Andrew Coyne: The pessimists might be right, social media may have plunged us into a new dark age

Andrew Coyne

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The Cambridge Analytica scandal is the latest in a series of incidents that, taken together, have contributed to a rising sense of alarm over the effects of social media — on human behaviour, on civil discourse, on democratic politics. A growing number of commentators have concluded that social media — shorthand for Facebook, Twitter and Google — are more a force for harm than good, whether in their own lives or society at large. Certainly the effects are not trivial. Whether or not you think the more underhanded uses of social media — fake news, Russian bots, or the exploitation of improperly obtained personal data to compile detailed psychological profiles of tens of millions of voters — decided the course of the last U.S. presidential election, they plainly were of some importance, or those responsible would not have gone to such lengths to deploy them.

And stretching far beyond overt abuses of social media are those effects that arise from their ordinary, everyday use, by hundreds of millions of subscribers:

– the polarization of society into “silos” of ideological or identity-group affinity;

– the coarsening of debate, when partisans of one group or another fling insults back and forth from behind a wall of anonymity; the self-censorship many observe on controversial subjects out of fear of being “mobbed”; at best the dumbing down of complex subjects, within the confines of 140- or 280-character limits;

– the spread of false information, bigotry, lunatic ideologies and conspiracy theories, and even more the validation of these, when formerly isolated individuals discover, to their excitement, that they are not alone;

– the addictiveness of social media, and the isolation from ordinary social interactions that can result, especially paired with the ubiquity of mobile phones — and yet the empty, depressed sense that many report they are left with afterwards.

Oh yes, and the devastation of vast swaths of my business, which you may regard as either good or bad. 

Even were none of these the case, the size and dominance of the major social media players would be cause for concern. Wherever so much power rests in the hands of so few, the potential for abuse is obvious.

And yet, even as I write this, I am conscious of a contrarian knee jerking. Surely all this fear is overblown. Surely this is yet another in a long list of “moral panics” that have arisen through the centuries, especially over new technologies, only to recede over time. Didn’t Socrates himself bemoan the advent of reading, on the grounds that it would make it unnecessary for people to carry knowledge around in their heads, in the same way folks today worry that “Google makes us stupid”?

And indeed for every piece fretting about the impact of social media you will find two pieces to the contrary. Ordinarily, I would be drawn to the latter camp. There is, after all, a vast industry of alarmism on every conceivable subject with the media at its core, devoted, as the great H. L. Mencken described it, to menacing the public “with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” Economic coverage, in particular, is prone to this: while most economic changes are good for some interests and bad for others, we hear only from the latter group, a phenomenon aptly summarized in the sardonic maxim that “all economic news is bad.”

And yet there is something else at work, I think, in a lot of the contrarianism: a belief, not only that social media are unlikely to have the kinds of dire impacts their critics fear, but that it is impossible that they could; that the pessimists must always and necessarily be wrong; that because previous fears have proved unfounded, any fear must be unfounded.

Which suggests to me an opposite danger, of an unfounded complacency. Sometimes, that is, the pessimists are right. It is not always or inevitably true that there is no new thing under the sun, or that every situation is the same. Maybe this is another one of those needless panics. But we should not automatically assume it is, merely because people are panicked.

Didn’t Socrates himself bemoan the advent of reading, on the grounds that it would make it unnecessary for people to carry knowledge around in their heads?

Of course, many of the pessimists display a kind of complacency of their own: the problem is real, they say, and the government should fix it, by some regulatory means or other. The prime minister, for example, has threatened to impose his own solution to the “fake news” problem, if Facebook and Twitter do not do so themselves.

But just because a problem can be identified doesn’t mean it can be remedied — by government, by anyone. We don’t like to admit this, but some problems have no solution, or none at an acceptable cost: the last thing we need is the government deciding what is false news and what is true.

It’s entirely possible, in sum, that social media has plunged us irrevocably into a dark and frightening age of unreason. And it’s entirely possible there is nothing we can do about it. I don’t say either is necessarily true. I only say we should not assume both are untrue, as I fear we are inclined to do. We have to confront the possibility that things can get worse, as well as better.

Contrarianism is a hell of a drug: it’s fun to mock other people’s fears, especially fear of the new. (Insert “old man yells at cloud” graphic here.) Add in the natural human desire for things to work out for the best, and the even stronger human desire for narrative — the townsfolk were faced with daunting challenges, but prevailed — and you have a recipe for a lot of wishful thinking.

One of these times the doomsayers are bound to be right. The story of the boy who cried wolf, if memory serves, ends with the wolf devouring the boy.