When social media first emerged it was a wonderful opportunity to broaden connections and maintain contact with people I value.
Sadly, it has become an incredibly antisocial mechanism in our culture. I still deeply value the contact and connections, but I am incredibly frustrated and honestly worried about the other things I see.
Nowhere else are people so prone to generalize and demonize others, giving themselves permission to despise and hold in contempt both groups and individuals.
Nowhere else is it so easy and accepted to speak, or write, cruelly in the visibility of those to whom that cruelty is directed.
Worse, the decay of our communication, our cultural glue, is amplified and even exploited intentionally by those who would profit in either influence or economy from our polarization.
Our thought processes, including attention span, critical thinking, and compulsivity, are all negatively affected when we consume social media excessively. Yet again, the dopamine-driven consumption is intentionally fed.
Those who drive these websites have created a cultural Frankenstein’s monster, never asking the question, “Just because we can, should we?”
They are plying brain science to capture the human mind en masse while claiming simply to be hosting conversation.
In the meantime, we have all allowed ourselves to become dependent on these platforms for communication, information, entertainment, and news. Google does not equal research.
Those who hold our source of information hold our minds.
While social media has offered us broader and deeper connections with those we value, it has simultaneously offered us a Trojan Horse by which its algorithms and biases enter our minds and present us their menu, then wink while telling us we have free choice.
Culturally, we have always valued freedom, and it has never been more important to consider this: freedom depends on our ability to think outside defined limits and choose something different.
When the defined limits are unseen and unconscious, we can lose this option and not know it.
Today social media has increased all the positive elements of the human race. But it has also amplified everything broken about us.
It has never been more important to Think Differently.