It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a wacky idea, must be in want of an X account. Most of us can agree that social media in America promotes a lot of wacky stuff. There are, of course, some instances in which social media provides constructive content. Facebook groups provide useful information to members. TikTok and Instagram sometimes provide video from events that lend useful context to situations. But by and large, there’s a lot of foolishness on social media, running the gamut from the silly to the dangerous to the evil.
Cultural critics routinely decry the potential harm of social media, particularly when consumed by young people via smartphones. But there’s a bigger, more destructive aspect that receives far less attention. The epistemology of social media is one that, by some accounts, is rewiring a lot of brains in terms of how we see and interpret the information swirling around us. This information, regardless of whether it’s foolish or insightful, constitutes knowledge of one sort or another. But the nature and origin of this knowledge, examined through the lens of epistemology, suggests a warping of people’s perception of reality, a willful surrender to the dopamine hit of social media, and a perversion of what we know, what we think we know, and what we clearly do not know.
In his seminal work Amusing Ourselves to Death, media theorist Neil Postman explored this issue as it relates to the television culture of the mid-1980s. Postman’s book postulated that our ruin would come not from forces inflicting pain on us, as George Orwell feared in 1984, but through pleasure, as Orwell’s Eton College teacher Aldous Huxley did in Brave New World 17 years earlier.
The nature and origin of knowledge conveyed through television, shallow as it may be, is at least curated to some degree. TV news goes through an editorial process that (sometimes) vets the conveyed knowledge for accuracy. Entertainment television is written and produced by professional people who (sometimes) convey knowledge with a modicum of relevance and insight. This is not to say television represents a paragon of valuable knowledge - it doesn’t. But the knowledge conveyed via social media is curated by no one. Social media companies try to control certain content promoting physical violence or inarguably hateful expressions, but for the most part, the knowledge promoted through social media represents little more than whatever is bouncing around in the mind of whomever shares it. This reduces the medium from a potentially constructive vehicle to little more than a platform for voyeurs and exhibitionists. Sometimes, it’s an elderly woman expressing personal angst about an American president. Other times, it’s a celebrity bemoaning the fates of lawless people they’ve never met. We are occasionally subjected to people who are angry about disease, while others choose to shriek at a stranger rather than simply walk away. We’ve all seen things like this, and things worse than this, for many years.
Postman theorized that television represents a merging of the worst aspects of telegraphy and photography - communication technologies rolled-out in the mid-19th century - by reducing, if not eliminating, context and meaning from information and the knowledge it contains. Forty years later, it could be said that social media represents the merging of emotional incontinence and unbridled rage, often providing knowledge no more useful than illustrating varying degrees of individual mental disorders.
If the aforementioned examples of social media posts were merely one-offs or cherry-picked samples of weirdness, that would be one thing. But they’re becoming the norm and are pervasive on social media, which is now a primary means of communication. A Pew Research survey showed that 83% of Americans consumed social media during the summer of 2023, and it’s unlikely that number has decreased over the past two years. We’re now scrolling ourselves to death.
The nature and origin of knowledge being absorbed by hundreds of millions of Americans is worse than useless. It’s destructive. Worse still, the epistemology of social media is such that our base of knowledge is shaded by a culture that permits and encourages consumption of some of the darkest glimpses of the minds of strangers. Nothing good comes from that. We may yet find a way to extricate ourselves from this spiral of anti-knowledge but the history of communications has shown that advances in technology do not yield a commensurate advance in the quality of knowledge. But I remain optimistic that Americans possessing intellectual integrity outnumber those who have something different. I have a dream that one day, our communications will not be judged by the coloring of knowledge but by the character of its content. That’s a lofty goal, which is why I want to pursue it. A good start might be cracking the spine of a Jane Austen novel.