Understanding Social Media

If the medium is the message, then what is the medium really?

I believe it is important to grasp the extent to which modern society is shaped by the dominant communication platforms, euphemistically called “social media”.

Much ink has been spilled over the various problems vexing the Western world: the mental fragility of youth, the absurd obsessions of American liberal politics, the spread of strange ideas on US campuses, the rise of the reactionary (far) right, the increased visibility of narcissists and attention seekers, the amplification of hate and division, and on and on. Invariably the root of each of these supposedly separate problems is placed at individual behaviour. Even when social media or devices are considered factors, again it all too often is blamed on improper or uncontrolled use: weak individuals choosing to use neutral platforms to spread hate and division, or worthless content made by morally bankrupt narcissists, or individuals scrolling incessantly for hours when they could just stop through force of will, or gullibly believing “fake news” or “disinformation” when all that’s needed is some social media training and good honest fact-checkers keeping everyone on the one true path.

Twitter launched in 2006 and, while not being the only social media platform, it is possibly the purest, providing the most dense stream of information with the least direct content. By no means is everyone on Twitter, but for at least 17 years a certain class of people in Western society have been highly active and successful on this platform. Journalists. Politicians. Screenwriters. Third-sector CEOs. Pundits and commentators. Academics. HR department heads. Social activists seeking influence. A strata of hundreds of thousands of highly influential people have spent over a decade and a half connected to a system that seems to foster conformity of language, of belief, of what it is even acceptable to think. People connected via Twitter have been in a position to affect everyone who is not through their connection to legacy media and wider society - through the TV shows they write and direct, the opinion pieces they publish, the departmental policies they enact, the worthy charitable initiatives they fund.

But what actually is “social media”?

From the dictionary result googling for a definition, it means:

“Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking”

Which seems broad and all-encompassing and reasonably benign. Again, what about this, from Wikipedia:

“Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of content, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.”

Nothing wrong with any of that, surely. Social media is inherently a participatory form of communication, built around the sharing of ideas through social networks. But this definition is superficial and self-serving, with very little connection to what we call “social media” actually is and what it communicates.

Understanding Media

Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan is perhaps most famous for the phrase “the medium is the message”, which succinctly describes the relationship between the form in which a message is delivered with the way that message is perceived. This means that to understand what messages are actually being conveyed by social media, we need to thoroughly examine the medium itself beyond the rather banal and aspirational descriptions above. In Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan provided many visionary insights into the world we now live in, anticipating the effect of instantaneous digital communications that are now ubiquitous some 60 years later, so all quotes in the remainder of this piece are from this important book.

As a starting point, let’s pick a popular tweet and examine the information it actually conveys.

McCluhan was clear that in advertising, what we think of as the content was mostly irrelevant, merely there to hypnotise the viewer or reader into unconsciously accepting the underlying advertising message:

Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the "meaning" of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song. Highly literate people cannot cope with the nonverbal art of the pictorial, so they dance impatiently up and down to express a pointless disapproval that renders them futile and gives new power and authority to the ads. The unconscious depth-messages of ads are never attacked by the literate, because of their incapacity to notice or discuss nonverbal forms of arrangement and meaning. They have not the art to argue with pictures. When early in TV broadcasting hidden ads were tried out, the literate were in a great panic until they were dropped. The fact that typography is itself mainly subliminal in effect and that pictures are, as well, is a secret that is safe from the book-oriented community.

By this reading, the Tweet’s content is largely irrelevant - and in this case little more than corporate branded banality with the pretence of counter-culture. It could be anything. Consider how something like this fits into the “virtual communities and networks” description above. Where are those communities and networks represented? What aspect of this is social?

In truth, the most significant parts of a tweet, the components you register subliminally before even consuming the brand-approved content of the tweet itself, are here:

The most important unconscious visual cues are the brand identity that the tweet belongs to, the numeric and visual reactions to the contextless content, and the seductive incentives to participate by signal your own reaction non-textually. A click of a button or a tap of the screen to demonstrate what you think.

McCluhan was very clear about the power of numbers and graphic information:

The statistical aggregation or crowding of numbers yields the current cave-drawings or finger-paintings of the statisticians' charts. In every sense, the amassing of numbers statistically gives man a new influx of primitive intuition and magically subconscious awareness, whether of public taste or feeling: "You feel better satisfied when you use well-known brands."

Making us aware of popularity through numbers and symbology in real-time is the principal information communicated over this media. This is what truly sets social media apart from what has gone before: the fusion of numeric popularity with recommendations based upon success.

We are familiar with the popularity both of an individual tweet, and the account tweeting it, and both of these factors deeply and unconsciously affect our perception of the information it contains.

This screenshot is still an incomplete picture, and considering a single tweet in isolation is like considering a single frame of a TV broadcast to the output of a TV network. A single tweet is not the medium, rather it is countless tweets in combination, shorn of context, and aggregated together into a personalised stream of information, whose very presence in your personal timeline indicates their importance.

It is possible to share original thoughts and ideas on Twitter. It is possible to discover and build a network of like-minded friends in real life. It is possible to engage in meaningful debate across political divides. In theory all of those high ideals about what social media could be are true, but that is not what it is. That isn’t what it is optimised for, that isn’t what is truly being communicated.

