Antisocial media blight our lives
Benefits do not make up for the constant, maliciously, malign effects
A long time ago in digital terms, I recall a conversation with an academic colleague who was extolling the wonders of email that meant he could now be in daily touch with his mother, who lived in central America (I think, Honduras). Innocent days of the early internet (remember dial-up modems and the uncertainty of a continuing solid connection?).
The world moves quickly on and from emailing we went rapidly to ever increasing internet speeds, to the certainty that a connection would not inexplicably fail; then to using our so-called ‘smart’ phones for everything and anything that took our fancy.
This week, in a restaurant, my companions and I happily exchanged images just taken, phone to phone. Our late arriving guest emailed her order ahead, to save time (we didn’t pick up on that, too busy nattering). Video calls can be (but not always are) a boon; they sure were during the lockdowns.
Against these gains – and they are many – have to set the losses: of privacy, of human disconnection, of time wasted. I’m about to run a drop-in for patients at my surgery to enable them to use the online diagnosis services available, as opposed to actually seeing a doctor, face to face. A report, just published, shows (as if we didn’t already know) that continuity of care (seeing the same GP every time) leads to vastly improved health outcomes. Well, well, well.
The biggest losses have been through the rise of anti-social media. Nothing good was ever going to come from software developed by a pair of geeks who wanted to rate fellow female students by, ahem, their looks. It was an early form of stalking, quickly to metamorphose into Facebook (now Meta) and to make its inventors among the richest and most unaccountable people on earth. After stalking, comes trolling and insane levels of anonymous aggression.
Meanwhile, there arose a new form of search engine, whose corporate motto ‘do no evil’ has always struck me as singularly threatening, suggesting the possibility of the exact opposite. Both Facebook and Google rapidly recognised that they held vast and growing databases, which could be monetarised, and how.
I was a very early user of Facebook, in a professional capacity as I was asked to investigate it (I was running a dozen websites at the time) as a potentially rich source for our purposes. Very quickly, I concluded the costs far outweighed the benefits for us – and for me, personally. Too much information scattered on the capricious winds of cyberspace, too intimate to an individual’s sense of self.
Many years later, long after I thought (because they assured me it was true) that Facebook had deleted my account, I discovered they had merely parked what I had given them: stored my data, in short. Consequently, I engaged in an 18 month and tedious battle with them to have that data permanently deleted. The first letter (I have it still, with the envelope) I received from them came from an address in Warsaw (me neither), disclaiming pretty much everything. In a byzantine chase to establish who I was dealing with, I finally found it was with Facebook Ireland (me neither, once again) and that my complaint over their egregious behaviour had to go through the Irish Information Commissioner’s office.
More time, more wasted effort but, eventually, and in a surprise volte face that startled the Irish ICO as much as me, Facebook agreed, in my case alone [my emphasis] they would concede that they had to delete my data. At no time, even at the end, would they admit to being a publisher; it’s key to their continuing existence that they uphold the lie that they are merely a platform, upon which all the demons of the world may merrily dance their macabre, malicious capers.
(You might be intrigued to know that the UK ICO at the time asked me if they might use my case as proof of publication. I wish them luck with that.)
You may say – and there is solid evidence for this – that Facebook has had its day, whatever form it now takes, or may take in the future; but many people appear to live out their lives on it. Others, notably the young, have decamped to other toxic publishers, masquerading as platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter (now called X by the increasingly weird and overtly alien Musk).
Here, there is a growing movement to restrict, if not actually ban, the use of smart phones by the under 16s, along with their being banned from all classrooms. It’s such a no-brainer, but it’s taken the crisis in the mental health of the young to make this onto the news agenda. But, as yet, there’s no call, as far as I am aware, to ban children and teenagers from anti-social media. The two are inextricably linked. There is a link, too, to the narcissism displayed by the young (not exclusively) and their obsession with self (itself a root cause of mental health problems). I’m no longer just anxious, I have ‘anxiety issues’.
