How social media can worsen us

Even though there’s plenty of reasons to keep our accounts, Aristotle’s insights on how such media works contrary to our nature, can inspire us to reduce our consumption.

It took some hundred million years to evolve homo sapiens into their current state. Only a few decades more will completely transform how we interact with the world. You don’t need a doctorate in biology to suspect that these new daily routines might not harmonize fully with our nature, along with its intricate, slowly refined systems of neurons and synapsis.

There is one good and one bad news to that effect.

The bad news is that the human nervous system is plastic. We’re surprisingly malleable. Our brains and neurons are never finalized products. Its development doesn’t conclude after childhood but goes on to change dynamically throughout life.

The good news is that the human nervous system is plastic. Our character and customs can be turned and bent in incredible ways. When we learn, we do it with our entire bodies, travelling old and new pathways throughout our nervous system with our actions every day. The tracks that are oft-trudged, become easier to walk again and again. The neglected part of our neurological landscape grows increasingly thick and inaccessible.

Influencing media

Life in social media can sometimes resemble some inner circles of Dante’s hell. Still, it’s common to think that social media platforms in themselves are neutral agoras. They are put in front of us as public marketplaces, and we are the ones to use them for our good or harmful ends.

However, they also have an inherent tendency to incentivize some of our worse tendencies. This is not a coincidence. It is the result of functions carefully developed in close collaboration between psychologists and technologists.

When we write on social media, we want to draw attention to our message. For what other reason would we write? The platform creators want us to get attention, drive traffic and spend time. Why else would they create?

The problem isn’t primarily that political interests govern platforms, which has received more attention with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the publishing of “Twitter files”. Political partisanship certainly doesn’t help. The catastrophic effect on our collective ability to concentrate has received greater awareness. While we were previously able to delve into books, conversations, movies and other projects over time, the phantom pains threaten to arrive a few seconds after we cut ourselves off from our digital generators of dopamine. Our new pathways have become much travelled. Others are abandoned.

In conflict with our rational nature

However, perhaps an even greater challenge is that the mechanisms behind social media direct us towards acting in ways utterly foreign to the ends of our human nature, as what Aristotle calls “rational and social animals”, and therefore inhibiting us from becoming better versions of ourselves.

To use one example, high emotional activation is usually negatively correlated with rationality. That’s one reason why it’s healthy for us to digest a message before we respond. Yet, the platforms incentivize emotional activation, calling upon us to throw around quick opinions almost instantaneously, written in short, polemical, often slogan form.

The rational animal in us, that originally was curious, and directed towards understanding, is challenged by a vicious temptation to draw our interlocutors point of views out of context, simplify and twist them to our own ends.

In some media, such as Twitter, you won’t have to search for long to find a strange category of otherwise reasonable people, who’s created for themselves a brand by representing themselves with a new online persona. This is a character that tediously repeats the activity of presenting complex issues as if they were one-dimensional.

Do these persons know that there are more nuances to the matters at hand, that would rapidly complicate their easy analysis? Almost certainly. Do they know that introducing sobering complexity would drastically reduce their reach? Absolutely.

In the end, we’ve been socialized into these carefully directed dynamics, to the extent that we almost forgot why we ventured into them in the first place. While we pat our backs for our outstanding knowledge on how to navigate the modern media, the creators of the platform view us useful idiots for their latest innovations.

Rather than beginning with the assumption that those who disagree with us are largely reasonable people, that at least in their own eyes seek out what they perceive as “good”, it is more attractive to signalize to our own groups that “the other side” consist of hopeless persons that haven’t even understood basic, universal truths, such as love being better than hate, that you should rather be kind than mean, and that peace is preferable to war.

However, what will it profit a man, if he gains all the followers and forfeits his soul?

Sustaining anti-social behavior

The social animal in us, that wished to create real meetings between human beings, that could develop into friendships and precious communities along with a desire to do good to each other, is often toned down in order to find strategies in order to represent ourselves in a best possible manner. Social media is a continuous rehearsal of self-representation. A place where we can act as communication consultants with ourselves as the leading client.

Our healthy, corrective mechanisms are subordinated when we’re not responsible for the gaze of the other. Yet, we still receive responses from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of faceless names on a screen. These responses are similarly often awarded if they’re plain and polemical. Unpleasant contrary views, even those who are fully reasonable, are more easily ridiculed or rationalized, while we stay in our groups, contributing to further self-praising conduct.

You can often trust that those disagreeing with you will find some revenge in presenting your message in a similar fashion to their group, to signalize their own excellence. All of which, gives us all the more reason to dismiss their critique, and maintain an artificially high confidence in our views.

Many of these propositions should be recognizable to anyone who’s spent more than a few hours online. Perhaps we’ve thought that this applies to “everyone else”, while we hope to keep at an arm’s length the idea that we might be among those infected.

A mirror to ourselves

Briefly summarized, the imposition of these new tools into our lives, seems to eschew us from being creatures naturally seeking the good, the true and the beautiful, to calculate how we can best represent ourselves as virtuous, rational and esthetically gifted.

The need of human beings to signalize to their own groups is in no way a new phenomenon. Neither is the modern person’s attempt to represent himself in the best possible manner. Being emotionally activated is an integral part of human life, even showing displays of anger, although preferably in a justified and controlled way.

However, what if we’re part of a game that sets all of this artificially in motion? Perhaps we really, by spending much time on social media, are part of a destructive relation with developers that care less about our interests in living good lives, and more about tuning cognitive mechanisms that’ll keep us on their platforms. But as with other destructive relationships, some can be hard to break out of.

Humans are animals that act in accordance to reasons. We’re situated in what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars calls “The space of reasons”. These reasons are often expressed through our desires. Suddenly we might experience that our immediate desires don´t correspond to the ends that we’d really wanted for ourselves.

Modern neuroscience has caught up with an ancient doctrine to confirm the plasticity of our beings, an outstanding foundation to the Aristotelian notion of virtues – a focus on a framework for living that gives rise to good habits. The Aristotelian ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre describes such virtues as dispositions, not just towards acting in certain ways, but to feel and desire in these ways. He highlights that the purpose of such education is just as much about learning how our weakness might guide our temptations, given our temperaments and social roles, and act in order to limit their influence.

All animals have desires. What’s unique to humans, is that we can express opinions about what we want to desire, and what we don’t want to desire. These are our second-order desires. Perhaps 2023 is the beginning for us to navigate our neurological pathways anew, where we identify which ones we would like to cultivate, in order to walk them easily anew, while other pathways can become increasingly hard to enter. Social media is a place where vegetation can grow thick.