Social Media Psychosis

There are a lot – and I mean a whole boatload – of fantastic reasons to be angry at purveyors of social media services, publicly sourced video and other content. I read about it all the time, my friends talk about their various grievances, but I’m only marginally engaged with social media and end up seeing a lot of the complaints as so much first-world hardship.

“Boo-hoo! I don’t get my required 2 hours of funny cat videos streamed to me  exactly the way I like it!”

Something along those lines, anyway. So always, in the back of my head I’m thinking something like “Seriously? These are massive, high-definition data files being shot at you across a massive terrestrial and satellite data transmission network the scope and scale of which, terms of human labor and resource value, within the context of the past 500,000 years, is hard to even begin to communicate. Try not to sweat the little stuff, k?”

And yes, I have been called unsympathetic… maybe more than once. But somehow my friends love me anyway. I do often worry though about the social (or perhaps ‘anti-social’) transformation sweeping humanity apparently as an integral part of social media’s wake.

Reading this morning about Nasim Aghdam and her assault on YouTube made me raise my eyebrows. I had to actually sit back and sip my tea for probably… 2 solid minutes (which is very likely long enough for several entire galaxies to be sparkle into existence, flare, crackle, and slowly burn out before auto-flushing themselves back into convenient, large-scale singularities) after reading the article.

There has been an increasing public awareness in recent months of how toxic the social media social dynamic has become, and more than a few people have been warning about the psycho-social impacts for decades. It has been nice to see this blossoming, broader awareness of the wildly metastasized malignancy worming its tendrils into the collective communication, one (literally) addictive Like at a time. For a couple of years there I started to worry that humanity was even stupider than any of us had ever imagined, so it has been refreshing.

When something like this happens though, I tend to ask myself, “does this go even deeper than we suspect?” And yes, that means more than occasionally entertaining some very imaginative conspiracy theories, but in cases like this the theories tend to be more about psychology and social dynamics. It forced me to ask myself, “Is a constant engagement with these forms of media actually causing some kind of psychosis?”

By “these forms” I mean media models that rely heavily on deliberately manipulating human emotion and sub-conscious operations in a calculated way to promote engagement and foster as much content creation and consumption through one company’s platform as possible. A lot of media outlets fit that model that most people probably don’t tend to think of as social media, and I’m not really set on calling them that, but I lack a label for the category to which I am referring, so for now I will smear them all as social media, and I believe that YouTube definitely falls into the category I’m defining above.

Anyway… I don’t have the answer. No one does right now, but a quick look around tells me that I am not the only one asking this particular question.

Nasim’s following was quite substantial. I know – and I think most of you know – that this can only be achieved by serious personal engagement with the medium through which one creates content. In fact, most successful content creators are deeply engaged with a broad palette of 5 or more different media platforms. So I’m guessing that she herself was likely a heavy consumer of social media and related content. It’s a prerequisite of self promotion today. You can’t target audiences or stay abreast of industry and media trends without at least keeping one ear to the social media portion of the aether.

It would be a huge jump to say that excessive engagement with social media, led to Nasim’s actions, and I’m not saying that because there are hundreds of thousands of human minds very deeply tied into these networks at this point, they have been like this for at least a couple of years, and so far they haven’t all been rendered psychotic. So far as we can tell at this point in time, anyway. So it’s… probably fine? For now?

I guess we will know one way or the other when it’s too late, as with all truly bold experiments.

I would like to see a shift in public dialogue around social media though. It’s good to discuss the ethics of the practices of various content platforms, but… I believe we should also be openly and directly discussing the possibilities of concrete psychological impacts on the lives of individuals. Similarly to the way we discuss the negative effects of video game addiction on people. I believe we need more clinical studies on relationships between social media and mental and personality disorders, on the specific side effects of addiction, and we need them, like… yesterday. The sooner we begin to openly talk about social media addiction as potentially being an actual illness – a disease, like alcoholism – with known negative physical, cognitive, emotional, and quality of life effects, the better chance we will have of moderating the worst of any potential social catastrophe it may be sowing the seeds as we read here.

 

Photo by Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash