Social networks kill communication because they look like TV

If I say that social networks helped Donald Trump to win the election, you will think about fake news on Facebook. But even if Facebook corrects the algorithm raising false articles , the problem will remain: social networks demonstrate the advantage of television over other media.

I have warned about this since November 2014, when I was released after 6 years in prison in Tehran. I received the punishment for the active position shown in the online space of Iran. Before prison, I often wrote to blogs in space, which I now call the “open web”: it was decentralized, the text was mostly in it, and there were many references to sources and the abundance of information accompanying the story. He supported different points of view. He was connected to the world of books.
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Then, for 6 years, I went offline, and when I was released from prison, and I returned to online, I met a brave new world: Facebook and Twitter replaced blogs and turned the Internet into television. It became centralized, pictures became the main thing in it, and the content was also in the form of pictures, without links.

And like TV, it more and more entertains us and reinforces existing beliefs and habits. Instead of thoughts, it activates our senses, and offers comfort instead of trials. As a result, we get a highly fragmented community, driven by emotions, radicalized by the absence of external contacts and trials. Therefore, the Oxford dictionary called the word “ post-truth ” [post-truth]: it is an adjective associated with circumstances in which objective facts make public opinion worse than emotional appeals. "

Neil Postman [Neil Postman] gave a few hints about this in his 1985 explanatory book “Entertaining ourselves to death: public discussions in the era of show business” [Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business]. A media researcher at New York University saw even then how television turned public discussion into an exchange of inconsistent emotions that were mistaken for questioners. As Postman wrote, one of the most frightening consequences of this change will be the transformation of news into misinformation. “ Misinformation is not false information . It is misleading information - inappropriate, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial - information that creates the illusion of knowledge, but actually leads away from it. The problem is not that television offers us entertaining us themes, but the fact that all themes are presented as entertainment. " Postman argued that if the news turns into a form of entertainment, they lose their benefits to a healthy democratic society. “My statement is much more serious than the fact that we are deprived of true information. I say that we are losing the feeling of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance can be corrected. But what if we take ignorance for knowledge? ”

The problem with today's Internet, leaving the text with links, is that it not only shares many television diseases, but also creates new ones. The difference between traditional television and what emerged in the form of social networks is that the latter are personalized media. Traditional television retains an element of surprise. What you see on TV is chosen by the editors, and although the programs must be entertaining in order to correspond to the high cost of their production, they can still challenge our opinions (that is, emotions).

Social networks, on the contrary, use algorithms to create an atmosphere of comfort and helpfulness, since their business model is based on maximizing the time spent by the user on the network. Who wants to stay in a place where everyone seems to be negative, rude and disapproving? The result is the spread of emotions, their radicalization and fragmented society. This is much more dangerous because the idea of ​​democracy is based on informed complicity.

What can be done? Of course, the appearance of Trump cannot be attributed solely to technology or social networks. The phenomenon lies in another: the media and technology do not create anything, they only distort, reject and destroy. Without growing inequality, the disappearance of the middle class, the threat to jobs from globalization, etc., neither Trump, nor Berlusconi, nor Brexit would have appeared. It is necessary to stop believing that any evolution of technology is natural, inevitable, and therefore positive. In order to remain intelligent animals, we need more text than videos. According to Postman, books are in fact more adapted to the transmission of complex concepts that stimulate thinking. We need to write and read more, put more links, and watch less TV and videos. And also spend less time on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

If we cannot resist this, and the algorithms do not give us different or opposing views on things, we should try to look for them ourselves. We can read people or pages that social networks do not recommend to us by keywords. We can confuse their algorithms, like what we do not like, so that they give out a more disparate stream. We can encourage social networks to disclose the details of their algorithms and make them customizable, and also allow us to respond to the recordings with the mind, not with the heart: we need the buttons “agree / disagree”, or “ believe / suspect ” and not “like / dislike ".

Our habits and emotions kill us and our planet. Let's resist this dangerous call.