one reason I don't really have social media accounts is that I'm usually a slow -as you say - "processor". I need time to fully develop a response to something. And that development usually involves talking as well...how can I know how I feel about something, without talking about it with someone else to some extent? isn't it a well-known experience to think about a thought for hours, finally verbalize it to someone, and have them instantly reply with something mundane that nevertheless reframes the thought entirely? so it goes with feelings too.
I think the range of expression is also limited. we don't talk about that enough, but it's actually hard to express yourself on text only forums! it's still hard even in video, but it text it's very difficult. the range of expressible thoughts in a tweet or even a long series of them is quite limited compared to face to face interaction. with in-person expression there's so much room for shades of meaning. it's a rich context for understanding. limiting the information channel naturally restricts the range of transmissible thought. so things that are more easily and quickly understood are by definition more transmissible. maybe this is close to tautology...
in the ecosystem of tweets, fitness means readability and ease of understanding I think. those traits ensure proliferation. long thinking, long development of feeling... it's possible as a reaction to a tweet. but it can't be successfully transmitted. at best it can be alluded to. in person, long moments of silence have meaning. online there isn't such a thing as silence. there's only a record of speech. how can you sit with another person as they don't post? how can you feel the meaning of 5 minutes between statements? when the record updates you still only have the record.
there's something there about being in sync with each other when we share physical space. we can sense so much more than words. our emotions can create the space others occupy and we in turn live in their response, and that doesn't need words to operate. without social synchrony each of us only has themself. endless emotional reflection across people sharing space is an aspect of deep feeling too.
Sep 30, 2022·edited Sep 30, 2022Liked by L. M. Sacasas
So well said.
How unnatural to encounter a post about the death of a loved one alongside some chirpy post about someone's 'morning routine' or keto diet or 5 hacks to happiness or political feuds or cat dancing or whatever--all in a matter of seconds.
How can we possibly feel a very natural and appropriate-and healthy- HUMAN emotion like sadness or grief when we are only with it only for a moment before scrolling, onto the next..whatever quickly rids of us of our discomfort.
We are devolving into 'processors of information' rather than feeling human beings.
This was excellent, thank you Michael. It gets at what I often feel is a false dichotomy in people's analysis, that of pitting head against heart, as if emotions had no capacity for rational thought and reflection OR as if thought was incapable of any emotional facet. I'm a professor, and students often describe things as "giving them all the feels" but every day, I find myself urging them to think! That is not to say I want them to stop feeling, but to see those feelings deepen and mature into something less reactive and more substantive.
I definitely think it's something. I couldn't help but think of the chapter from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death titled "And Now... This!" in which Postman describes the effects of the medium of television combined with news too numerous (and geographically distant) for us to care about. The happy jingles and short segments segued with the anchors saying "And now... This!" Chain together unrelated stories ripped from their context such that you get 30 seconds to process a context-less bit of information before that phrase spoken by the news anchors gives you permission to completely forget it and move on, soothed by the jingles.
What you're describing feels like the social media equivalent of what Postman describes.
This found me on a very emotionally vulnerable morning, L.M. And yes, this IS something. I was at a media work event last night, and while it was a beautifully planned evening, I felt the clammy specter of the meta-discourse all around me. As a result, I am feeling very spiritually depleted this morning.
It is anathema to not have a twitter or instagram account doing the job I do, but I simply cannot go back to feeling the seasick whiplash of context collapse all day every day.
To your last point, same. Being a software engineer, people are always confused, if not slightly offended, that I've got an anti-social media bent, especially in recently leaving LinkedIn. That said, they aren't the ones who have to account for the lives we live. It's encouraging to see people who realize the folly of digital devotion, even if it means acknowledging there is a cost to be had.
I particularly like the thought on emotion and "processing" being a metaphor that maybe set us off on the wrong path. I had never thought about it, but it struck me that processing is a very future orientated metaphor, moving through the emotion to deliberately get out the other side. In our house we talk about feeling your feelings, being present with them, be that, as you note, through silence, touch, presence. Feeling feelings is always an embodied approach too.
I am struck by a memory of a mum who has a child of a similar age to my youngest and when they both got really hurt together she was attempting to try to make him avoid thinking about the pain until it went away. Whereas I felt it was important for my daughter to get inside the feeling, connect with where it hurt, focus on the pain, and only from that point of focus can you work out how to push back against that hurt. It seemed more embodied from my perspective. Furthermore, as a parent I had to connect with the hurt and specific pain in my child and try to focus in on it as well.
I don't use social media all that much but occasionally browse Facebook for certain in person groups. Just this week I saw a post from an old colleague referencing the suicide of their friend. As fellow commenter Anna said there is an insanity of seeing that next to more banal trivial posts, but there is also no avenue for me to take an embodied approach to connecting with that pain at all unless I go out of my way to reach out to that person.
