The dark world of social-media blamers

Do lots of people think this way? Maybe I’m the one who’s weird.

I have been baffled at post-Neil-Postman logic that our media – social media, nowadays – are the evil dictator akin to Stephen King’s cellphones, destroying our minds, relationships, and society.

Were things so much better back when we relied on carrier pigeons? The Pony Express? Post-it notes? Gossip networks? Why are large segments of the social commentariat so afraid of every new medium from the nickelodeon flicker, radio dial, and TV glare to the video game and internet keyboard, as if razor-fingered Freddy Krueger were about to leap out of the screen gloating, “Welcome to prime time, bitch!”

Some new insight is offered into the frightened world social-media-fearers occupy by Atlantic Magazine contributor Nicholas Carr, who recently acknowledges that his own brain has been rewired. Knowing too much too fast about people we meet online wrecks “fragile” human relationships, he argues.

“Fragile,” of course, has been ridiculed as the pathetic snivel of the student snowflake. This has been quite a 180-degree evolution. Now, the crisis is Too Much Information. Asks Carr:

“What if too much communication breeds misunderstanding rather than understanding, mistrust rather than trust, strife rather than harmony?… With social media, we have constructed a hyperkinetic machine for communication that is more likely to bring out the worst in us than the best… Whereas measured and thoughtful communication tends to produce affection, unbridled and chaotic communication is more likely to produce enmity.”

This is the opposite of my experience with the internet, which I view as a wonderful supplementary tool for information, communication, and expression. My keyboard contains many functions to shut down “unbridled,” “chaotic,” and enmity-producing communications: <delete>, <unsubscribe>, <block user>, etc. One of my favorites:

[OFF].

Unless… you happen to LIKE chaos and enmity. That’s a different problem, far from new.

In any case, computers and phones have many protective functions. Real life doesn’t. If a teenager meets a rapist in a park, in church, sports, a program, etc., the “healthy” outdoors activities to which social-media-fearers would exile teens away from “damaging” social media, the teen can’t hit a <delete> or <block> button.

Carr continues: “When two people first meet, they’re careful about what they reveal about themselves… in healthy relationships self-disclosure is balanced by self-withholding. Privacy matters. Boundaries matter. Human beings need communication, but they also at times need protection from communication.”

True, although good old bar and party drinking accelerates TMI faster than social media. However, Carr leaves out a crucial nuance that goes the other way: self-regulated disclosure also fosters lying and deception, whose consequences for the deceived party range from betrayal and disillusion to physical danger. We can now access advance warnings of “the handshake that hides the snake,” the murderous Mr. Goodbar. The first-date man-god turns out to repost Nazi slogans and pled no contest to spouse beating; the just-met woman-goddess has court hearings for bankrupting credit card debt. Relationship killers, all right.

But Carr’s larger point is that we 21^st century homo sapiens just don’t have the fortitude to handle this level of communication, to evaluate it objectively with the skepticism it merits. We just can’t help ourselves. We succumb too easily to online aggrandizement, Carr insists: “In the physical world, we remain present even when we’re quiet. In the virtual world, we don’t. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. To confirm our existence, we have to keep posting. We have to keep repeating, Here I am!”

I am not possessed of undue maturity, self-discipline, or morality. Still, when I see the bleak barrage of posts on social-media-fearing sites, I want to intercede:

There’s no gun to your head making you destroy yourself online

If you don’t want TMI on someone, don’t go looking for it. If you don’t want information about yourself known, don’t post it. Of course, like the phone klatch, water-cooler gossip mills, and poison pens of the past, anyone can say anything – and cyber networks do spread bad stuff more efficiently. More information merits more skepticism.

It seems simple to me, someone whose online and social media experiences have been stunningly positive. Carr does acknowledge “the many close bonds people have formed online… Facebook posts have kindled or rekindled friendships. Snaps have spawned romances. Exchanges of tweets have opened up into deep conversations. TikToks have inspired feelings of communal joy. Many people who feel isolated or uncomfortable in their physical surroundings have found companionship and a sense of belonging in the internet’s vast, disembodied social scene.”

So, why do social-media fearers who lobby to deny these benefits to teenagers refuse to learn better online habits from… well, the large majorities of teenagers who told Pew Research (2022) that social media helps them feel “more accepted” (58%), connects them to “people who can help them get through tough times” (67%), and keeps them up with “what’s going on in their friends’ lives” (80%)?

As long as those who remain obsessed with the small fraction of teens (9%, Pew found) and adults who lament how bad social media is for them, their misery and fear will persist.

The ultimate disembodied evil

Carr gets to his structural concern: “In online society, moreover, the tempering influence of face-to-face conversation is missing. We can’t read people’s expressions and gestures; we can’t make eye contact. Virtual presence entails physical absence.”

Has Carr heard of videochatting? If you crave enhanced eye contact, expressions, and gestures, install a 55-inch wall monitor. You’ll see what someone is really thinking faster than Freud.

The mammoth irony, though, is that the communications medium truly epitomizing disembodied “physical absence” dominated the past eras today’s social-media-fearers worship.

I grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s. At that time, the ubiquitous instrument, typically several, ruling nearly every home enabled near-instant near-global communication. Its sole format was disembodied voices; no faces, no expressions. Privacy? Ha, ha. The access number for nearly every owner of these instruments was published in public directories everyone (serial killers, bigots, pedophiles, harassers, shady advertisers, malicious pranksters, spammers) had, alongside – get this – the owner’s street address.

