What Do You Think: how social media and information overload disrupt thinking
Earlier this week, I had a massive case of writer's block. Sitting down to write made me realize how hard it can be to get your thoughts out on a page. Sometimes it feels like you just can’t get in touch with your own thoughts. This is something I think we all experience today. A while back, I wrote about how modern life and the current information environment cause us to go on autopilot. There are just too many distractions for us to concentrate on one thing. We just move from one stimulus to the next. What I missed when I wrote about that is even though we’re on autopilot for most of the day we still have thoughts. Those thoughts are also affected by the insane amounts of information we take in. Information that’s driven by a small group of hyper-online individuals and the platforms we use. We’re spending so much time and energy taking in other people's thoughts that it’s becoming harder to have our own. This theme shows up quite a bit in my writing, but I think it’s important to look at it on its own. What makes us us is our unique personalities and ability to form original thoughts. If we lose that, then we lose everything.
Groupthink isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Consensus building brought humans to where we are now. To live in large groups we had to be able to voice our opinions but then agree on one to make a collective decision. If there was no agreement then the tribe would splinter and probably die off. Individuals also wouldn’t survive if they chose to split from the tribe because they didn’t agree. So, agreeableness and going along with the group were key traits for survival on the personal and species level. Our ability to agree on what to think and how to act not only led to survival but a lot more, like key advancements in technology and culture, they also led to some pretty terrible things. Recently, much like other aspects of our lives, technology has changed what it means to make collective decisions on what to think. The town square or tribal council has moved entirely online with new rules of engagement and dynamics in place. Online, people aren’t trying to build consensus, they’re trying to get the strongest reactions because that’s what the algorithms prioritize. Our brains then confuse those strongest reactions as the collective decision of the group because they’re the focal point of conversation. We see these ideas and want to join the rest of the tribe, so we take part in spreading them. Whatever’s viral becomes the collective decision and we never get a chance to weigh in.
Over time we become so inundated with the viral thoughts surrounding us that we learn to stop thinking about the world through our own personal lens. We view it through the lens of whatever people say on the internet. This is what made Twitter so dominant at its peak. Whenever something important or newsworthy would happen, people would log on to see what everyone else was saying. Conversation was never the goal though, that’s not how these sites work. People weren’t logging on to talk about what was happening, they just wanted the biochemical reward of being able to refresh and take in all of the new tweets. Ideas were just thrown out to be a part of the dopamine slot machine that is social media, the more reactive the better. Our new “town square” only showed opinions that caused some sort of outrage or extreme emotion. Opinions that mainly came from those with the resources to have a platform or whose job it was to game the platform. Whether it was a serious global issue or a light pop culture moment, it reduced conversation and public opinion to nothing more than half-baked one-way interactions.
It’s one thing when social media dictates how we feel about a buzzer beater but it’s another when it’s our politics. That can be disastrous, 2016 showed us that. That election was the first after social media had fully hatched into its algorithmic winner-takes-all format. Trump won because he won the algorithms. The measured and logical arguments for why he shouldn’t be president couldn’t take root on social media, so people didn’t adopt those arguments. Instead, we all saw the emotional and reactive shitstorm he engineered. His views became the consensus for far too many voters because they created the strongest reactions. I know this is all a bit reductive, but if you look at previous elections, the language and tactics resembled nothing close to what we see today. Politics was boiled down to memes and stayed that way. Facts and policies no longer matter in winning votes. It’s all about whatever people are saying online and controlling the social media groupthink. Counter-movements are also affected by this. It’s easier than ever to get a group of people to come together for a cause, but the movements themselves are generally toothless. Protests mimic the online conversation, the motivation is simply to show you’re on the right side and get the most reactions. Reactions that don’t lead anywhere, because there’s no real intention other than getting “likes”. It’s performative and ineffective. In the 60s it took time and effort to organize a protest movement. People were invested in it and had concrete goals for what they wanted. Now people just want to join their side’s latest trend. We’re not thinking our own thoughts about the issues we care about, making it impossible to advance our causes beyond viral moments.
Our identities are being replaced by whatever and whoever we follow online. We aren’t doing the work to put any of it in the context of the bigger picture of who we are and who we want to be. Kids growing up today learn to parrot whatever they see on the internet, with the adults in their lives doing the same. Opinions about almost any subject are ripped from the comment section of YouTube or Reddit. Hopefully, this doesn’t sound like a personal attack, I’m as guilty as anyone. NBA Twitter is one of my vices, I jump on there to see what people are saying any time something crazy in the league happens. Sitting there absorbing other people’s thoughts without developing any of my own never feels good. Lately, I’ve been trying to avoid the comment section and it’s been a game-changer. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I’m thinking deeply about what’s going on in my life. I’ve tried to use this approach with everything I enjoy like movies, music, books, or articles. It’s another antidote to being on autopilot. Getting in touch with your thoughts also creates better relationships. You and the other people in your life can connect over what you all think rather than what random people on the internet think. Most of all though, leaving the comment section allows you to be yourself. One of the reasons I think so many people feel lost today is because they don’t have a strong sense of self. Their heads are filled with whatever had the most retweets that day or what the “for you page” says about any of the crazy events going on. Taking the time to actually think about what we encounter instead of just looking at the comments or going to the next piece of stimulus creates a deeper connection to life and the people in it.
One example of what it might look like to return to an older model of conversation and decision-making is, wait for it, Survivor. At the end of the day, it is reality TV with its own petty flaws, but there’s a reason people love it. One of the first things I mentioned in this piece was how social media replaced the tribal council and changed how decision-making is done. Well, Survivor literally has a tribal council every episode. Throughout the show, contestants have to come together to have real conversations and make decisions. There are no phones or social media to sway opinion or get in the way of someone's thought process. Conversations aren’t geared toward what has the strongest reaction in some algorithm. Everyone has a say and a chance to try to play their game. To go far, you have to be able to think and react to things as they happen. You need the skills to communicate with people and actually get your points across, not just tweet at them. The only strategy you have is the one you’ve developed. Thinking about how to best blindside someone probably isn’t the type of critical thinking that’s most necessary to our survival, but imagine if we went back to talking in small groups to make decisions together.
I’m not naive, the genie isn’t going back in the bottle. For the foreseeable future, what’s trending is more important than what’s true. That’s not great for our society, but I also don’t want to sit here and say that I’m some “freethinker” and everyone else is “sheeple”. It’s important to listen to other people’s ideas and know that other people think the same thing. You can learn a lot about yourself that way. There are so many things that I wouldn’t know how I felt about unless I heard someone else discuss them. That’s what thinking is, that’s what learning is, but there’s a difference in that and just filling our heads with other people's thoughts. Throwing opinions out into the void and hoping they become viral isn’t how people connect. Ideas aren’t just content to be passively consumed. The world is a much better place when people are sharing their thoughts and engaging in conversation. We need real critical thinking and communication to make progress on the things that matter. We also need to take the time to reflect on life so we can feel more connected and enjoy it. We all have our own personalities and thoughts to share with the world, if we can unearth them we might be able to do something great. So what do you think?