My mother died recently and I assiduously avoided bringing it to social media (though I might later on), but I have a mountain of siblings so the news got out there and I was tagged. The flood of “sorry for your loss” responses on Facebook depressed the living hell out of me. Your remarks have helped me make sense of why these expressions of condolence felt so empty. Later when I saw some of these folks at work they said hello and smiled blandly, when I would have liked an actual face-to-face acknowledgment of my loss. (And to be clear I had offered some of them as much or more when they had lost loved ones.) What is happening to us? Thank you as always for your astute and meaningful reflections. This one was especially resonant.
I'm going to focus on one of your explanatory claims, to wit, "The gist of the above is that our emotional lives tend to be impoverished in an online context. This happens because the temporal rhythms of digital media are inhospitable to achieving a depth of emotional experience [. . .]."
My modest observation is that you seem to be describing the detachment of feeling from its original and paradigmatic context and the transformation, or deformation, of feeling into something deliverable to the passive consumer of outrage — in a word, its commodification.
Supposing I am not hallucinating in this regard, I have two comments.
First, the resonances with Borgmann are striking and might be fruitfully explored.
Second, the commodification of feeling (especially outrage) is of a piece with the commodification of experience generally. The latter may be recognized by the growing popularity of referring to experiences, in the plural, and of appending the word "experience" to the advertised benefits of buying hotel rooms, televisions, automobiles, coffee machines, and so on — in too many cases, you are said to be buying an experience.
Sep 30, 2022·edited Sep 30, 2022Liked by L. M. Sacasas
I remember reading a piece a few months back about the differences between the way the human mind “processes”information and a computer. It’s necessary to point this out because there is a lot of academic and popular perspectives about the similarities. And it’s true that it’s fascinating that computers can be so easily integrated into our minds, both through the installation of chips into our brains and also through screens. It leads one to believe that whatever differences there are between man and machine are trivial and eventually will be reduced to the point of being indistinguishable. A human of course does not think like a machine. How a machine processes information is independent of its environment, if it’s cold, hungary, tired, around a lot of other machines or not etc. One behavior of humans that has been irritating me more recently is the unwillingness of them to acknowledge my existence. The environment that they usually used to was hiking on a trail in the woods for instance or being at a beautiful vantage point in nature. If a computer doesn’t acknowledge another computer‘s existence it’s not going to get irritated. It’s weird to have to say this but they are not designed by evolution to be hyper social animals. But as other commenters have pointed out, the use cases of computers and the ways in which they’re implemented take into account the mechanistic attributes of the machines themselves. A computer doesn’t ”care” which post comes after another in terms of its emotional affect, how information is organized is determined by how the information will demand the attention of its user. Because social media can never be programmed to take into account all of the unwritten rules about how to respect human emotions (many of which are culture dependent), we are the ones who are forced to change in order to engage with technology. As has been very aptly demonstrated in this newsletter, most of the changes are contra the well being of our increasingly non-sapiential species. The message of the medium is, “ when it comes down to it, all information is just 1s and 0s so what’s the big deal?” I would say the deal is that we’re turning into an animal that doesn’t care about it’s interaction with its surroundings as much and who/ what is around them.
I agree with you that the random skipping between all kinds of stories at all levels and emotional valence – “the tragic and the comic as well as the trivial and the consequential” – makes it difficult to attain and maintain appropriate emotional responses. And the volume also makes it hard: where a single pre-internet day might have dozens of ideas, today one might be exposed to hundreds or thousands, each one of which is a latent hyperlinked rabbithole: to give even a small proportion of them attention would be to drown.
I do think it's something. Specifically it seems that digital media rewards negative/critical emotional expression when it is performative or sarcastic in nature, rather than the deeper "negative" emotional expression of, say, lament or grief. I've also found that "positive or earnest" emotional expressions just tend to be ignored (thus again training our brains to avoid it, because interaction is reduced to quantitative "engagement".
You've touched on it but İ think emotional depth depends on 'forms' and not just duration: other people, the face, bodies, familiar words said in the right time,the right place.
Without them it becomes just a private feeling that is easily exhausted or swayed one way or the other by the anger merchants (the media) or advertising agencies.
> I’m wondering now whether the problem is not that I’m called upon to feel too much, but that I am not allowed to feel enough, to feel deeply and at length.
I agree with this a lot. The rhythm of my personal life feels to reflect this sentiment. Often, I find myself in conversation with family members about what is happening in the news. I don't follow much news, and this opens up an opportunity for them to tell me about something they read recently in a newspaper.
If I use this "current affairs" topic to bring up something profound and general, such as how I have lost faith in "divine rule" or how I feel hopeless about navigating bureaucracies, then I have noticed that they avoid deeper conversation about this general topic. The larger the group of people around, the more the conversation drifts away from generic, emotionally significant topics, where I want to learn about what the other people really think/believe, to facts-based topics where there is no need for any such thinking or belief.
