How social media mediates our interactions with each other and ourselves

Whether we like it or not, digital spaces are where activism and social movements can find their expression and be effective. Online social spaces have connected people from disparate localities and provided environments to share information and ideas.

While these technological tools have provided new social spaces for human interaction, we must understand their architecture to realise the limitations, negative impacts and pitfalls of their use.

The question is how do we navigate these new spaces without succumbing to their predatory economic incentives, along with their effects on our social and self relations.

“Real problem with humanity is that we have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, god-like technology” — E.O Wilson

Our online lives are mediated by corporate entities. The tools we use aren’t benign or provided to us disinterestedly, they have a vested interest in commodifying our time. This is what the Center for Humane Technology calls “extractive attention economy”. These corporations are set up to exploit and overwhelm human weaknesses in a race to the bottom of the brainstem. Their incentive is to hack and reverse engineer human instincts in order to capitalise on our time. There is an asymmetry of power to manipulate us into getting addicted to getting attention.

Although platforms like facebook, youtube and instagram market themselves as egalitarian, their inherent structure within a capitalist market-based economy throws this humane-washing into doubt. The appearance of a space for the commons is quickly supplanted with private economic interests, a sleight of hand which opens us up to willingly share and expose ourselves to these tech behemoths.

There is no denying that these platforms can facilitate good, we wouldn’t be utilising them for activism if they weren’t. But the deleterious effects could be hindering how we are most effective.

The structure of these new hyper-social environments has colonised how we see our relationships and ourselves. They are predicated on overwhelming who we are, downgrades our identity to archetypes and undermining our free will. While we’ve been upgrading our machinery, we’ve been downgrading our empathy.

Former design ethicist at Google, Tristan Harris, who founded the Time Well Spent movement, and co-founder of the independent non-profit organization Center for Humane Technology notes that the problems manifest as; digital addiction, mental health, breakdown of truth, polarisation, political manipulation and superficiality.

All of this leads to downgrading our; attention spans, relationships, community, habits, nuance, critical thinking, mental health, creativity, intimacy, self-esteem, productivity, common ground, shared truth, mindfulness, governance and values.

So how do we navigate these spaces and use them effectively for activism without damaging ourselves and our message in the process?

Activism in digital spaces

Polarisation

One of the most glaring aspects of social media is rampant tribalism and vitriol. The goal of engaging people through primal reactions such as fear and anger trivialises the issues and heightens in-group out-group dynamics. This is not happening because humans are inherently bad or evil, it’s happening because of artificial social systems that have hijacked and overpowered human nature. Digital spaces don’t allow for the empathy of real-world human-human interactions. As soon as we remove physical social cues and subtlety it brings out the worst in us.

“Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have built a remarkable new public square. Yet these platforms can be confusing at the very times when people most need solid information, because tech platforms don’t have a clear business reason to evaluate truth.”[1]

This is existential as it rots our capacity for making positive change and degrades experiences that help us find common ground. We probably agree on more than we think, but social media inhibits the social environments for shared understanding. Defensiveness becomes the default position, which almost never results in a shift of perception. By changing the language and content we are exposed to daily, with algorithms feeding us what we ‘want’ to see, our worldview shrinks, affirming us to entrench our position and slander anyone who dares question it.

Social and media technologies, optimised for the diffusion of highly emotive, reaction-generating content, encourage a rapid trade in attention-grabbing ideas over slower-burning systematic, contextualised thinking [2].

Attention and cognition are the foundation on which all our capacities depend — our ability to think, to concentrate, to solve problems, and be present with each other. Technology’s constant interruptions and precisely-targeted distractions, which have been designed to keep us more engaged with tech products, are taking a major toll on these critical functions [1].

It is this polarisation that fuels some of the violent rhetoric (and real-world fallout) we see. Individuals who are isolated or in some way primed to adopt harmful ideology are then further exposed to material with entrenches these views by way of the algorithm simply serving up more of the same. We know that familiarity influences the brain to view something as more positive, and repeated exposure to hateful ideas as well as the sense of increased belonging to a group cements these ideas as part of an individual’s identity and means of viewing future information. Of course the same is true for movements that are progressive — but the algorithm is not interested in the value of the information, only your continued engagement with the platform.

As activists, the algorithm continues to feed us violent imagery and the callous indifference, or even mocking celebration of violence which fuels our sense of isolation and sense of “us vs them”. These individuals we see as actively supporting speciesism or other violent ideologies have undergone the same process of isolation, reaffirmation of their views, and exposure to representations of prototypical activists… and then we all duke it out in the comments, rewarding the algorithms and organisations that view engagement as currency.

Breakdown of truth

Truth is what activists are seeking to reveal. Anti-speciesist activists rely on truth-telling to reveal the atrocities non-human animals are subjected to on a daily basis. Unfortunately, in the current political and technological environment it has become harder than ever to separate fact from fiction.

The reputational impact of the fake news issue has been predominantly borne by digital and social media channels: 58 percent now trust social media coverage of politics and elections less and 41 percent trust online-only news sources less [3].

