I have a love/hate relationship with connective technology.
My phone, the internet, social media…all that stuff is, to a great extent, absolutely necessary to my job, my musical side projects, and my consumption of news. I enjoy keeping up with distant friends, streaming music and movies for enterainment, having access to infinite products and services should I need them,and, of course looking at the occasional picture of a cute cat.
All that said, I really hate it most of the time.
The constant flow of unreliable information, the always-connected nature of the thing, the performative framing of how we present ourselves out there; the fact that whenever I need to talk to someone, they’re invariably staring at their phone looking at the latest YouSnapTokGramFace thing and it’s a challenge to compete with that for their attention; it really, as they say, grinds my gears, and I hate that something so frustrating is, from certain perspectives, necessary.
In fact, sometimes it’s damned useful. When I have a gig or a new musical release I’m trying to promote, social media, in particular, Facebook, is the most effective means of getting the word out there. It’s where the audience is.
It’s also pretty much unrepentantly evil. It started out as a means for pre-incel college bros to rate how f*ckable their female classmates were. Now, as a monopolistic behemoth encompassing billions of data points users, it optimizes its algorithms for engagement an clicks, and what gets the most clicks and eyeballs is negative, agressive, and hostile content. And the company (as well as all the others) encourages this, because it increases stock prices and produces revenue, since the actual business social media companies are in is not “encouraging connection between people,” it’s selling relevant ad space (based on ridiculously detailed demographic data on everyone, including people who don’t even have an account on the service) to advertisers looking to push their products on receptive audiences.
If you’re not paying for the product, it’s likely that in reality, you are the product.
It’s really that negativity, that provocative content that often has very little to do with facts or reality driving clicks, that gets me. The semi-anonymity (at least amongst the products) encourages negativity and outsized reactions, in concert with the performativity and quick-hit reward one gets from the attention they receive by going some level of “viral.” The fact that a relatively small group of people have managed to make a living as an “influencer” only intensifies the performance, as it teases the possibility of financial gains from being an internet asshole.
And the companies, like nearly all elements of a late-stage capitalist system, apart from some basic lip service about “community” and “responsibility,” encourage the negativity in order to deliver short-term gains to shareholders, without regard for any sort of social responsibility. It’s a never-ending spiral into the kinds of corporate dystopia certain artists envisioned back in the 80s when all this shit started, what with all the “Greed is Good” and “Trickle-down” zeitgeist that, nearly 50 years later, has thoroughly convinced a significant minority of Americans to work against their own self-interests and deny the basic reality put before them.
That last paragraph went a little off-track, because the picture is bigger; it’s not only the negative influences of social media and technology that’s got us into this mess, but it’s certainly contributing to the issues by amplifying them.
For my part, knowing that I can really only affect change to a limited extent at the societal scale, look inward to myself. While my livelihood and my hobbies depend to a great extent on the technology backbone we call “the internet,” I make what efforts I can to unplug from the constant social media barrage where I can. Actions as simple as putting my phone in another room when I go to sleep at night; reading books rather than doomscrolling (and although I use an e-reader/tablet for many books these days, I purposely keep the device social-media free); going outside and spending time in nature, and not leaving the background noise on all the time. It works for me; the constant data feed stresses me out (as data shows it does to everyone), and I’m spending more and more time putting some distance between us; trying to take advantage of the benefits of 21st century technology and minimize the drawbacks.
It’s hard, but it feels worth it.
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In terms of meta-commentary on this whole topic, I’m aware of both the irony of bitching about the internet on the internet (and in fact pay to have this little piece of it to myself, but at least I avoid being the product), and that a lot of this sounds, as certain people have told me, like “old man yelling at cloud,” but I believe its a valid concern. Sure, the generations that have come after me grew up with this stuff, and it’s an inseperable part of their life in a way it isn’t for me, even if I stepped into the internet pond *very* early, before the WWW existed.
From this perspective, though, I’ve got a somewhat unique viewpoint; I see the benefits of the technology; occasionally get excited about it, but at the same time, feel frustration with it as it displaces other things, because I saw what things looked like before, and, to some extent, mourn that time that no longer exists while recognizing the inevitability of change.
Maybe I am just yelling at clouds. Oh well. I’ve got this onion right here to tie on my belt as well.
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This bit of writing was, at least in part, inspired by the first episode of Offline, that I stumbled on entirely by accident while listening to stuff in the car yesterday. It was interesting, though I kind of wished it leaned into the irony of talking about internet negativity through the vehicle of the internet, but glass houses, stones, etc.