I have started noticing this contrast especially because I had profound conversations about government policy / the fairness of copyright / the qualms that an effective altruist friend felt, just a few years ago in college. However, as soon as everyone around me graduated from college and entered the "adult" phase of their life, it feels like they have put their emotional and intellectual lives on hold; to be resumed after retirement. For now, the only things that matter are money, work, family, vacations, a car, a house, and of course, reading the news.
I hear this. I too have a tendency to digest the specifics (of, for example, news) that I encounter by integrating them into broader topics I already have some feelings, experience, or data about. When I try this in conversation, it often doesn't stick. The "let's talk about what happened" approach is a bit easier, for whatever reasons, for most folks to access. I'm not sure if that's a result of the ways that we communicate via social media etc. Perhaps that hasn't helped. But perhaps its a function of human variation. I'm not sure how to know.
I'm not saying I *want* you to join LinkedIn, but I'd be curious what your thoughts about social media would be if you were well-versed in the ecosystem. As someone who just left, I think there are potentially larger risks than other social media websites, especially since so many are under the illusion they are being "productive" on there.
That said, I do appreciate the insights here, especially the trend of not being able to reflect or process things. As mentioned, you've touched on this before, but it seems like whether it's the news, social media, or even in our interpersonal relationships: haste is now a supposed-virtue.
I believe that's the first mention of Freeboard on the Convivial Society. Wish I had a badge for you or something. That's an interesting point about LinkedIn.
I've been on a Tolkien kick lately. In a weird way, I have my disappointment in the Rings of Power to thank? Finally convinced me to dive into the Silmarillion, and woo boy. What a journey.
But yeah, there's a lot of stuff happening there that I'm considerably concerned about, but since it's all under the guise of "building a brand" and "success," it's hard for people to think otherwise without being labeled a pariah.
David, I'm curious. I'm following your argument here but I'm lacking information: what IS it that people do on LinkedIn? I have an account, which I use almost entirely as an easily accessible CV, working as I do in an industry that shifts frequently. I do update my LinkedIn, but I don't...DO anything on the site on a regular basis. What are folks doing there that concerns you particularly?
P.S. Rings of Power was SO disappointing. I didn't make it past episode 1. The Silmarillion is ... well, it is itself. A better way to spend my time than that show supposedly based on it.
Aaaaand I could have continued reading this thread, in which I would have seen before posting that Caitie asked you a better-thought-out version of the same question, to which you replied. ;)
I will admit I've warmed up to RoP, only because I've realized how little material they had access to. There are definitely things I'm not crazy about, but by and large, it's definitely not horrid.
That said, the way you're using LinkedIn? That makes sense! The way the rest of us have felt pressured (and succumbed) to using it? Totally different.
My objection to RoP isn't its lack of faithfulness to the source material. The Silmarillion is not a hill I'm going to die on. :p
The first episode was beautiful, certainly, and I appreciated the casting diversity (as opposed to the artificial lack of it that I think a lot of folks were expecting), but it was also just not very well-written, and the acting was...fine...and the melodrama was VERY high, but almost totally unearned. Interesting to know that you've warmed up to it, however. Maybe all of the above settle out a bit after that first episode?
I'm really interested in your thoughts on LinkedIn, David. I just left a job where I spent a lot time helping my boss become a "thought leader" on LinkedIn (*cringe*). I came of age right as social media came online so I "get" most of the platforms on an intuitive level, but LinkedIn has always confused the hell out of me. Do you feel up for expanding on some of those potentially larger risks you see with LinkedIn? I'm curious on both an intellectual and personal level!
So again, I think part of it comes from the illusion of being productive. If you're promoting your "brand" or you believe posting will help you network and land a better job, then of course it makes sense, right?
However, I really believe it stems from this desire of being recognized, as Michael has indicated elsewhere. If we are not posting on social media, then we do not exist. And with LinkedIn, since so many people have bought into the ideology of building a brand (which is disgusting), the only way your brand will exist is to constantly post, the same way companies rely on their ads being played/plastered all over the place.
Then you have the subsection of LinkedIn that seems to take their pages from the prosperity gospel handbook: literally naming and claiming jobs, that everyone deserves a job and wealth, etc. The amount of money people make simply by marketing cliches and empty platitudes is beyond me. One particular "thought leader," Justin Welsh, is a huge contributor to this, and one I plan on discussing, largely because he argues there is zero negative costs to "building your brand." Which inevitably leads a lot of people in my industry (software engineering) to burnout and anxiety.
Those are some largely uncollected thoughts... Like I said, it's on my list to write about more, because I think whereas with Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, you can "use" the tool to be productive and professional, but LinkedIn is designed to make you think this is what you are doing 100% of the time, so there's an extra allure and danger.
