President Biden is said to be using Tik Tok to support his presidential campaign and Donald Trump argues that Facebook is the enemy of the people. I think that Biden is being practical and Trump is correct. Having said that, I believe that the principal problem is not social media itself, but instead, a flaw in the human psyche, akin to its' appetite for drugs. Social media channels like Tik Tok and Facebook are but enablers as is crack and fentanyl. Humans are intellectually cowardly and lazy and drugs are mistakenly thought to be a solution.
I do not blame Biden for using Tik Tok to reach young Americans, just as I do not blame Trump for using Truth Social to reach his base. Both politicians are dealing with the world as it exists and would be remiss if they failed to do so. The people that I "blame" are you and me. Our use of narcotics, and that definitely includes both fentanyl and social media, is destroying us. Americans, in particular, are prone to seek escape from reality because we are ignorant, pampered, intellectual cowards, but the fundamentals are born into all humans.
As I look at social media, I ask myself what it is about it that is so addictive and I conclude that it is the algorithm that learns what we want to be served, provides that, and then adds in its message primarily by curating content. Control the algorithm and you control thought, or at least what passes for thought. I was alive when the internet was born and social media invented. I wrote code in the simplistic early days and could manipulate search engines like Alta Vista with "meta tags." My involvement faded rapidly as "code" became more obtuse, and I failed to see what was happening, because my interests were elsewhere.
In the early days of social media, I actually advised my clients not to waste time or money on it as its' content was infantile and nobody of substance would waste their time on it. One day, one of my clients informed me that she was losing one of her clients because a competitor of mine offered her a presence on Facebook. I remember saying that I would put her business on Facebook, even though it would do no real good. I did that and within an extraordinarily short period of time learned how wrong I had been. Cutting to the chase, I now consider social media to be a, if not the, principal way Americans communicate.
The social media guru's mantra is that your message must be short on words and long on imagery, because the human attention span is impossibly short and you are a click away from obscurity if you do not instantly grab your viewer's attention visually. My own experience in social media is a bit more nuanced that this, but I agree that it is the common perception and does indeed govern social media today. The amazing part of the whole thing is that you can tell so much about a person by looking at his or her social media presence, to include not only the content of the pages that they control, but also the content being served to those pages. I am tempted to make the argument that, in many cases, the algorithm knows the person better than the person does himself or herself.
All of that is history and it is bad enough, but we are now at the stage of the game where the algorithm is actually grooming the human. That is definitely Orwellian and, I argue, contrary to humanity's fundamental interests. Tik Tok is front and center for a lot of reasons related to it's effectiveness and it's Chinese ownership, but all of social media is doing the same things that Tik Tok does, the only difference being the intent of the people that develop and maintain the algorithm and their sophistication.
Most social media algorithms are controlled by liberal leaning individuals, but conservative and renegade individuals are awakening to the opportunities presented and nations are beginning to get into the act - China at the forefront, but Russia and Iran are not far behind, if less sophisticated. My own concern relates to the cumulative impact, rather than the partisan effect, of social media and its' algorithms. What is happening is that we are arguing about who controls the algorithm, not the fundamental change that is happening in the way in which we relate to one another.
It is important to note that I choose to write this blasphemy on a blog, not on a social media platform. The reason is that the social media algorithm will literally not permit me to spread this blasphemy on any of the channels that it controls. I fully expect the blog loophole to be closed at some point in the future. The underlying enemy of humanity being the computer.
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