💡 SMog, or Social Media Fog

[kesbeacon]

Back in Let artists shrug, I mentioned that social media has a way of collapsing ‘place you go to vent and talk out your fears’ and ‘place you make coherent policy proposals and analyses’ into one spot, and managed to stop myself going off on that tangent. But there’s always another post, so let’s go!

I first started thinking about this after reading a Tumblr post from someone getting annoyed with how creatives were talking about the gimmicky tech exploitation Thing du jour (either NFTs or AI) because nobody’s going to listen to you if you just whine about X issue with the Thing! This isn’t a coherent way to formulate arguments and policy! It’s driving me up the wall how you miss the low-hanging fruit arguments to counter the Thing and go all in on arguments that normal people will never understand! Don’t you get it, you’re holding us back!!

And it made me mad, and that made me think. (The motto of this series?)

I had the immediate knee-jerk feeling that this person wasn’t being fair. Many, perhaps most, people posting about the Thing were not doing it as a way to persuade or put forward coherent policy proposals. They were scared, they were venting, they were mocking it with their friends, whatever – they were chattering in what, unfortunately, passes for a virtual town square. It’s not really fair to say ‘shut up, only people with coherent arguments or proposals can talk here.’

But this applies far beyond that singular issue. I mentioned the endless merry-go-round of arguments about voting Democrat in the US in the last post, but you also see it across a huge range of social justice issues and things people think are social justice issues. Some people want to make fun, some people want to put forward coherent analyses and proposals, some people want to fite, some people want to be right, some people want to make money, some people want validation, some people want to persuade, some people want to sow confusion. All of that is… pretty normal. Pretty unavoidable, to be honest. But so many people seem to think that their own way of using the social media public space is The Correct One and everyone else is Doing It Wrong.

Do I have a coherent proposal to fix this? I’m not sure,* but I’d tentatively diagnose a key contributor to the problem being narrowed horizons. To take one example, people fight about politics on social media as though that’s the only place you can make change, when in reality it’s one of the most difficult places to make change. Like, I get it, I came up in the digital social justice scene of the late 00s and early 10s when we all thought this was where we’d change the world, and I learned a lot – a lot of people did. But even then, we were probably less effective that we thought – especially as a lot of us got diverted into fandom infighting – and the internet’s changed since then.

(Is it useless for social change and social activism? Absolutely it is not. There is still plenty of good and vital work happening online. But that work does not seem to me to look how many ‘internet activists’ think it does.)

It’s narrowed, just a handful of dominant websites which can fuck you over with a single algorithmic decision, cutting you off from whatever you’re trying to use the platform to do. But it also seems so hard to step outside of that sphere into the fog of uncertainty. This is by design. Those websites profit from us not knowing where else to go to meet our needs, whether digitally or in person. So I guess my only message is to remember that social media is not the world. There are other spaces, digital or physical, that we can find or create.

*That’s not the point of this series. The point of this series is to put stray thoughts into an order so they can stop bugging me.