Thank you for these thoughts... I've been mulling them over! As I reflect on what I've seen on LinkedIn (and by extension most of social media, but especially LinkedIn) the idea of what is real vs. what is "real" in the sense that we've created some kind of subsection of reality in a virtual space has been flitting around in my mind. Anything we've created that we ascribe meaning to is technically real, including activity on LinkedIn, but it very much feels like a closed loop system–a fish bowl. A finite group of professionals live out their digital existence on the platform, and there is an element of productivity there, because engagement on LinkedIn can lead to professional success (whether simply in building that brand/growing that platform or actual lead generation that makes money). But it feels like an alternate universe that a relatively small number of privileged people exist in, in some ways alienating them from the rest of the world and definitely leading to being out of touch, so all "success" is contained within this alternate-reality platform. It just feels... icky, somehow.
I've mostly avoided the prosperity gospel side of LinkedIn (thankfully, because that is horrendous) but another way LinkedIn seems to intersect with a lot of what Michael writes about is the focus on optimization in conversations about work. I worked for an organizational design consultancy, largely helping the founder establish a platform on LinkedIn, and her (really important) message of restoring a sense of humanity to the workplace seemed completely lost on people. She would get frustrated that people would resonate with her messages only to not be willing to put dollars behind it, and I had to explain to her that she was speaking a foreign language because we've been so conditioned in the white collar world to only think only about optimization and productivity. Even "work-life balance" is really about optimizing each for maximum success and enjoyment. I don't ever see that language changing, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on that element and how the fish bowl of LinkedIn and the optimization obsession feed into each other!
Yes! I'd be happy to. I plan on writing about it on my own newsletter, but I'll chew on this and come up with something here shortly. I will say I just left a side-job where I was helping someone with their social media presence as well, and yeah.....thankfully, he wasn't going to THAT extent, but it still pained me.
Sep 30, 2022·edited Sep 30, 2022Liked by L. M. Sacasas
I tend to agree with you, but I think there is much more going on than I have really been able to put my finger on, and I have made many attempts, in my journals, to figure - well everything - out. I'm worried I'll bore my children to tears with my journal after I pass away.
I ditched almost all social media after the election of Donald Trump. (Concomitantly, I try to keep all mention of politics out of comments in places like this, but in this instance I think it is relevant.) Up to that point, I had both Facebook and Twitter, and there were things I found valuable, as well as things I found disturbing, about both. Most disturbing was finding myself filling any small moment of time, such as waiting for the tea kettle to boil, scrolling through the Facebook feed.
What disturbed me enough to opt out of social media was the vehemence expressed on both sides. I would say, in a somewhat haughty manner that I hope does not offend anyone, that I did not (and do not) support Donald Trump because I feel myself to be a reasonable person, and his political manner is not based in making an appeal to reason. But I was very disturbed that good friends of mine, who I also tend to think of as reasonable, felt at liberty to completely lose their shit on social media, falling back on the same "end of the world" rhetoric being employed by those who supported the candidate.
I also have some family members who are of opposite political tendencies - my brother was part of a "despicables" Facebook group, in response to Hillary Clinton's poor choice of an offhand remark. All of those family members headed way over in the other direction.
It did not seem worthwhile to me to even read, much less echo, what was happening on social media, though I admit I do miss keeping up with family members and their lives.
I'm unsure if it's the case that we have impoverished emotional lives though. I think, as a species, we get entertainment out of being riled. When we operate in a physical social sphere, there are social norms that cause us to behave in a reasonable manner. (We might even call it repression.) There are days when I really hate my job, but I'm not going to step out into the lobby and scream it across campus, even though I think that would actually feel pretty good and be cathartic. I know that it's just not appropriate behavior, and while I doubt I would be fired, I imagine I would have an uncomfortable talk with the HR Director.
On social media, people seem to forget that there are social norms. You can scream whatever you want to scream with the feeling that you are just sitting there in the privacy of your house. The people to whom you are screaming do not refer you to therapy, but scream back in the same vein, so you scream louder, ad nauseum.
I think that whatever reward system that kicks in in the brain in response to that sort of outraged call and response overwhelms our ability to appreciate the quiet beauties and sorrows of, for lack of a better word, normal emotional life. I find that I rarely go through my day with feelings of outrage, but that seems to be the coin of the realm for social media. What is it that is so inherently rewarding about outrage? And could social media exist on quiet observations and reasoned discourse?
(I did, by the way, hang on to Instagram. Don't get me started on their targeted ads...)
I resonate with this lol
one reason I don't really have social media accounts is that I'm usually a slow -as you say - "processor". I need time to fully develop a response to something. And that development usually involves talking as well...how can I know how I feel about something, without talking about it with someone else to some extent? isn't it a well-known experience to think about a thought for hours, finally verbalize it to someone, and have them instantly reply with something mundane that nevertheless reframes the thought entirely? so it goes with feelings too.