In fact, anti-social media are addictive, just like alcohol, any other recreational drugs (especially nicotine) and gambling. They suck you in, willingly or otherwise and, before you know it, wham. You’re hooked. Exactly the same is true for smart phones with their emphasis either on fashion, or on new gizmos that, at first sight, appear alluring. Only later, if at all, does the penny drop. For most it does not: take a look on any street, in any shop, restaurant, or at work, the addiction to smart phones is total.
There is more. We know that most people now get their ‘news’ from their phones, via anti-social media, not from professionally run, regulated and organised news organisations, like newspapers and broadcast media. As such, they are exposed to a constant stream of alleged ‘facts’, in reality more and more ill-dressed unverified lies and half-truths.
The war in Gaza; Trump’s deranged rants; toxic misogyny and racism; woke claptrap, like that surrounding the definition of ‘woman’; the anti-vaccination conspiracy; the even wilder, but no less dangerous, concept of the ‘illuminati’ all provide rich seams for this global gossip machine to suck up and spit out, in an ever-ascending spiral: the real ‘fake’ news.
This week, I tried a quiz, devised to illustrate how easy it is to fake audio clips. The two voices used were Biden’s and Trump’s, each talking for a few seconds about this and that. I got 6/10 right. That is, I failed to spot either the genuine clip or the readily made fake (using the modulations of these two men’s voices to create a false narrative) in 40 per cent of the clips, so, almost half.
I note that both the current Samsung and Google television adverts for their new smart phones relish the ease with which the user can fake photos, in this case substituting smiling faces in a group where in the real original there was a mix of smiles and frowns, or just dropped eyes. The same set of adverts insists the new phones, once owned ‘is all about you’.
In those two adverts, is encapsulated twin dangers: the ability to fake reality, pretty much in real time. And the tempting – to the gullible – offer to transform your life into something it palpably is not. Influencers on anti-social media know all about this: they make a fortune from constantly pushing this dangerous illusion, along with, for example, deadly suggestions as to how you might cure yourself of any number of ailments, or change your appearance (‘O youth I do adore thee, age I do abhor thee!’).
In the past 20 years, a mere blink of an eye, the world has had loosed upon it tools as deadly in their seducing ways as nuclear weapons seduced world leaders, foolish and vain enough to believe they could fashion such destructive power for good. Watch Oppenheimer to see for yourself how well that went, or contemplate the war in Gaza and Ukraine, both involving nuclear powers with lunatics in charge).
I do believe, if we survive that long, that historians a hundred years from now will look back on the antics surrounding the free use of anti-social media, allied to the instant gratification provided by unregulated smart phone use, as akin to giving a small child a box of matches in an unsecured fuel store, explaining all the while what a great fire they could – should – start.
It’s not possible to put this particular malign pair of genies back in their boxes. But it is perfectly possible for us to grow up, accept the positives, while quickly and determinedly regulating against all the negatives. And to do it quickly; time is running out for our offspring, as well as for us.
It used to be so much simpler. My childhood was free, in every sense of the word: free to roam the countryside, free of peer pressure brought on by malicious and manipulative use of the internet, all denying freedoms children should have, free of stress in the modern oppressive sense; free to think as a child; free to learn at will.
Just, hell, free.
A E Housman eloquently puts it so:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again. (from a Shropshire Lad)
This week: Tim started to read George Eliot’s Middlemarch at last and wondered why it has taken him so long to delve into a book many varied intellects have said is the greatest novel written in the 19thcentury, way outclassing Dickens or Trollope. (the 20th century equivalent, by a country mile, is Ulysses). The book has so much to say to us in the 21st century and it is written in language it is easy to absorb. It is, of course, very long which is why it was originally issued in eight parts, smashing, in 1870, the conventional three-part novel into oblivion. (I have to confess, I still write three-art novels; it has a natural rhythm.)