Wealthier owners installed separate instruments listed publicly for their “teenagers” – also alongside the home addresses where said teenagers dwelled, affording predatory access choices. Devices for recording conversations bestowed permanence on voiced indiscretions, ideal for everything from party humiliations to legal proceedings.

For decades, this instrument – yes, the voice telephone – enabled routine harassing, threatening, violent, lying, and demeaning communications by both anonymous (difficult to trace) and known callers who knew exactly where their victims were located (how quickly we forget those hundreds of When a Stranger Calls-type films). The voice at the other end of the line could be anyone, saying anything that served their interests; they could even be “inside your house!”

The social toll in those past eras was staggering. Rates of divorce and failed relationships soared during the 1950s-80s era. Apologists who pretend teenhoods back then were convivial and idyllic fantasize that past societies were safer. In fact, social-media America is far less violent and dangerous.

Still, no matter how much mayhem the voice telephone facilitated and how frequently that device was hurled at a wall, I doubt anyone from that era would blame the existence of the phone for their bitter breakup. Nor would anyone blame the telephone for victims stalked, injured, or killed or insist safety and mental health would ensue from total Ma Bell desistance. Nor would ‘50s Americans blame the bulletin board or hallway gossip for wrecking relationships. Nor would 1800s failed romantics blame pen, ink, paper, and primitive postal services and telegraphs for their troubled relationships.

The problem then and now is between people – not the device they use to communicate. However, social-media-fearers (who perhaps speak for most people; I may be the one out of line) seek to convince us that social-media formats are to blame for today’s failing mental health and relationships. We just can’t help overexposing ourselves (just because we can), finding out too much too fast about someone, and believing whatever we see posted online. The sitcom joke of 20 years ago, “they can’t put it on the internet if it isn’t true, can they?” isn’t funny.

My theory of what changed

For a significant number of people – something under 10% of teens and adults if surveys and consistent effect-size analyses are accurate – social media use genuinely exacerbates problems elsewhere in their lives. This fraction has trouble controlling their online habits, as with any addictive or compulsive behavior. Problem users deserve attention and help, but their problems should not be extrapolated to most or all users.

For example, half of the teens who told the 2023 CDC survey that they suffer frequently poor mental health use social media several times a day, compared to just one-third of teens who rarely use social media. Social-media blamers claim that must prove that using social media causes poor mental health.

However, it could just as easily mean that already depressed teens use social media more, either as part of an unhealthy use pattern driven by their other problems or to find contacts and help. Looked at from that standpoint, over 60% of teens who are frequently abused by parents/adults suffer poor mental health, compared to just 15% of non-abused teens. That strongly suggests that being abused, not social media use, drives their depression.

The true direction of the vector causing depression is further indicated by the one-sixth of teens who report being cyberbullied. Of this cyberbullied fraction, 82% in 2021 and 84% in 2023 also reported being psychologically and/or violently abused much more often at home by parents and household adults. Strange how social-media-fearers incessantly deplore cyberbullying but say nothing about the more common parental bullying that closely accompanies it.

So, why do we blame social media?

If only small fractions of teens and adults experience social media problems themselves, and that fraction tends to have larger problems elsewhere in their lives, then what accounts for the large number and popularity of commentaries insisting social media is destroying minds, relationships, politics, and society?

My answer is not edifying. The real problem is not technological determinism – that gadgets force social wreckage on us. Rather, it is the drastic deterioration in adults’ taking responsibility for our actions, a decades-long devolution of adulthood that social-media blamers enable but are not responsible for in its devastating totality.

American adults today, especially those ages 30-60, are more lost, more addicted, more chaotic family-wise, more arrested, and more suicidal and troubled than even the worst rates we attribute to teens. A 40-ager is more prone to criminal arrest, an unheard-of new reality, and 5 times more prone to self-inflicted death than a high schooler. Bizarre, conspiracy-laced attitudes afflict middle-aged grownups far more than the very young. By multiple measures, middle-agers are acting much worse than teenagers in America and across the Anglo world.

Amid the grownup deterioration American authorities cannot discuss for political reasons, seek easy scapegoats are sought, and none are easier than another tiresome round of blaming “teenagers,” “pop culture,” and “media.”

The real fear

Concern over impersonal socializing and dangerous predation, problems far worse in pre-social-media eras, are too ludicrous to be taken seriously. Rather, the real fear seems to be that teens can access disapproved-of information not censored by adults. Social-media-fearers rush straight to porn, but I suspect from the efforts to censor TikTok and other platforms that the real fear is that kids nowadays learn too much about issues like climate change, global conflicts, social injustices, and leaders’ hypocrisies and are able to network faster across diverse communities.

The perception of too many unchaperoned girls and young women getting out in society and succeeding too much – especially those who become assertively “liberal” – inevitably spurs tribal elders to launch fearful campaigns that fragile female psyches and safety must be getting damaged, requiring censorship and “protection.”

I don’t understand the intense, censorious fear many commentators and crusaders have of today’s online media, which has proven a wonderful resource I wish I had growing up in the stifling, closed-off, conventionally-controlled media of the 1960s that uniformly echoed the established order. Perhaps my biggest disagreement is that they view social media as a separate, menacing world, a zero-sum, either-or dichotomy completely divorced from the “real world.” To me, the online world is a terrific resource that supplements and enhances life in the physical world, one I hope children and teenagers will continue to access without fear-driven restrictions.