I think the range of expression is also limited. we don't talk about that enough, but it's actually hard to express yourself on text only forums! it's still hard even in video, but it text it's very difficult. the range of expressible thoughts in a tweet or even a long series of them is quite limited compared to face to face interaction. with in-person expression there's so much room for shades of meaning. it's a rich context for understanding. limiting the information channel naturally restricts the range of transmissible thought. so things that are more easily and quickly understood are by definition more transmissible. maybe this is close to tautology...
in the ecosystem of tweets, fitness means readability and ease of understanding I think. those traits ensure proliferation. long thinking, long development of feeling... it's possible as a reaction to a tweet. but it can't be successfully transmitted. at best it can be alluded to. in person, long moments of silence have meaning. online there isn't such a thing as silence. there's only a record of speech. how can you sit with another person as they don't post? how can you feel the meaning of 5 minutes between statements? when the record updates you still only have the record.
there's something there about being in sync with each other when we share physical space. we can sense so much more than words. our emotions can create the space others occupy and we in turn live in their response, and that doesn't need words to operate. without social synchrony each of us only has themself. endless emotional reflection across people sharing space is an aspect of deep feeling too.
I like a lot of your writing but this one got me.
Yes, this is all very well put. Thank you. Not sure if you would've seen this post from 2021, but it addresses a lot of what you described here. "Impossible Silences": https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/impossible-silences#details
So well said.
How unnatural to encounter a post about the death of a loved one alongside some chirpy post about someone's 'morning routine' or keto diet or 5 hacks to happiness or political feuds or cat dancing or whatever--all in a matter of seconds.
How can we possibly feel a very natural and appropriate-and healthy- HUMAN emotion like sadness or grief when we are only with it only for a moment before scrolling, onto the next..whatever quickly rids of us of our discomfort.
We are devolving into 'processors of information' rather than feeling human beings.
This was excellent, thank you Michael. It gets at what I often feel is a false dichotomy in people's analysis, that of pitting head against heart, as if emotions had no capacity for rational thought and reflection OR as if thought was incapable of any emotional facet. I'm a professor, and students often describe things as "giving them all the feels" but every day, I find myself urging them to think! That is not to say I want them to stop feeling, but to see those feelings deepen and mature into something less reactive and more substantive.
I definitely think it's something. I couldn't help but think of the chapter from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death titled "And Now... This!" in which Postman describes the effects of the medium of television combined with news too numerous (and geographically distant) for us to care about. The happy jingles and short segments segued with the anchors saying "And now... This!" Chain together unrelated stories ripped from their context such that you get 30 seconds to process a context-less bit of information before that phrase spoken by the news anchors gives you permission to completely forget it and move on, soothed by the jingles.
What you're describing feels like the social media equivalent of what Postman describes.
Yes, quite relevant. Same dynamic, only intensified.
That Postman chapter stood out to me the most, I think. Great point.
This found me on a very emotionally vulnerable morning, L.M. And yes, this IS something. I was at a media work event last night, and while it was a beautifully planned evening, I felt the clammy specter of the meta-discourse all around me. As a result, I am feeling very spiritually depleted this morning.
It is anathema to not have a twitter or instagram account doing the job I do, but I simply cannot go back to feeling the seasick whiplash of context collapse all day every day.
To your last point, same. Being a software engineer, people are always confused, if not slightly offended, that I've got an anti-social media bent, especially in recently leaving LinkedIn. That said, they aren't the ones who have to account for the lives we live. It's encouraging to see people who realize the folly of digital devotion, even if it means acknowledging there is a cost to be had.
I particularly like the thought on emotion and "processing" being a metaphor that maybe set us off on the wrong path. I had never thought about it, but it struck me that processing is a very future orientated metaphor, moving through the emotion to deliberately get out the other side. In our house we talk about feeling your feelings, being present with them, be that, as you note, through silence, touch, presence. Feeling feelings is always an embodied approach too.
I am struck by a memory of a mum who has a child of a similar age to my youngest and when they both got really hurt together she was attempting to try to make him avoid thinking about the pain until it went away. Whereas I felt it was important for my daughter to get inside the feeling, connect with where it hurt, focus on the pain, and only from that point of focus can you work out how to push back against that hurt. It seemed more embodied from my perspective. Furthermore, as a parent I had to connect with the hurt and specific pain in my child and try to focus in on it as well.
I don't use social media all that much but occasionally browse Facebook for certain in person groups. Just this week I saw a post from an old colleague referencing the suicide of their friend. As fellow commenter Anna said there is an insanity of seeing that next to more banal trivial posts, but there is also no avenue for me to take an embodied approach to connecting with that pain at all unless I go out of my way to reach out to that person.
