Social media promises connection but leaves us all alone in the same room

Everywhere you look at the moment, at least in western democracies, the prevailing mood is sombre. Majorities in almost every country surveyed by Pew Research are worried about democracy’s next five years, and more people say those fears have got worse over the last half-decade. A survey of 12 high-income countries found a majority who believe children will be financially worse off than their parents. In the US and Canada, about three-quarters of adults expect their children to be worse off. Fortune reported this year that young Americans are now more pessimistic about job prospects than older generations, a reversal with no precedent in any advanced economy for which Gallup has data.

If we are indeed heading into a great depression, what are the probable reasons? The prime candidate – that it’s all the fault of social media – is tempting but wrong. That’s not to say it’s not an important factor, but anyone who thinks technology has been the prime mover of our slide into dejection and pessimism hasn’t been paying attention. The answer to how we got into our current mess lies elsewhere.

It is, as Bill Clinton’s former electoral guru James Carville once said: “The economy, stupid.” Liberal democracies, which have been governed since the 1970s by elites choking on neoliberal Kool-Aid, have increasingly failed to deliver a reasonable way of life for many of their citizens. People who wound up being sneered at as “deplorables” or scroungers; people who were forgotten, “left behind” and impoverished while their governments were, at the same time, building economies that greatly boosted wealth and opportunity for a minority, cheered on by politicians who were “intensely relaxed” about people becoming as rich as Croesus.

Which is how we wind up with a country disfigured by the Thatcherite cant that “there is no such thing as society” (translation: “You’re on your own, mate”), in which four million children now live in poverty and many people are “bowling alone”, to use the American sociologist Robert Putnam’s resonant metaphor, while Westminster frets over Reform UK’s ascendancy.

So how does social media fit into the picture? Well, as the great US cultural critic Neil Postman pointed out, societies are shaped by the dominant media technologies of their time. When Postman was writing, the dominant force in the media ecosystem was broadcast TV. In our time, that dominance has been ceded to social media; a technology dominated by tech corporations whose business model involves monetising human attention. It does this by prioritising the kinds of user-generated content that most engages other users. Which, it turns out, also amplifies negativity.

How this happens has been insightfully analysed by Chicago University philosopher Agnes Callard. At the core of her uni-context theory is the idea that social media services are devices for engineering “context collapse”, which occurs when multiple, distinct social groups such as family, friends, coworkers and strangers are merged into a single group. For most of history, she says, norms were local. What you should do depended on where you were – home, church, bar, classroom – and you read cues from your immediate surroundings. The uni-context is the condition where a single set of norms applies everywhere, all the time, because social media puts everyone in the same “room” simultaneously. And this has happened because the technologies satisfied a pre-existing human hunger to be bigger than one local “self”.

From this, a number of interesting things follow. One is what Callard calls “negativity bias”: goodness is context-dependent (what makes you happy depends on who you are and where you are), but badness is closer to universal: death, pain and violence read as suffering across any context. So if you’re broadcasting to strangers with no shared context, badness is the only thing that is reliably legible to everyone; a personal pleasure has no cross-context audience, but a moral violation does.

A second consequence is that identity becomes more important than character. The latter is a complex bundle of qualities that people need context to appreciate. But identity categories (woman, gay, Irish, etc) hold in every context, so they’re the only self-description that survives the flattening into one universal room.

None of this means the prevailing public mood can be fixed by fixing the feed. If the economy is the taproot of the discontent, social media is what makes the poison travel faster: it takes real grievances – stagnant wages, vanishing security, children worse off than their parents – and, via context collapse, converts them into the one currency that travels everywhere: outrage. Putnam warned us we were bowling alone. Callard’s theory suggests we’re now shouting alone, but in the same room as everyone else.

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Photograph by Eileen T. Meslar/Chicago Tribune via Getty Images