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This talking about #mentalhealth and social media suggests that social media has led us to be unhappy because we see others unrealistically. I'd argue that the change between 2000 and now is more that we see each other more clearly and that confuses and discomforts us
Being able to see others we've never met, in real time, I'd suggest shook many people's long held ideas about what other people are actually like. Far from a retreat from reality, I think social media has instead been a constant cold splash of awful reality.
I mean, social media as the wellspring of unrealistic expecations about life? Does no one remember what used to be on telly before the 2000s? Or in glossy magazines? Social media, I think, has encouraged us all to think of ourselves as participants in a much bigger world
And, I think, that sense of social media as the world in your pocket happening now in which we, somehow, play a role is what has made us all feel a bit out of control. We didn't, and often don't, know what this new connection asks of us and how we rest our conscience in it
I think that it's right to say social media has been a massive change to our psychic life. And I also think it's right to say the way platforms and devices work has changed how it feels to 'be' in the world. But I don't think it's right to say that's about unrealistic selfies
One of the things we weren't prepared for with social media was endemic context collapse, the new reality where events, knowledge, words, video can no longer be guaranteed to survive in the context they were intended. We weren't ready for seeing things we wouldn't otherwise
We really weren't ready for social media to expose us to people, ideas, and sentiments for which we didn't have a cushioning context to understand them. 'Online' removed the filtration of ideas, events, people which previous let us opt out of 'knowing' or have others know for us
That's where the 'filter bubbles' argument was a bit wrong I reckon. All filter bubbles result from the implicit knowledge of what they're trying to avoid seeing, not ignorance of that. People double down not in ignorance, but in the wish to maintain it in face of mass of stuff
The way I think about it is that knowing and seeing too much, or being exposed to other people's awfulness, online is what people are retreating from. Much online 'knowingness' is based on response to extreme examples of others we don't feel we have much in common with
Social media has made everything feel right up in our faces, because we don't feel passive. We have problems of scale, of being able to know whether something is a massive thing or just something one person said one time. The attention economy hacks our sense of perspective
I also think what we weren't ready for the way social media gave us direct access to complete strangers and complete strangers access to us without boundaries between us. And the freedom to be ourselves to and with others without direct cost, both positively and negatively
I think, ultimately, the question with social media we ask ourselves every day looking at what others do in social media is: when you had the choice to do or be anything you want, why did you choose to be or do THAT? We see others we would have actively avoided
I think social media has done a massive thing in infinitely increased the number of data points from which any of us draw our consensus of how the world and the people in it are. We used to do that face to face and through authoritative sources we trusted. Now: different
It comes back to perspective, and way that it's very difficult to filter signal from noise. Even when we filter bubble, we do that as an action in response to our desire to escape the constant churning moving exposure to things we didn't ever want to know about or to experience
I think this is why it's amazingly easy to shift people's view of the world via social media by appealing to their most visceral reactions. Weaponised disgust is a massive one, as is panic. Social media can make us feel contaminated by the lives, desires and ideas of others
I do think Tim Lott has point about unrealistic expectations fostered by social media, but I don't think it's about instagramming your dinner and retouched selfies. I think it's the desperate task of maintaining perspective in the face of this confusion of others and information
Too often the logic of social media becomes 'do be a dick'. Social media doesn't exist outside of prejudice, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia. But the same technologies allow people to come together regardless of whether they express hatred or kinship. Or kinship in hatred
For anyone who's interested, I've written quite a bit on what positive things social media has made possible for people experience #mentalhealth difficulties. I'd not be doing any of this without it. Have a read here: centreformentalhealth.org.uk/sites/default/…