The encouragement to "feel your feelings" is nicely put. The focus on embodiment is helpful, too. Thank you.
“Is this anything?”
It’s a 🎯
My mother died recently and I assiduously avoided bringing it to social media (though I might later on), but I have a mountain of siblings so the news got out there and I was tagged. The flood of “sorry for your loss” responses on Facebook depressed the living hell out of me. Your remarks have helped me make sense of why these expressions of condolence felt so empty. Later when I saw some of these folks at work they said hello and smiled blandly, when I would have liked an actual face-to-face acknowledgment of my loss. (And to be clear I had offered some of them as much or more when they had lost loved ones.) What is happening to us? Thank you as always for your astute and meaningful reflections. This one was especially resonant.
Thank you, Stacy. That's so hard. And, yes, it's especially depressing when the online interaction replaces the in-person exchange.
Thank you for sharing this, and, for what it's worth, I'm truly sorry for your loss.
I'm going to focus on one of your explanatory claims, to wit, "The gist of the above is that our emotional lives tend to be impoverished in an online context. This happens because the temporal rhythms of digital media are inhospitable to achieving a depth of emotional experience [. . .]."
My modest observation is that you seem to be describing the detachment of feeling from its original and paradigmatic context and the transformation, or deformation, of feeling into something deliverable to the passive consumer of outrage — in a word, its commodification.
Supposing I am not hallucinating in this regard, I have two comments.
First, the resonances with Borgmann are striking and might be fruitfully explored.
Second, the commodification of feeling (especially outrage) is of a piece with the commodification of experience generally. The latter may be recognized by the growing popularity of referring to experiences, in the plural, and of appending the word "experience" to the advertised benefits of buying hotel rooms, televisions, automobiles, coffee machines, and so on — in too many cases, you are said to be buying an experience.
I remember reading a piece a few months back about the differences between the way the human mind “processes”information and a computer. It’s necessary to point this out because there is a lot of academic and popular perspectives about the similarities. And it’s true that it’s fascinating that computers can be so easily integrated into our minds, both through the installation of chips into our brains and also through screens. It leads one to believe that whatever differences there are between man and machine are trivial and eventually will be reduced to the point of being indistinguishable. A human of course does not think like a machine. How a machine processes information is independent of its environment, if it’s cold, hungary, tired, around a lot of other machines or not etc. One behavior of humans that has been irritating me more recently is the unwillingness of them to acknowledge my existence. The environment that they usually used to was hiking on a trail in the woods for instance or being at a beautiful vantage point in nature. If a computer doesn’t acknowledge another computer‘s existence it’s not going to get irritated. It’s weird to have to say this but they are not designed by evolution to be hyper social animals. But as other commenters have pointed out, the use cases of computers and the ways in which they’re implemented take into account the mechanistic attributes of the machines themselves. A computer doesn’t ”care” which post comes after another in terms of its emotional affect, how information is organized is determined by how the information will demand the attention of its user. Because social media can never be programmed to take into account all of the unwritten rules about how to respect human emotions (many of which are culture dependent), we are the ones who are forced to change in order to engage with technology. As has been very aptly demonstrated in this newsletter, most of the changes are contra the well being of our increasingly non-sapiential species. The message of the medium is, “ when it comes down to it, all information is just 1s and 0s so what’s the big deal?” I would say the deal is that we’re turning into an animal that doesn’t care about it’s interaction with its surroundings as much and who/ what is around them.
I agree with you that the random skipping between all kinds of stories at all levels and emotional valence – “the tragic and the comic as well as the trivial and the consequential” – makes it difficult to attain and maintain appropriate emotional responses. And the volume also makes it hard: where a single pre-internet day might have dozens of ideas, today one might be exposed to hundreds or thousands, each one of which is a latent hyperlinked rabbithole: to give even a small proportion of them attention would be to drown.
I do think it's something. Specifically it seems that digital media rewards negative/critical emotional expression when it is performative or sarcastic in nature, rather than the deeper "negative" emotional expression of, say, lament or grief. I've also found that "positive or earnest" emotional expressions just tend to be ignored (thus again training our brains to avoid it, because interaction is reduced to quantitative "engagement".
You've touched on it but İ think emotional depth depends on 'forms' and not just duration: other people, the face, bodies, familiar words said in the right time,the right place.
Without them it becomes just a private feeling that is easily exhausted or swayed one way or the other by the anger merchants (the media) or advertising agencies.
> I’m wondering now whether the problem is not that I’m called upon to feel too much, but that I am not allowed to feel enough, to feel deeply and at length.
I agree with this a lot. The rhythm of my personal life feels to reflect this sentiment. Often, I find myself in conversation with family members about what is happening in the news. I don't follow much news, and this opens up an opportunity for them to tell me about something they read recently in a newspaper.
