Social Media Decay and Boaty McBoatface: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
I’m not as enthusiastic about “social media” as I used to be. It’s not just that they sometimes get hijcked to promote ideas I disagree with — I can handle that — but they often get used to promote silly, irrelevant conversations, or even hateful conversations.
Granted, using the web to organize a gun-toting counter-demonstration agains BLM marchers is something that we need to watch out for. And, long ago I gave up trying to read Breitbart to get alternate perspectives; the racist and hate-filled comments there were just too repellant. Later I even gave up Twitter and Facebook because they had become serious distractions while making “real news” hard to find and evaluate.
I’m still a believer that the web is a fantastic tool if net neutrality can be protected. But the overwhelming commercialization of tools like Google Search which can make it difficult to find “objective” links does give reason for pause. And, there’s the “Boaty McBoatface” factor:
To get Boaty McBoatfaced means that you’ve made the critical mistake of letting the internet decide things. In other words, as much as we revere democracy, there are times — and they do typically involve the internet — when one’s fellow citizens deliberately make their choices not in order to foster the greatest societal good, but, instead, to mess with you.
Because they want to send a message. Because they think it might be kind of funny. And above all, you know: because they can.
What to do? Even if behemoths like Facebook, Google, and Twitter flag or even remove lies and dangerous information, the web is so distributed now that any group that wants to will be able to organize and promote online its agenda be it for good or ill.
On balance I think there will always be an uneasy truce between the extremes of “anything goes” and “remove dangerous stuff” factions. In theory I tend towards the “anything goes” pole given how authoritarianism can so easily arise and survive in a pluralistic society like ours — we see that happening now when people use the banner of “religious liberty” to justify using the legal system to impose their religious beliefs on others. And there will always have to be exceptions such as prohibitions against child pornography and preventing the open promotion of physical violence or harm.
At least in the short term, my solution to these dilemmas is to focus my information seeking on sources I trust while avoiding sources — such as Twitter and Facebook — that can too easily serve as sources for anxiety and misinformation.
Copyright (c) 2020 by Dennis D. McDonald
