Maybe we need to thank Facebook, Trump and the Russians

Ten years into the “smartphone experiment”, and we seem to be reaching a tipping point.  Just this week, we saw two major Apple investors write an open letter challenging Apple over concerns that device-usage habits are harming children’s developing brains. Then two days later, the Globe and Mail ran an alarming, evidence-based article on how smartphones are making us stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. But what is all of this technology (ab)use doing to the health of our society?

The smartphone’s “always-at-our-finger-tips” internet access offers the potentiality for diverse individuals to connect and learn, discuss and debate important social matters, and in doing so, help create change for the common good.

It’s easy to understand why the advent of the internet was hailed as offering an inclusive and expansive public sphere that traditional media prior could not provide.

Evidence of the internet’s capacity for community conversations is abundant. Just look at social media’s 2017 user results, with Facebook’s 2 billion monthly active users leading the list. The concerns discussed in McKee’s work, however, are also evident: trivialization of important issues, commercialization, over-reliance on spectacle, fragmentation and apathy. Civility on social media is challenged by flaming and trolling. Reading this New York times article on the emerging culture of nastiness tells part of the story, while another clever writer coined the phrase antisocial media.

In fact, for a variety of reasons, social media can work against the public sphere ideals. Just this month, in an urgent call for Facebook regulation, Roger McNamee (an early Facebook investor and Zuckerberg mentor) shared his findings on how Facebook algorithms and filter bubbles were capitalized on by bad actors (hypothesized as the Russians), who used cheap ads (targeting the less costly, less educated, less wealthy demographic), and deployed bots and trolls to influence both the Brexit vote and the election of Trump as President. This one example reveals the numerous forces working against rational discussions around the common good, that are the antithesis of what our world needs more of.

And yet, the optimist in me wonders if the #metoo movement would have happened without Trump’s election. It’s an interesting chain of events, supported by the internet’s capacity to inform and connect its users:  accusations of Trump’s sexual misconduct hit the news during his campaign; the largest global women’s march took place the day after Trump was sworn in; and then the Harvey Weinstein sex scandal started a Hollywood revolution that currently sees 116 accused.  Maybe in the future we will identify Trump’s election as a key pivot point, resulting in significant social change through so much spectacle that apathy was no longer a choice. This might not be the ideal public sphere sociologist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas originally envisioned, but for now, it’s what we’ve got.  And maybe it’s working in spite of itself.

Til next week, “speak your kind”,

DLM

P.S.  Check out this week’s musical reflection here.