If I use this "current affairs" topic to bring up something profound and general, such as how I have lost faith in "divine rule" or how I feel hopeless about navigating bureaucracies, then I have noticed that they avoid deeper conversation about this general topic. The larger the group of people around, the more the conversation drifts away from generic, emotionally significant topics, where I want to learn about what the other people really think/believe, to facts-based topics where there is no need for any such thinking or belief.
I have started noticing this contrast especially because I had profound conversations about government policy / the fairness of copyright / the qualms that an effective altruist friend felt, just a few years ago in college. However, as soon as everyone around me graduated from college and entered the "adult" phase of their life, it feels like they have put their emotional and intellectual lives on hold; to be resumed after retirement. For now, the only things that matter are money, work, family, vacations, a car, a house, and of course, reading the news.
I hear this. I too have a tendency to digest the specifics (of, for example, news) that I encounter by integrating them into broader topics I already have some feelings, experience, or data about. When I try this in conversation, it often doesn't stick. The "let's talk about what happened" approach is a bit easier, for whatever reasons, for most folks to access. I'm not sure if that's a result of the ways that we communicate via social media etc. Perhaps that hasn't helped. But perhaps its a function of human variation. I'm not sure how to know.
I'm not saying I *want* you to join LinkedIn, but I'd be curious what your thoughts about social media would be if you were well-versed in the ecosystem. As someone who just left, I think there are potentially larger risks than other social media websites, especially since so many are under the illusion they are being "productive" on there.
That said, I do appreciate the insights here, especially the trend of not being able to reflect or process things. As mentioned, you've touched on this before, but it seems like whether it's the news, social media, or even in our interpersonal relationships: haste is now a supposed-virtue.
Treebeard would not be pleased.
I believe that's the first mention of Freeboard on the Convivial Society. Wish I had a badge for you or something. That's an interesting point about LinkedIn.
I've been on a Tolkien kick lately. In a weird way, I have my disappointment in the Rings of Power to thank? Finally convinced me to dive into the Silmarillion, and woo boy. What a journey.
But yeah, there's a lot of stuff happening there that I'm considerably concerned about, but since it's all under the guise of "building a brand" and "success," it's hard for people to think otherwise without being labeled a pariah.
David, I'm curious. I'm following your argument here but I'm lacking information: what IS it that people do on LinkedIn? I have an account, which I use almost entirely as an easily accessible CV, working as I do in an industry that shifts frequently. I do update my LinkedIn, but I don't...DO anything on the site on a regular basis. What are folks doing there that concerns you particularly?
P.S. Rings of Power was SO disappointing. I didn't make it past episode 1. The Silmarillion is ... well, it is itself. A better way to spend my time than that show supposedly based on it.
Aaaaand I could have continued reading this thread, in which I would have seen before posting that Caitie asked you a better-thought-out version of the same question, to which you replied. ;)
I will admit I've warmed up to RoP, only because I've realized how little material they had access to. There are definitely things I'm not crazy about, but by and large, it's definitely not horrid.
That said, the way you're using LinkedIn? That makes sense! The way the rest of us have felt pressured (and succumbed) to using it? Totally different.
My objection to RoP isn't its lack of faithfulness to the source material. The Silmarillion is not a hill I'm going to die on. :p
The first episode was beautiful, certainly, and I appreciated the casting diversity (as opposed to the artificial lack of it that I think a lot of folks were expecting), but it was also just not very well-written, and the acting was...fine...and the melodrama was VERY high, but almost totally unearned. Interesting to know that you've warmed up to it, however. Maybe all of the above settle out a bit after that first episode?
I'm really interested in your thoughts on LinkedIn, David. I just left a job where I spent a lot time helping my boss become a "thought leader" on LinkedIn (*cringe*). I came of age right as social media came online so I "get" most of the platforms on an intuitive level, but LinkedIn has always confused the hell out of me. Do you feel up for expanding on some of those potentially larger risks you see with LinkedIn? I'm curious on both an intellectual and personal level!
So again, I think part of it comes from the illusion of being productive. If you're promoting your "brand" or you believe posting will help you network and land a better job, then of course it makes sense, right?
However, I really believe it stems from this desire of being recognized, as Michael has indicated elsewhere. If we are not posting on social media, then we do not exist. And with LinkedIn, since so many people have bought into the ideology of building a brand (which is disgusting), the only way your brand will exist is to constantly post, the same way companies rely on their ads being played/plastered all over the place.
Then you have the subsection of LinkedIn that seems to take their pages from the prosperity gospel handbook: literally naming and claiming jobs, that everyone deserves a job and wealth, etc. The amount of money people make simply by marketing cliches and empty platitudes is beyond me. One particular "thought leader," Justin Welsh, is a huge contributor to this, and one I plan on discussing, largely because he argues there is zero negative costs to "building your brand." Which inevitably leads a lot of people in my industry (software engineering) to burnout and anxiety.
