Social Media, the New Cocaine

If sitting is the new smoking, social media is the new cocaine.  

About social media, a former Mozilla employee, during an interview with BBC’s Panorama programme this week, said that ‘it's as if social media companies are taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back.’

As a saying about advertising from the nineteen-seventies goes, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. They addict you, record your viewing habits, and then trade your time, i.e. sell your data to advertisers.

Every day, three billion Snapchat snaps are exchanged, three hundred and fifty million photos uploaded on Facebook, and close to a hundred million photos shared on Instagram. That mindless scrolling through our social media feeds! That endless checking of our phones!  Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit. The list is not exhaustive.      

They say their aim is to help you connect with the world, although conversely we have lost the real connection. We have books – iBooks, Kindle, etc., but we don’t read them. We have hundreds of friends, albeit on Facebook and other social media platforms, but we don’t talk to them. The more online friends we have, the less real friends we have.

A report by the Education Policy Institute in the UK last year suggested that moderate use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels may have some benefits for children in building up their resilience, developing their social skills, and also enabling them better access to emotional support and help.

But then some things in moderation don’t work. Social media, for most of us, is one of them, hence we invent syndromes such as ‘Facebook Addiction Disorder’ and ‘Facebook depression,’ and their bogus solution (one of which is called digital detox). It’s a collective failure. 

Historical Sense

One thing that history teaches us is how tough it is for us to control it.

TS Eliot, in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, says that 'the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence'. Historical sense is a belief that past is not something that is lost or void. The past cohabits with the present.        

A major demerit the lack of historical sense holds is uncritical observance to present-day attitudes, particularly the penchant to understand past events in terms of modern values and concepts. We exaggerate our present problems unrealistically in terms of seriousness and importance to those that have occurred in the past. We erroneously believe that current situations are much worse than they had earlier been.   

We often fail to acknowledge that the present modifies the history as the history modifies the present. 

As Adam Gopnik puts it, the only wisdom history supplies is historical wisdom. 

Silent Spring

Books talk in a very interesting manner. Like trees, hills, birds, and creeks, books have power to provoke thoughts, teach, and captivate us. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring (1962), a contentious environmental classic, while she battled breast cancer. In the summer of 1963, when she was fifty-six and dying of her ailment, she appeared before a Senate committee to testify on pesticides, upon being lambasted by lobbying groups and some in government for being too alarmist in her book to describe the adverse impact of pesticides on the environment.

A senator told Carson at the time, ‘every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history.’ Published more than fifty-five years earlier, Silent Spring is extensively credited with support launch the environmental movement. Carson argued that DDT and other synthetic pesticides, and insecticides were being used in reckless quantities without concern to their impact on the environment, animals, and human health. In her book, she warned of severe consequences for the environment if their use continued to propagate.  

An illustration used in the first of a series of three articles - excerpts from Silent Spring - published in the New Yorker in 1962   

Silent Spring starts with a fable about a town - ‘a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards, where white clouds of bloom drifted above the green land.’ And then, she snappishly introduces a strangely ominous paragraph:    

'Then, one spring, a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death.’                     

The ‘evil spell’ was DDT and its aerial spraying. The synthetic chemical - invented in 1939 to kills fire ants and mosquitos in the US - not only killed bugs but also threatened fish and bird population and could nauseate children, Carson argued. ‘The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of the air, earth, rivers, and seas with dangerous, and even lethal, materials,’ she wrote in her celebrated book. She suggests that we should not pursue to control nature through chemistry, in the name of progress.

The use of DDT was banned in the US by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1972, eight years after Carson died after battling long against breast cancer. In today’s metamodernist era, when the public confidence in government and business leaders is subsiding, Carson’s life serves as an example of one person’s brilliance to stir up positive change. Silent Spring underscores the potential for encouraging others to thoughtful action and to protect plants, animals, and organisms.