I don’t believe we live in a more connected world. Social media has, if anything, unconnected us. Scrolling through a feed, eyes glazed over, double-tapping every so often is not connection. Defining connection as number of connections *average depth of connections, it is clear that while we may have a greater number of connections today, the depth has shallowed. That’s not inherently a bad thing — however, I am concerned with the medium through which these connections are made.
I believe social media, while it offers great opportunity, has also played a significant role in hypersocializing today’s culture (defining socialization as making someone behave within cultural norms). While socialization is essential for development and proper social skills, I believe it can go too far — go to a point where the heuristics we learn from communicating online insidiously spread to real social interaction.
On the internet, anything you say will offend someone. Coupled with cancel-culture, this means that those offensive statements you may have made years ago will quickly dampen your social status. That people are getting angry at Joe Rogan for saying a racial slur so many years ago while he no longer says it reveals the true nature of this culture. Cancellation is not built for rehabilitation; it is built for excommunication. Instead of discussing why we should not say certain words, we cancel those who say them as if no justification is needed. We expect others to have received the same education as us, and we believe that we have nothing to learn from others — that they may know something that we don’t.
For agreeable populations (which I am not happily a part of), it is abundantly clear that stating your opinion is dangerous. We are taught from a young age the importance of being kind — not so much assertive. But, when sharing your opinion itself, when saying a word in context, becomes unkind, we are breeding sheep of conformity. Future Utopia argues this point:
Finally found a voice and we ain’t speaking as loud
People only wanna listen to the sheep in the crowd
With social media platforms, we are free to share our beliefs, yet we don’t. Often not because of the rules of the platforms themselves but because the culture the users built around it. We are throwing away John Stuart Mill’s free market of ideas, favoring instead a non-offensive market of ideas.
This is dangerous. If we don’t promote Mill’s free market of ideas, we are hurting only ourselves. It’s time to separate the ideas from people and argue them, not throw them away for being offensive.
