The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

Except... is it their ego? Or is it some surrogate persona?

It has always struck me as more of a performance. And that's the problem with social media. Rather than encouraging an individual to be themselves and arrive at their own values independently, it on the contrary encourages inauthenticity -- perhaps not intentionally by the developers of the websites in the beginning, but it emerges through behaviour of the users.

Rather than accepting of all people, people with deviant-discourse views are vilified very publicly, and either remove themselves from the platform or instead surround themselves with supporters from the deviant side. Social media does bring people together, but it doesn't bring everyone together, it just promotes the formation of ideological tribes.

This effect of uniting and dividing people into tribes isn't constrained to social media. Marketing, advertising, indeed many aspects of how capitalist society has evolved has a similar effect of forming tribes. Adverts and marketing tell people that they should do a thing, and then those who agree gravitate to that product, and those who disagree gravitate toward an opposing product or a steadfast disapproval of any product in the space, and they come to define themselves by that approval or disapproval.

Ask a person to define who they are. They will tell their name, their age, their occupation, where they were born and/or live, and then they'll most likely move on to what they like and dislike, what they believe and don't believe. They define themselves according to details they think are important to others and in relation to other things, usually things made by corporations or governments/bodies of power.

- A name doesn't define a person, it's simply how you refer to them in conversation or get their attention without ambiguity in the presence of other humans.

- Age also doesn't define a person. People look older and younger than they actually are all the time, and in my experience it has little bearing on the person's wisdom or intrigue.

- Occupation matters not. All you need is the understanding that your occupation is what you do to pay for food, water, shelter and your hobbies/downtime. It can also be what you actually want to achieve with your life, but this isn't essential as long as you have awareness.

- What a person likes and dislikes is not a defining feature, it's at best an expression of a person's taste. It is a description of a relation between a person and other things. Tastes are easily feigned to please others, easily changed and highly likely to change over time, and while they can be used to stereotype people, I'm pretty sure stereotyping people is considered a bad thing to do.

- Belief and disbelief aren't defining and also don't make a great deal of sense, since to believe is to hold that something is true without data -- holding that something is true OR false without data is nonsensical, and thus pointless to communicate to others, because they'll either have the same nonsensical belief or an opposing one, and probably won't be very amenable to having their belief(s) changed since there is no data to argue from.

Ultimately, people don't know who they are, they know what their profile page(s) should say, and these "defining" characteristics are most likely things for which they are a willing standard bearer, things that they want to shine out like a lighthouse to attract or ward off the types of people they will get along with and not get along with. There are people that do have a notion of who they are, but I suspect they are likely too scared to reveal it, precisely because people are polarised, capricious, and unforgiving.

Perhaps that's what it is, social media actually encourages people to both fall in line with a stereotype and to stereotype others. Certainly, I think social media also distorts the personality of the user as well. I avoid social media like the plague, primarily because the content social media sites generate is of little interest to me. I have absolutely no understanding of why anyone would want to do social media stuff -- so I cannot speak from any personal experience.

I've created a profile on some of them for the sake of communicating with someone who refused to communicate by other means, but never have I felt inclined to use the platforms because... it's just not for me, I don't understand it. I prefer to toil in the shadows and live my life, without sharing it.

Anyway, something I have observed throughout my life is that the personality is performative, i.e. most people will act differently if they have an audience. It either causes them to withdraw and hide features of who they are, or it will encourage them to reveal as much of themselves as possible and even to fabricate features of their persona that aren't authentic.

This kind of behaviour is easy enough to observe in work contexts, and my intuition tells me that social media must surely have a similar effect on people. With thousands of people watching out for what banal thought you share next.

The result is that not only are you exposed to the whole of the other, but you're exposed to the super-other that forms (depending on the subject type) through audience demand and expectations, or through the subject's desire to provoke a certain reaction in their audience, or indeed to attract a certain audience to serve their agenda.

Much of the social media landscape is essentially just memetic. Probably quite fascinating to study if you're interested in how utterly twisted and inauthentic people can become by living an observed and performed life, rather than simply living according to their own principles, resolute and only subject to observation when necessary to achieve, say, professional or academic goals.

* * *

I'd like to bring up something Douglas Adams wrote about in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. He imagined an alien race called the Belcerabons, who enjoyed peace and success, no doubt in part thanks to their being a wholly quiet civilization. A Galactic Tribunal of other races, envious of their success and perceived smugness, infected them with a disease that gave them the curse of forced telepathy -- every thought would be broadcast from each Belcerabon to the rest of their kind. The only way that they could silence the artillery of communicating their every thought to each other was to constantly talk to each other instead, probably preferable just to retain some control over communicating private or awkward thoughts and instead talking about the weather etc.

While Adams was undoubtedly poking fun at the sorry state of the human race when it comes to those nauseating conversations about the local weather conditions and what was eaten for lunch on a previous day, I do find it amusing that constantly bombarding one another with banalities ought to be considered a curse, and yet we have somehow managed to develop our civilization around technological platforms for that very purpose.

The original American Experiment allowed this sort of thing. Big Important Nationwide things happened at the federal level; everything else was done by the States. It's a pretty good idea.

All social media suffers from the "talking to nobody/talking to everybody" aspect. A post on a social media site is really just you talking to yourself out loud. But it's a public place, and therefore everybody can hear you. So they talk out loud to themselves, but at you.

If this sounds like a gaggle of homeless people shouting at each other about everything and nothing, that's because it is exactly that, only with a $25B market cap and a P/E ratio that looks more like the onset of hypertension.