Information is more readily available than ever before, and with the breakdown of institutional authority over that information, people have the ability to share and reach a larger audience than was ever possible without this democratising technology. While this can obviously be used for good, it can also have detrimental effects if we aren’t diligent.

Whilst we want to believe that individuals adopting veganism are more critical of information, after all, they were able to reject socialisation tactics which normalise speciesism, the fact is that they are just as susceptible to ‘fake news’ and misinformation. Indeed, in some regards, they are more prone to some forms. The knowledge of the awful things done to non-humans makes inaccurate or downright false claims of atrocities perfectly believable — as do phony health claims or tangential issues such as vaccination distrust. Because these individuals are perfectly primed to distrust authorities which have been documented committing atrocities or turning a blind-eye to damaging practices in order to maintain profit, unverified and scaremongering thrives as individuals fail to apply critical thinking to information they are presented. We have observed this happening in our own circles with anti-vaxxers openly espousing vaccination as dangerous or nefarious, and when we started a satirical news project, many vegans interacted with the blatantly false (and silly!) information as if it were real. Of course so did many non-vegans but this was troubling to observe.

Being critical is how we became aware of the speciesist world we inhabit, but failure to maintain critical reasoning when engaging with the bombardment of information makes us susceptible to falling for and further propagating, information that is incorrect — and which does not engender trust in the movement more broadly. As history shows, movements with poor critical reasoning are susceptible to campaigns that sow internal distrust and result in fractures, infighting, and loss of unity — at the expense of achieving social change. It is also a fact that misinformation is used as an excuse or a form of a “gotcha” to discredit a broader message. This is why individuals will fight about the minutiae of a source rather than the broader idea precipitating it — if the source is incorrect, if there are claims that cannot be verified or supported, the whole message is disregarded. This is especially true when in discourse with individuals who hold polar-opposite views. A technicality is enough for them to reject your view and re-affirm their own position.

Self relations in digital spaces

Being aware of what the digital spaces we use are doing to our social relations and effectiveness as activists is crucial. Learning what they are doing to our personal relations is also key.

Superficiality

A social system built on likes and shares prioritises shallowness over depth, we see this in social justice activism all too often. When individuals or groups are seeking shallow validation they usually reiterate the normative cultures value systems, which are what get rewarded in these environments. This means commodifying their identities and activities, showing a curated selection of lifestyle choices or engaging real-world activities that fit a certain narrative and aesthetic. This is problematic for activism as it leads to hero worship, the cult of personality, saviorism, performativity and shifts the focus to what gets likes instead of what’s important.

This isn’t to say that representations of lifestyle shifts can be important in shaping a movement and showing lived alternatives, but in the case of anti-speciesism no amount of smoothie bowls are going to achieve animal liberation. Further to that, the majority of “successful” individuals are echoing the privilege of the real-world with access to excess time and resources. Valorising and praising their activities is ableist, classist and further engenders these inequalities. This superficiality is especially harmful to individuals who feel unsupported or isolated in a movement as it creates unachievable standards they may feel they must strive towards — or rejection of a movement as being a privileged space in which they are unwelcome. It also facilitates the commodification of a movement which undermines the capacity to oppose structural barriers to liberation.

Mental health, digital addiction, and burnout

Social media has altered the field of social comparison from operating mostly at a real-world transient scale of a few hundred people to one that is global, permanent and media-scale. We constantly face a battle for our attention, with social validation linked to self-image this can create a maelstrom of negative feedback loops between pleasure-seeking and addiction.

Social media can help people when they are isolated or lonely, but it also constructs an artificial social reality that can be deleterious to our mental wellbeing. Some evidence shows that when people use social media a lot, they’re more likely to be isolated, stressed, and depressed [2].

This technology has also provided us with new tools for long-distance correspondence that was not previously possible. But these conversations are mediated and interrupted by the technology itself, creating a less emotional connection and carrying a higher risk of misinterpretation. It is this breakdown of the interpersonal that creates junctures and impasses that lead to frustrations and don’t fully replace real-world connectivity.

All of these factors combined can give us pause in our own personal use and organisational use of social media. If we want to be effective is it the best use of our time to engage for so many hours on these platforms that will probably lead to burnout? Online arguments seem to run in circles and exponentially increase feelings of what vegan psychologist Clare Mann calls “vystopia”. Vystopia is defined as “Existential crisis experienced by vegans, arising out of an awareness of the trance-like collusion with a dystopian world.”

Burnout is also prevalent in activist circles, and from our own experiences, social media can only exacerbate these feelings if not managed. Having a comment storm of irate dog breeders who are positively apoplectic with rage because you protested a dog show is not a situation that will be improved through engagement. If anything, it amplifies your exhaustion and frustration whilst failing to change their entrenched views. Within our own activism, whilst we obliged to use social media to share our message and organise resistance to speciesism as it occurs in our city, we have learned that excessive engagement through these platforms are fruitless and harmful to us as activists. They represent wasted hours that could be better used for reflection, self-care and downtime, and active creation of resources.