I was having a conversation with one of my best friends earlier this week about the nature of modern society, and I challenged my friend to name the best and worst things about modern society. We didn't get as far as the best thing, but my friend was quite quick to state social media as one of the greatest perils of the way we live now, and naturally being a very active social media user I leapt in to defend it! Although I should clarify that I don't love social media that much; I can very much appreciate its flaws, and I also think the overall quality of it has degraded quite a lot since I started using it in the late 2000s. But I continued to think about this conversation for a while afterwards, and I actually realised that social media is the answer to both questions. It's the best thing about modern society, and also the worst.
According to the Internet, I'm at the very end of the 'millennial' generation, being born in 1993. I always think my generation is quite interesting because we were the first to grow up with the Internet being commonplace, and yet it was also new enough that we can easily imagine a world without it. On reflection, I can see how frightened the generations before us were about the fact we were growing up with the Internet - anyone born before about 2010 can remember being told, over and over again, that we must not, under any circumstances, give out any personal information about ourselves to people we'd met on the internet, not even our real names. I sometimes wonder if they knew back then that they were fighting a losing battle on this, or if they still felt that it could be controlled - whichever one it was, clearly the entire generation took no notice, and within a few short years we were setting up our profiles on Facebook and Twitter, and connecting with people.
I was 14 when I got my Facebook profile in 2008. Now being 30, I've had it the majority of my life, and although I will admit to not always finding it quite as satisfying, I'm still just as active a user as I was when I started out. The reason I don't find it quite as satisfying is that for the most part, I think social media has stopped being user-generated - I like to use it to communicate with friends and keep up-to-date with how people's lives are going even if I go a bit of time without talking to them. This doesn't seem to be what social media is really used for anymore - the majority of things that come up in my feed are paid promotions, the majority of which have very little relevance to me. I also have serious concerns about things like data mining, artificial intelligence training and the fact that the nature of social media is that we are not the consumers, we are the products. All of this is true, and it's harmful.
But having said that, I think it's become quite trendy to bash social media. In fact, I actually think that bashing it is a way for us to justify our continued use of it, almost like how we might feel guilty for buying something on Amazon when we know it's harming an independent business - 'Yes, I do it because it's easier, but I don't like it, honest!' I think this is almost more harmful than continuing to use it in the first place, because in addition to potentially causing harm to someone else, you also grow an increasing amount of dissatisfaction with yourself and your own behaviour. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that actually, I really enjoy my social media presence. I enjoy it to a limit - I don't intend to spend any more time on social media than I already do, and I think I'm unlikely to sign up to any more social media sites other than those I'm already signed up to (hence why I don't have Instagram or TikTok) - but being part of these communities has enriched my life greatly, has caused me to meet new and amazing friends that I'd otherwise never have known, and caused me to reconnect with people I'd long since lost touch with. It has also caused me to have some professional opportunities which I wouldn't have known about were it not for my online contacts.
More to the point, my use of social media has been really beneficial for my involvement in social and political activism. I've got to know when protests are happening largely through Facebook. I've got involved in communities like OCISA, through which I'm campaigning to unseat Keir Starmer, largely through Facebook. I've used Twitter to put pressure on politicians and public bodies. I've learned when important votes are taking place in the House of Commons. I've had online petitions shared with me. I've participated in debates which have caused me to have more core knowledge of subject matters than I ever would have done otherwise. I've shared memes and raised awareness of things during election time, and more besides. And it's largely because of this kind of thing that in 2017, Theresa May and the Conservatives lost their majority in the House of Commons, after being predicted a super-majority in the early days of their campaign. That would not have happened if the mainstream media was our only source of information - it came from user-generated content, and most importantly, our willingness to talk to one another.
The user-generated content aspect has largely died out since 2017, and I think the unexpected result of that election is a big part of the reason for that - the Conservative Party paid social media companies like Facebook a lot of money to target users with dark ads, and the fact that high-quality user-generated content was able to make those dark ads largely defunct surely resulted in a lot of complaints from extremely powerful people. In any case, it is far harder to get people to see your own personal posts now than it was then. But talking to people is something that hasn't died, and this is the point I want to make. It often feels like we're living in one of the most dystopian parts of history there's ever been, and maybe we are, but at the same time, never before has it been this easy to communicate with people we have never met, whose experiences are entirely different to our own and who are geographically a long way away from us. I believe that networking with these kinds of people is absolutely vital for 21st-century life, and that's it's something we should value.
If we're people of privilege, it's hard to quite put ourselves in the shoes of those who aren't - we may know logically that lots of people haven't been as fortunate as us, but if they aren't directly in our circles we don't have that much of a glimpse into what their lives are like. Interacting with these people on social media can be beneficial in that regard. And if we're not people of privilege, if we're oppressed and miserable, it's very easy to think that we're the only ones. But if we can see other people who are in the same boat, it's far easier to speak to them and say, 'Shall we try to do something about this?' And perhaps we can do. So then it's still beneficial.
Here is a list of things that I do not believe would have happened were it not for social media:
-The result of the 2017 UK General Election
-The Arab Spring movement
-The #metoo movement, which has significantly changed our approach to intimacy in the entertainment industries
-Increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ relationships, and demands for equality in this
-Increased awareness of climate change, and more abilities for groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil to form and evolve
-Greater understanding of the context behind global issues like the terrible things currently happening in Palestine
-An ability to reach out to friends if we're struggling with mental health (this one is particularly personal to me because it was something that I found very helpful when I was a teenager, and I know it got a lot of people through the 2020 pandemic)
And yes, acknowledging this does not mean that it's perfect. It is far from perfect - it's run in an overly-capitalist way, by an extremely small group of very powerful people, and there are many things that I would change about the way it operates given the chance. But the comparison I would make is with coffee-houses. I have many issues with companies like Starbucks and Costa Coffee, but that doesn't mean I'm against the existence of coffee-houses generally - in fact, given the opportunities they create for community cohesion, I think they're a positive thing to have on our high streets. I feel the same with social media. Having a lot of issues with the ruthless corporatism of it (which we should have) does not mean we need to object to the technology being there, or that we need to avoid it. I think it's something we can work with, and form our own personal moral compasses about. And I also think that, even if we haven't yet reached a world where our media isn't owned by the powerful, we are so incredibly privileged to live in a world where they don't always create the content we consume. This is something that, if we're going to change the world (hopefully in a socialist way), we are going to need.
I'll just conclude by saying that one thing I've heard quite a lot, from people of many different persuasions, is that conversations online have a tendency to get more heated than they do in person. The justification given for this is that when you're hiding behind a screen, it's easy to detach yourself from the fact that you're talking to a real person, who has feelings and will be affected by what you say. And there is some truth in that, but, like with whether social media is the best or worst thing in society, the opposite is also true. I find that I am a far more thoughtful and considered person online than I am in person. The reason for this is that in person, if someone says something that annoys you, it's easy to get cross with them, and that can lead to having a falling-out and perhaps no one learns anything. But online, if someone hits a raw nerve, you don't have to show them anything more than you want to. You don't have to respond straight away, if you're not ready. You have the time to make yourself a cup of tea, re-read what they said to make sure you didn't misunderstand it, and think about how you're going to write a response which is polite and diplomatic but also doesn't shy away from the truth. I've found this to be a really positive thing for my communication skills, and also for my general control over my emotions. Of course, like everything else about social media, it's a matter of whether you actually choose to use it in that way.
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