Finn McRedmond: Social media may face a seismic reckoning

We take alcohol, nicotine and gambling addictions seriously. Why don’t we feel the same way about social media? Perhaps because it feels, at least medically speaking, benign. It incurs no great financial cost and seems to inflict little damage on those around us. And it is terribly difficult to quantify the risks associated with spending too much time on Instagram. The whole thing seems rather frivolous.

But this is intellectual complacency we should not tolerate. Terrible harm had been caused by cigarettes before we even found out they were bad for us. Not to mention the dawning realisation that lead was poisonous long after women had powdered their faces and we had lined the walls of our houses with it. Social media poses an existential threat to our communities, our politics and our minds. No matter how innocuous it feels.

The nascent internet promised a lot. Global connectivity and information on a scale never seen before. It delivered, changing the world utterly and irreversibly. But as with all seismic societal shifts it brought with it something not so worth celebrating. Yes, people are more informed now than at any point in human history. But not many have stopped to ask whether that is actually a good thing. And sure, we can forge connections across the world. But is this a model of meaningful relationships or a trivial facade?

Disconnecting from cyberspace

Optimistic delusions about what social media can offer are fading. When the 25-year-old pop star Lorde told the world she deleted social media because her “brain wasn’t working very well anymore” it struck a chord. And when she defiantly sang about disconnecting from cyberspace and throwing her phone in the sea she became a standard bearer of a long overdue movement.

The Government is keeping us in the dark on abortion data

---

Michael McDowell: Putin has overplayed his hand – but is the West bluffing?

---

The Irish Times view on the Graham Dwyer court decision: it had been coming

---

Legislative changes can target misuse of Irish shelf companies by Russians

---

It is not just TikTok. Facebook's founding president Sean Parker has even admitted that addictive properties are baked into the company's model

Teenagers are expressing their resentment too. The video-sharing platform TikTok (replete with one billion monthly users) is increasingly awash with candid videos about young people’s addiction to the app, advice on how to curb it, and testimonies of those who waste hours of their life everyday scrolling through a site designed to keep them hooked. Videos under the description “TikTok addiction” have garnered 199 million views. The kids are worried about this. Who are we to dismiss their concerns as frivolous?

It is not just TikTok. Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker has even admitted that addictive properties are baked into the company’s model. We should hardly need to remind ourselves that no matter what gestures they may make to the contrary, social media behemoths do not have a vested interest in the well being of their users nor in the functionality of their attention spans, but in keeping them obsessed with or dependent on their product. Perhaps we are long overdue a moral panic about all of this.

It is easy to get bogged down in the specifics. Instagram is a platform almost tailor-made to make us feel bad about ourselves, so that we may buy things to feel better. Twitter does not open our mind to opposing worldliest but corrals us into narrower and narrower brackets. TikTok is destroying the attention spans of young people, perhaps to no recoupable levels. And the state of political discourse is ravaged – dragged left and right and back to the centre, tearing at the seams and then nosediving in a race to the very bottom.

Maybe we can preserve the things vital to our humanity while still reaping the benefits of Facebook and TikTok, whatever they might be. But I am sceptical

But perhaps we are missing a bigger picture. Information and connectivity sound like enticing propositions. But were we ever supposed to have constant access to a stream of rolling news? Has any other group in history –excluding world leaders – ever had to receive continuous updates on the likelihood of nuclear war and the unrelenting destruction of climate change? And though social media giants sell themselves on the promise of offering community, time and time again we are shown they are more likely than not to encourage feelings of loneliness and isolation.

Step away

And yet so few of us are prepared to step away, afraid we might lose something. But we cannot rely on Facebook to adapt. Big tech companies, argues Franklin Foer in his book World Without Mind are on a crusade “to mould humanity into their desired image of it”. And we already know what a world moulded by these giants looks like: constant correspondence with no respite for contemplation; polarisation and anger; an intentionally smudged boundary between honesty and purposeful deception.

Maybe we can preserve the things vital to our humanity while still reaping the benefits of Facebook and TikTok, whatever they might be. But I am sceptical.

And perhaps this is inherently conservative-minded, valuing tradition over progress, and needlessly resistant to an unstoppably changing world. But not all traditional values are bad simply because they are old fashioned. And social media, replete with its most insidious trappings, may well face a seismic reckoning.

Because there are something worth holding onto and that is not a world cast in the image of the tech behemoths.