Not long ago, and not so far away, getting an education was essential to becoming an accomplished human being. Not only as a means to an end – having a profession and making a good living and so on– acquiring knowledge, more than formal education, was the real game-changer; and even more, it was a life's purpose. Knowledge, to use a more current value, was cool once.
But much has changed since then. The world has become interconnected, and once we had the opportunity to exchange knowledge in scale, things took a different turn. Instead of elevating the conversation, social media turned everything into a non-stop water cooler chat. Basically, we lowered everyone's bar. The digital social media-powered society leveled us to the lowest expression on human exchange: gossiping, narcissism, and passing judgment.
The millennium and Gen Z generation, who haven't experienced the world differently, learned culture through Google and copy/paste. Then the likes came making things simultaneously more shallow and polarizing. Feeding our constant narcissistic hunger, likes became a measurement of popularity and entertainment. The more entertaining, the more popular we became. And when we don't have much to share but what's is going on in our own belly buttons, social media became, like Laurie Anderson would say, a platform for people screaming loudly, "Look at me! Look at me!".
Ten years ago, I read Neal Garber's amazing "Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality"– if you want to have an idea of how we got here, this book is a must. So, after finish reading the 244 pages book, what was the first thing that I did? I posted this quote on Facebook:
"We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism. "
Facebook reminded me of this post last week. And it made me realize that while Gabler's was totally on point, back then I thought things were already reaching a tipping point. I was wrong.
Fast forward to 2021, Americans spent more than an average of 1,300 hours on social media, according to a new study from Uswitch. It's the equivalent of 54 entire days! Of course, one can argue that since last year the pandemic pressured us to increase our screen time, but still, it's a staggering number anyway.
On the positive side, social media helped people to get more engaged in activism too. Covid-19, the death of George Floyd, and an upcoming presidential election were just a few of the things that have called Americans to action, making 2020 the summer of protest, both online and offline.
But while social media helped to get people more engaged on social issues, that doesn't mean they are more knowledgeable about social topics. Also, social movements fueled by social media are not new. The Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movements occurred in the early 2010s, making them the predecessors of the 2020s progression into digital activism. The most significant criticism to the Occupy movement was the lack of a clear agenda. To many people, fair or not, it looked like a bunch of kids protesting for the sake of it only. Similar criticism was extended to the people trying to look cool while live streaming on Instagram from the Black Lives Matter marches and celebrities posting inspirational quotes supporting the movement. It looked disingenuous self-promotion.
The problem seems to be the past. Not the memory of a more challenging time, instead, the absence of it. Millennials and Gen Z have no recollection of the social movements and the cultural, economic, and political turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s. And what they've learned in school was copied and pasted from Google to pass exams. Therefore, there's no acquiring or knowledge retention.
So how do we learn from it without experience, memory, or fundamental understanding of what happened in the past? And how can we imagine a different future if we can't learn from the mistakes of the past?
No wonder a decade after Occupy Wall Street, connected as ever before, society hasn't achieved substantial gains on social matters. In fact, we have regressed. The 1% only got richer – look at Musk and Besos fortune growth over 2020 – and the right wave wing that took over the planet in the 2010s only contributed to global social and economic disparity.
While we have been entertaining ourselves and feeding our narcissistic hunger for attention, the world has become shallower and more ignorant. And because of it, increasingly more dangerous.
It is very timely that last week the Facebook whistleblower has disclosed evidence that social media network is just as toxic as we thought– The New Yorker called it The Moral Bankruptcy of Facebook.
While I write this and plan to post it on Facebook, I'm thinking of the irony and hypocrisy of doing so. I feel somehow defeated as I wonder if the only way out is opting out of society altogether? But I'm forcing myself to try to learn something out of this. I still believe that knowledge is the real game changer.