worrying amount of time going on about how it represents a new, deeply meaningful type of human interaction- something equal to or better than traditional communication. I’m concerned not just by how wrongheaded this notion is, but by how commonplace it is becoming.
Social media is a fine invention, but it is no substitute for real interactions with people in the physical world, in much the same way that a love-letter is no substitute for oral sex, no matter how powerfully erotic its wording might be. It’s easy to perform emotions you don’t feel and establish shallow connections through social media. Interacting with people you care about and- more importantly- maintaining real relationships with them in the corporeal universe requires effort and emotional investment. Social media allows you to communicate without getting invested. That’s fine, if it’s just one type of relationship in your life among many, but if that kind of superficial connection dominates the way you interact with people, you’ve got a problem. The ability to communicate with such ease that it becomes trivial is called ‘frictionless sharing’ and it’s often framed as a good thing. It isn’t. Sharing is supposed to entail friction. The extent to which you fight against that friction to make a connection happen is often the measure of how real that connection is.
I accept that, for some people, frictionless sharing has been a serious boon. It has allowed people who consider themselves damaged or ill to talk about their feelings in a way that they can’t in real life. This is an enormously important part of many peoples’ coping strategies, and that’s a good thing. I don’t want to dismiss the positive results of social-media-enabled frictionless sharing. But it’s important to remember that it also has a dark side: it makes communication shallow, and thereby encourages people to have more shallow views of others. When other people are just letters and pictures on a screen, it’s easy to not really care about them... and human beings fall into patterns of thinking very easily. If you don’t really care about the people you see online, you might start to not care about people in general.
Think about all the hate campaigns that have been spawned on social media. Think about the scientist who landed a probe on a moving asteroid and was abused on social media until he cried because he wore a fucking shirt some people found offensive while making scientific history. Think about the care worker who posted daft photos of her being silly on a daytrip to a military ceremony and who lost her job because a bunch of joyless cunts decided that she had to be ‘taught a lesson’ for not enacting poe-faced seriousness in a particular location. Think about the IT guy who got fired after making a dumb Carry On style innuendo to his friend at a tech conference because some earwigging little pim-hole decided to quote him on Twitter. Think about James Gunn, who got fired because right-wing sociopaths and supposedly liberal people joined forces to persecute him over jokes he made eight years previously and had already apologised for. All of these people got fired because social media twats used frictionless cunting sharing to share outrage they didn’t really feel. The ‘sharers’ of the world destroyed actual human beings’ lives and didn’t give a fuck because their fucking Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and Tumblr accounts had trained them to see other humans as faceless targets, unworthy of emotional investment. Frictionless sharing is both a crash-course in sociopathy and a tool through which mass sociopathic acts are carried out.
I’m wary of social media, but not because I’m a technophobe. I don’t think the technology is intrinsically evil. I’m wary of social media because I know how susceptible the human psyche is to being rewired in dangerous new ways.
I like to think I have the self-awareness to use social media responsibly. I have a reputation for being abrasive, but I’ve only ever gone after targets who thoroughly deserve my ire. I have savaged many people, but always in response to wilful and extreme acts of abject cuntery. I’ve never made a concerted effort to ruin a random stranger’s life over something trivial and I’ve never joined an arbitrary dogpile against someone. I ask all of you reading this to exercise the same level of care. Frictionless sharing makes it all too easy to see other humans as disposable and unimportant. Ergo, when you use social media, you can’t rely on your initial instincts about what is and isn’t acceptable. You need to check yourself and make an effort to remember that the people you’re talking to (or at) are, well people. Behave accordingly.
Aaaaaaand in my next post, I’ll probably undermine everything I’ve just said by making cruel and arbitrary comments about whoever’s been in the news lately. In my defence, though, that’s not because of the influence of social media, that’s just because I’m an arsehole in real life, too. Don’t be me.
