Social media and the art of thinking unreasonably

Here comes my rant against political uses of social media, notably Twitter and Facebook.

Politics on social media is not reflective. It is not deliberative. It is not long-term thinking. It is short-term, reactive, tribal, and emotional.

Social media facilitates the formation of mobs. Contra Howard Rheingold, mobs are not smart. When it comes to politics, mobs are epitomized by Charlottesville.

Politics on social media is cyber-bullying. Progressives started it, and they have been relentless and ruthless practitioners of it. But in recent years their opponents have discovered it, culminating in the election of the cyber-bully-in-chief.

I wish somebody could figure out how to walk it back. Social media is not the whole problem when it comes to political polarization and anger, but the way it works today, it sure as heck is not the solution.

11 thoughts on “Social media and the art of thinking unreasonably

  1. To use social media effectively for political action you focus on the reporting and organizing aspects of the platforms, not challenging your opponents.

  2. Politics on social media is cyber-bullying. Progressives started it, and they have been relentless and ruthless practitioners of it.

    Well, most of the progressives social media grew up during the Bush administration and rebeled against both conservatives and liberals that supported the Iraq War. For all the cries of liberal MSM, the MSM was locked and loaded for the Iraq War and there were few voices against in 2002 – 2004. Also by late 1990s, cable news and talk radio became the domain of hard right as well. So liberal audiences went to internet.

    Have you seen the crap that right wing (5%) are doing on the social media. Stuff is beyond strong and with Russia help they were a lot more relentless and ruthless practitioners of it. (Also some of the hard end Bernie 2016 stuff, anti-HRC stuff was coming from Russia as well.)

  3. The worst thing about social media is the way it captures “the conversation” and the online activity of certain commentators on proprietary platforms. Twitter and Facebook in particular are gradually making it increasingly annoying to “lurk” and read “public” messages, without creating and logging in to one’s own account. Twitter, for example, gives a lot of quasi-fradulent “this is taking too long” error messages when trying to read tweets anonymously via mobile web browser. Meanwhile, unlike most of the web, twitter and facebook are blocked by most workplace networks, so linking to them from one’s website doesn’t often work and doesn’t keep one “on the web” on mobile devices. If one isn’t really interested in having accounts on these platforms or using them regularly as “closed-shop” interfaces, then one simply has to live with the fact that for every post of “ordinary matter” one can see, there is an order of magnitude more “dark matter” that one can’t see.

    • Twitter, for example, gives a lot of quasi-fradulent “this is taking too long” error messages when trying to read tweets anonymously via mobile web browser.

      I have noticed this as well. I think it’s a bug, not an antifeature. I think it takes e.g. 2 seconds to render on the backend, but the mobile frontend times out after 1 second and yields the error message. Fair enough. The main bug is that pressing Twitter’s own “retry” button on the page just reloads the error message. Try pressing your mobile browser’s reload button. The proper destination has then loaded every time for me.

      I rarely get the destination on the first load / click. The in-page retry button just reloads the error page. The browser reload tends to work.

  4. Spoken like a true (not contemporary politicized PC) academic, Arnold. But academia, whose ideal once was disinterested rational inquiry, is not politics. President Trump responds to criticism, much of it intemperate and hateful, with criticism of those who attack him. He does not go looking for people to “cyber-bully,” but responds.

    To call him “cyber-bully-in-chief” suggests a gratuitous antagonism which doesn’t seem to be present.

  5. There seems to be an expectation that social media will be automatically satisfying, useful, and pleasant. Don’t be lazy and expect Mark Zuckerberg to do everything for you.

    Twitter and Facebook can be nice to visit, but you can’t run on autopilot. Like anything in life, you have to exercise a bit of virtue. If you put garbage in to your social network, you’ll get garbage out.

    In both of those networks, I’m friends with many dozens of people, but as a rule I only follow ten people at most. Everyone else I’m connected to is categorized in a list. This means that the emotional nonsense chatter of the day doesn’t instantly appear on my feeds.

    For example, if I *really* want to see what’s going on with old high school acquaintances on Facebook, then I simply click on the High School list. It’s only two extra clicks, but it’s surprising how infrequently I click on it.

    As a result, my feed is very clean. I only see posts from the small circle of people I actually interact with in real life. In addition, I see posts from people, organizations, and groups that interest me, none of them having to do with politics.

    For politics I get opinions and ideas from thoughtful blogs, like this one. I’m old school and still use an RSS reader.

  6. Any more so than, say, Fox? That Fox is older media, hardly made it any different, even in echo points. It is a lot older than social media though social media may make it even more prominent given how many and much people are on it. Party politics at its most pervasive. The rarity is truth seeking and common consensus.

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