I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
You may have heard that social media is dying.
But how can that be, seeing as the number of monthly active users for Facebook is still going up? With every passing month, more people are using social media, and for more time.
Social media may not be dying, but it is changing—substantially. To put it succinctly, we’re seeing a move from the universal to the relational.
From roughly 2000 to 2020, our collective technopsyche was dominated by optimistic visions for what globalized social media platforms would mean for humanity. Remember the Arab Spring? The idea was, as Facebook articulated as their mission in 2017, that the whole world could be brought together in a global community. Related was the notion that platforms such as Twitter were the new town square. (Computer scientist and writer Cal Newport argues that was never the case. Twitter wasn’t the town square but the coliseum.)
This universalist kind of social media was the manifestation of what media theorist Marshall McLuhan called the global village. And that sounds nice until you realize McLuhan thought the global village would be characterized by discontinuity and conflict—not any sort of Edenic harmony. Turns out he was spot-on.
Today, social media users aren’t very interested in documenting their lives for public consumption. People are less likely to comment on a post but more likely to bring a post into a messaging thread to discuss it. The “fediverse” represents a next-gen vision of social media centered on smaller experiences rather than a single global system. The hottest platform right now is Discord, a social media platform built around smallish communities, originally made for groups of friends to hang out while gaming.
Will these changes make things better?
From Democracy to Infocracy
I recently read my first Byung-Chul Han, which is perhaps a weird thing to think notable, but he is kind of trending, which is also a weird thing. I started with his 2022 book Infocracy.
Han is a Korean-German philosopher of modernity, looking at issues like technology, burnout, and the meaning crisis. His books are short and almost aphoristic. As much happens between the lines as on them. It reminded me somewhat of James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, where you want to sit down and meditate after each section.
In Infocracy, Han foretells that today’s digital technologies mean the end of democracy. There are two major factors here: media fragmentation and our self-obsession.
Media Fragmentation
Perhaps the central cause of democracy’s demise is the fragmentation of our media. Today’s democracies—consider at what point in history the United States was founded—rely on what Han (drawing on another philosopher, Jürgen Habermas) calls a book culture, in which sustained discourse is possible. Think about the kind of attention it takes to read a book: long, slow listening. Han suggests that in centuries past speeches were longer, too.
We’re no longer in a book culture. Our media today is not only shorter but more fragmented, which makes societal self-observation impossible—and such looking at oneself from the outside is necessary for democratic politics.
The other thing that fragmentation makes impossible, unfortunately, is truth. As Han writes, truth is not just about something being correct or not; it’s narrative and purposive, it has direction. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote as well, truth is about revealing insights, and something can be factually correct without giving any insight. Think of the way you could mention a misleading statistic.
Self-Obsession
The second pillar of democracy’s demise for Han is our growing self-obsession, a trend that can be traced across the 20th century. This is something the journalist David Brooks chronicles in books such as The Road to Character as well. The personalization and filtering of social media have further induced us all to constantly be producing ourselves and performing ourselves and above all thinking about ourselves.
In a time of self-obsession, we no longer listen to each other. And without listening, there can be no democracy. We no longer listen because we have formed identities based on our beliefs, meaning that we cannot let those beliefs be challenged because that would disrupt our very sense of self. So any information we encounter that conflicts with our beliefs simply gets ignored, not even debated.
What Happens to Democracy
In the digital age, says Han, what we get is not democracy but “digital rationality,” the idea that all the collected data can be used to calculate people’s collective will, which makes governance possible without any politics. Some people, who Han calls “dataists,” see this as a good thing.
One problem Han sees with digital rationality is that it’s rooted in behaviorism, meaning it looks at snippets of people’s observable behavior without taking into account their deeper experiences: their motivations, heartfelt desires, etc.
I’d add that, philosophically, no amount of data can tell you what should be done. Data can answer questions like how much of your budget you could spend on clothes, but it cannot tell you whether you should wear a pink shirt or a green shirt, or whether you should have that party on a Friday or Saturday. Somewhere you have to make a leap.
What’s to Come
Social media never was the town square, and its further fragmentation won’t make it so.
To be sure, the shift we’re seeing in social media may have some positive effects, such as perhaps diminishing issues around social comparison. (Then again, if our feeds just become full of influencers who are younger and more beautiful than us rather than our friends, maybe not.)
But it won’t help with governance. For that, we’ll need to find a different way forward.
Habermas, who developed the idea of the public sphere and discussed how it is central to politics, unfortunately is pessimistic here. He said in 2020:
I simply do not know what the equivalent to the communicative structures of the large-scale political public sphere that emerged since the eighteenth century should look like in the digital world… How is it possible to maintain, in the virtual world of the decentralized internet … a public sphere in which communication circulates so that it includes all of the population?
These are big, global questions far above my pay grade and probably yours, too. What can we do?
For now, two small ideas. One is to cultivate the art of listening, even though digital technologies make it difficult. And maybe our technologies will eventually help us become better at it, as we continue to learn how to live with them. The second is to study the art of silence in today’s noisy world.
Maybe with these two arts—in the end they go together—we can shore up the crumbling cornerstone.
Ports of Call
TikTok News: It happened: A new U.S. law forces TikTok to be divested to American ownership within nine months or be banned in the United States.
Changing perceptions of higher education: A recent piece by Nate Silver analyzes the diminishing perceptions of elite higher ed. This, combined with the so-called demographic cliff (lower birth rates starting about 20 years ago means progressively fewer college students), does not bode well.
Does public art reduce crime? Ongoing research by a doctoral student at Penn suggests maybe yes. Love that.