#308: Think Before You Post: How Social Media Affirms Our Worst Tendencies — And What We Can Do About It

Social media is very good at giving us a platform to speak. But how it does that affirms our worst tendencies. What do I mean? And what can we do about it?

As we all can see, we are living in a time of high volatility. We’ve been at it for a while. And this is not about a specific side. This is not about a specific group of people. This is about all of us—all of us who use social media either as creators or as consumers.

We are all human beings, and in human beings there’s this tendency to thrive on drama, on gossip. “Have you heard? Have you seen what that person said? What do you think of this?” And so on. And it becomes a game. It becomes a game of making yourself seem better than maybe you are, making yourself belong to a cause, to a group, or whatever.

And our groupishness then leads us to demonize the other side or to try to demarcate us from others. It’s not always two sides. Sometimes it’s three, four, or more. We have this groupishness built in.

And we have this great tool now at our disposal to build our identities. But rather than building our identities by actually putting something out there coherently that is about us—that is about how we would like to see the world, how we would make the world better—oftentimes we are seduced into giving in to our worst tendencies. Doubling down on groupishness, doubling down on identity, doubling down on seeing other people not as individuals but as part of a group.

And I would like to remind ourselves of a quote by media theorist Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” What does this mean?

It means that if you have a medium that encourages reflective, careful talk and that protects you from writing the wrong thing or writing it without enough evidence or reflection, then this medium hopefully creates reflective thought. This is why in academia there’s what’s called peer review—before you actually get to publish something, some annoying people have to give you annoying comments about what all you did wrong so you can embellish yourself. And as annoying as this is, it is a much-needed safeguard that keeps us on our toes.

But that’s not interesting for the current media environment. Imagine you’d have to send your Facebook post through peer review. Maybe we should, but it would take forever. That’s not what social media is about. It wants quick responses, quick-fire responses. “What are you thinking now? What are you doing now? Now. Now. Now.” Not “What have you, after careful deliberation, got to say about this very complex issue after looking at all your source materials, looking at everything carefully over several weeks so that you don’t fall prey to misquoting and stuff like that?” No, that’s not what social media wants us to do.

YouTube is maybe a little bit better because it takes a while and you have to set up your scene a little. I mean, even though I’m just talking here, I do have to have a setup so I’m not looking too weird. And then you have to cut the video, maybe put something on there, create a thumbnail. There are all kinds of things that go into YouTube. So by the time you upload it, there may be a nagging question of “Maybe this wasn’t quite well done.” And ideally you have a script or half a script. So YouTube, if you do it well, will guide you through a more careful measurement. It doesn’t always work either. Again, if you do it on the phone, it’s different. Send a quick story out and have a short video, and then that’s probably the path to ruin.

TikTok, Facebook—they don’t care about that either. They want something immediate.

But even though to us these are now just snippets of thought, these things become fixated online. They are not posts. They are micro-publications. And rather than giving it the measurement and care a publication should require, that’s not what’s happening.

So again, if we understand that the medium is the message, then this message being sent seems to be: “Post what you are thinking now, but we will keep it forever if possible, and also we own your content and make money through polarization. And if you look bad for it, it’s your fault because we didn’t stop you.”

And in a way, it is our fault. If we put something out there, it’s our responsibility.

So what should we do?

Measured responses. Responses that take time and reflection and allow ourselves to critically ask ourselves: Is this post a reflection of the best of me? And could I live with it even in 10, 20, 50 years? Is this post as respectful as possible of other people? Is this post based on truth and evidence rather than hearsay or caricatures?

Because here’s the strange thing: Publishing and posting online makes all of us quasi-journalists, or at least opinion journalists. But then journalistic standards should apply. And none of us—or many of us—don’t have journalistic training. Well, some journalists don’t seem to either, okay.

We are all seduced by this media machine into thoughtlessness because it’s all about immediacy, immediate feelings. And even the smartest of us can succumb to that. And it has invaded politics and political speech. So even if we are not on social media but on established media, the same phenomenon is there: clickbait headlines, clickbait speech, politicians who say things just for the immediate reaction rather than for posterity.

So it’s a wider problem. But here I want to focus on what we can all do in our own lives.

So if you notice me posting irregularly, this is why. I may not always succeed, but I try to be as measured and as careful as possible—not just for my sake, but for everybody’s sake. Again, I may not always succeed. And if I don’t, I’m truly sorry about that.

But this is a standard we all have to uphold for ourselves, our loved ones, our colleagues, our workplace, our children and grandchildren, and for our audience, which is nowadays global. We are all speaking to a global audience.

So we have to think before we post.

If you believe in empathy, sympathy, agape love, or any of these concepts that tie us all together and open our hearts to each other, apply these principles to everything you do and say. If you say “My religion is about love,” then let that love infuse everything you do. If you say “My ideology is built on empathy,” then this empathy should infuse everything you do. You don’t just have love and empathy for the people that agree with you. You have them for the people that you don’t agree with.

So if this means that we will post less and more carefully, and if this may even make us all reflect on not just our words but our actions and even our thoughts and feelings, then we will all win—even the platforms, because for the platforms it looks better long-term as well.

We have all this power. We are all in this together. We all have more power with our speech than any individual ever had in history.

So, here comes the obligatory Spider-Man quote: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Thank you very much.