Those are some largely uncollected thoughts... Like I said, it's on my list to write about more, because I think whereas with Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, you can "use" the tool to be productive and professional, but LinkedIn is designed to make you think this is what you are doing 100% of the time, so there's an extra allure and danger.
Thank you for these thoughts... I've been mulling them over! As I reflect on what I've seen on LinkedIn (and by extension most of social media, but especially LinkedIn) the idea of what is real vs. what is "real" in the sense that we've created some kind of subsection of reality in a virtual space has been flitting around in my mind. Anything we've created that we ascribe meaning to is technically real, including activity on LinkedIn, but it very much feels like a closed loop system–a fish bowl. A finite group of professionals live out their digital existence on the platform, and there is an element of productivity there, because engagement on LinkedIn can lead to professional success (whether simply in building that brand/growing that platform or actual lead generation that makes money). But it feels like an alternate universe that a relatively small number of privileged people exist in, in some ways alienating them from the rest of the world and definitely leading to being out of touch, so all "success" is contained within this alternate-reality platform. It just feels... icky, somehow.
I've mostly avoided the prosperity gospel side of LinkedIn (thankfully, because that is horrendous) but another way LinkedIn seems to intersect with a lot of what Michael writes about is the focus on optimization in conversations about work. I worked for an organizational design consultancy, largely helping the founder establish a platform on LinkedIn, and her (really important) message of restoring a sense of humanity to the workplace seemed completely lost on people. She would get frustrated that people would resonate with her messages only to not be willing to put dollars behind it, and I had to explain to her that she was speaking a foreign language because we've been so conditioned in the white collar world to only think only about optimization and productivity. Even "work-life balance" is really about optimizing each for maximum success and enjoyment. I don't ever see that language changing, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on that element and how the fish bowl of LinkedIn and the optimization obsession feed into each other!
Yes! I'd be happy to. I plan on writing about it on my own newsletter, but I'll chew on this and come up with something here shortly. I will say I just left a side-job where I was helping someone with their social media presence as well, and yeah.....thankfully, he wasn't going to THAT extent, but it still pained me.
I tend to agree with you, but I think there is much more going on than I have really been able to put my finger on, and I have made many attempts, in my journals, to figure - well everything - out. I'm worried I'll bore my children to tears with my journal after I pass away.
I ditched almost all social media after the election of Donald Trump. (Concomitantly, I try to keep all mention of politics out of comments in places like this, but in this instance I think it is relevant.) Up to that point, I had both Facebook and Twitter, and there were things I found valuable, as well as things I found disturbing, about both. Most disturbing was finding myself filling any small moment of time, such as waiting for the tea kettle to boil, scrolling through the Facebook feed.
What disturbed me enough to opt out of social media was the vehemence expressed on both sides. I would say, in a somewhat haughty manner that I hope does not offend anyone, that I did not (and do not) support Donald Trump because I feel myself to be a reasonable person, and his political manner is not based in making an appeal to reason. But I was very disturbed that good friends of mine, who I also tend to think of as reasonable, felt at liberty to completely lose their shit on social media, falling back on the same "end of the world" rhetoric being employed by those who supported the candidate.
I also have some family members who are of opposite political tendencies - my brother was part of a "despicables" Facebook group, in response to Hillary Clinton's poor choice of an offhand remark. All of those family members headed way over in the other direction.
It did not seem worthwhile to me to even read, much less echo, what was happening on social media, though I admit I do miss keeping up with family members and their lives.
I'm unsure if it's the case that we have impoverished emotional lives though. I think, as a species, we get entertainment out of being riled. When we operate in a physical social sphere, there are social norms that cause us to behave in a reasonable manner. (We might even call it repression.) There are days when I really hate my job, but I'm not going to step out into the lobby and scream it across campus, even though I think that would actually feel pretty good and be cathartic. I know that it's just not appropriate behavior, and while I doubt I would be fired, I imagine I would have an uncomfortable talk with the HR Director.
On social media, people seem to forget that there are social norms. You can scream whatever you want to scream with the feeling that you are just sitting there in the privacy of your house. The people to whom you are screaming do not refer you to therapy, but scream back in the same vein, so you scream louder, ad nauseum.
I think that whatever reward system that kicks in in the brain in response to that sort of outraged call and response overwhelms our ability to appreciate the quiet beauties and sorrows of, for lack of a better word, normal emotional life. I find that I rarely go through my day with feelings of outrage, but that seems to be the coin of the realm for social media. What is it that is so inherently rewarding about outrage? And could social media exist on quiet observations and reasoned discourse?
(I did, by the way, hang on to Instagram. Don't get me started on their targeted ads...)