Culture and division in 'the information age'

Rather than bemoaning the impact social media has had on cultural tensions, we should work to recalibrate the way we rely on it in our personal lives.

The prospect of an AI apocalypse notwithstanding, our technological progress over the last century is something to behold… yet many blame this “information age” for much of our current political and cultural rot.

And it’s easy to see why. A quick perusal on social media makes it pretty obvious our collective hivemind of interconnected digital networks suffers from severe schizophrenia. The division and partisan absurdity on display following the indictment of a specific former president, for example, was so thick this week one could barely navigate the pathways of the world-wide web without a machete in hand.

And that’s to say nothing of the detrimental (and arguably far more serious) threat social media appears to pose for the mental well-being of younger generations. (That being said, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that parents who used to plop their 4-year-olds down with a tablet or smartphone to keep them quiet aren’t at least fractionally responsible for the upcoming generation’s unhealthy addiction to smart phones and social media feeds.)

Nonetheless, it’s still quite difficult to see how something as fundamentally transformative and democratizing as the internet could be anything other than a net-positive for humanity — it’s contribution to our current social dysfunctions notwithstanding.

The internet has made our world — all of its history, the cumulation of human knowledge and all of our cultures — more accessible than ever before. From turning long-distance communication into an effortless endeavor, to expanding the public square well beyond any given city center, the internet has transformed our lives in ways that have bettered the human experience beyond anything history would have thought possible.

The possibilities of our world, as a result, are endless — and our access to new ideas, new information and new experiences are equally infinite. Shouldn’t we, therefore, be experiencing a new era of human enlightenment with such technological advancements, rather than an unhealthy contagion of political tribalism and TikTok dance videos?

Unfortunately, despite access to the great diversity of thought and information available online, people seem more inclined than ever to ensconce themselves in increasingly restrictive cultural and political silos.

Part of the problem is that, despite all our technological prowess, we’re still ruled by the same instinctual cognitive processes as ever. Psychologically, we’re simply not as well equipped for a world of social distance, complex informational economies and impersonal social interaction as we would like to believe.

And much of our current political and cultural rot reflects how unaware we have been of our own personal biases. Our new informational (and entertainment) technologies have exacerbated our tendency to retreat into cultural tribes, and it’s having a profound impact on public discourse as a result.  

Social media algorithms are often identified as the leading cause of our current social dysfunction — being designed to spoon-feed us an ever-more radical diet of our biased preferences. And, to a limited extent, this certainly seems like a reasonable concern.

After all, even the algorithms on entertainment services — such as Amazon, Netflix and other premium content providers — are profoundly powerful. As the journalist and author David McRaney so simply put it, these algorithms know us better than we know ourselves — feeding us suggestions that we might never otherwise consider due to our own cognitive blind spots about what we like and who we are.

To put it simply: Much of what we watch on a streaming service is recommended to us, rather than “discovered” by our own actions — and each time we watch something those recommendations get “better” at keeping us engaged.

The algorithms on social media are, certainly, every bit as creepy, powerful and impressive.

So, while it’s true we have more information and entertainment opportunities at our fingertips than any human being who lived before us, are we actually seeking it out? Or are we merely consuming whatever digital content is served to us by effortlessly effective digital curators?

It’s easy to see how such curated content could contribute to a “radicalization” in something as innately divisive as modern politics. If one enters the world of social media as a conservative, their timeline will spoon feed conservative fodder their way. Enter as a progressive, and one’s timeline will be full of views that comport with the values they already harbor. (Enter as a self-critical teenage girl, and things can get ugly quite quickly.)

As a species, we are already highly tribalistic in how we socialize — and the very same technology that has democratized access to the breadth of human discovery has made such tribalism even easier.

And maybe that’s what is really disturbing about the cultural and political impact of modern technology: It has laid bare just how much control over our own thoughts we have been willing to outsource to others — how much of the world we interact with online is curated content rather than sought-out experiences.

After all, that seems to say far more about the fragility and malleability of our own minds than it does about some creepily insightful algorithm.

The amount of the world we can explore with a few taps on a smartphone makes the internet one of the most impressive democratizing advancements in human history… but it’s effect on our culture is entirely dependent on how we use it as individuals.

Rather than bemoaning the impact social media and the internet has had on social discourse or cultural tensions, we should be recalibrating the way we engage with it in our personal lives. Like any other great gift to mankind — coffee, alcohol, or trans-fatty acids — a greater understanding and recognition of its effect on our wellbeing can allow us to interact with it in a more productive and healthier way.

Intentionally seeking out perspectives that aren’t curated by some algorithm, for example, would be a powerful first step in eroding those intellectual silos in which we so often find ourselves trapped.

At the very least, we might stumble across an unexpectedly entertaining new series to binge-watch over the weekend… which still feels like a pretty big win.