In truth, the “social network” part of social media is secondary to the principal communication of this form of media, which is: here is what everyone else is reacting to, and here is how they are reacting.

This is what gives social media its shape, and creates a stream of new content to react to - each of which may already be its own reaction, which demands further reaction, which might generate more reactions in legacy media, which can be re-shared on social media for more reactions, creating new reactions.

What we think of as “social media” is really “reactive media”. The possibility of communicating to people via social connections is secondary to those connections ability to provide impetus to react. The social network/community fantasy is little more than a marketing point.

From a commercial point of view, this sort of reactive media is a pyramid scheme for taking your meaningless reactions to content and using them to encourage other people to react, taking time and attention in pursuit of ad revenue.

When 5-star ratings and automated upsell of related products became ubiquitous on online sales platforms such as Amazon, the consumer manipulation and inherent profit motive was obvious.

It is less straightforward when translated to a tweet with 1 million likes that you are being upsold via the same basic mechanism, but it it precisely the same approach. A continual stream of tweets, each absorbed in a fraction of a second as the user scrolls, unconsciously recognising popularity and incentives to react to it. Instead of a material product for sale, you are invited to participate in displays of allegiance to consumer brands, be they corporate ones or individuals touting their personal brand identities.

This same visual sense is, also, responsible for the habit of seeing all things as continuous and connected. Fragmentation by means of visual stress occurs in that isolation of moment in time, or of aspect in space, that is beyond the power of touch, or hearing, or smell, or movement. By imposing unvisualizable relationships that are the result of instant speed, electric technology dethrones the visual sense and restores us to the dominion of synesthesia, and the close interinvolvement of the other senses.

Because of our inability to truly see the relationships that shaped the information we see, we experience dislocation and dissociation. The network effects at play are out of our control, with our reactions consumed and processed, slicing users into market segments and providing a stream of new targeted content for those groupings, invisible to us. Not only do our groups become polarised, but we no longer get to choose what group we truly belong to or even see its other members - instead, we are allocated to algorithmic buckets of similarity based on our unconscious reactions. Reacting and consuming, and each reaction - or refusal to react - determining what we will be instructed to react to and consume next.

Unconscious Manipulation

McLuhan was scathing of intellectuals’ belief in their own immunity to the unconscious manipulation of advertising:

[T]he literate man, floundering in a milieu of ads, who boasts, "Personally, I pay no attention to ads."

But this imagines the these manipulations are straightforward and obvious, when in truth, the subtle shifts are invisible to the individual, incremental, and detectable only in aggregate:

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.

One thing that stops people truly addressing what reactive media actually communicates is the embedded logic of the market. That is, the idea of the free market as an almost Darwinian force: the combined effect of millions of rational consumers making informed choices, producing over time the most successful outcomes. We apply such concepts to “the marketplace of ideas”, imagining that “good ideas” and “bad ideas” will succeed or fail from similarly aggregate processes, all dependent on the rational engagement of individuals. In the process we applaud ourselves as rational beings, responsible for our own choices, and to accept we are all subject to irrational behaviour in response to systemic influences is to accept that the logic of the marketplace is fundamentally broken. Accepting our whole society is built on a fundamentally broken premise is too bitter a pill to swallow, too large a problem to grasp, so we imagine it fixable with sufficient tinkering around the edges. We shift the blame to others, who are clearly making bad decisions, while putting the onus on ourselves to make good decisions, through strength of will and consumption of the correct information. If we are susceptible to outside influence then that is our own fault for not recognising and protecting ourselves from exposure to bad opinions.

Calling on individuals to moderate their behaviour, or holding them “accountable” for individual statements that collectively add up to a culture of toxicity on such platforms is to flail about believing that we are rational individuals, behaving rationally at all times, engaging rationally on a platform that neutrally conveys our rational thoughts to other rational individuals. If only people would behave themselves dystopia would become utopia through effort of will, and so a failure to do so must represent some sort of individual moral failing.

McCluhan describes rationality not as some additional property we can impose upon sensory experience, but an integral, proportionate part of it:

[R]ationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community.

By this understanding, the sensory impact of this new medium - the overload of unconscious, relational, aggregate information - necessarily and essentially impairs our rational faculties. Again, a high degree of irrationality is integral to this medium: the more it demands unthinking reaction, the less rational we are - and reaction is the paramount metric of success, driven by the logic of capitalism.

In fact it seems that so embedded is the grammar of the marketplace in these communication systems that advertising’s need for empty inclusivity - while paradoxically appealing to a never-satisified individualism - has become an integral part of the divisive political battles that rage across them.

Some writers have argued that the Graphic Revolution has shifted our culture away from private ideals to corporate images. That is really to say that the photo and TV seduce us from the literate and private "point of view" to the complex and inclusive world of the group icon. That is certainly what advertising does. Instead of presenting a private argument or vista, it offers a way of life that is for everybody or nobody. It offers this prospect with arguments that concern only irrelevant and trivial matters.

[…]

Instead of the voting bloc, we have the icon, the inclusive image. Instead of a political viewpoint or platform, the inclusive political posture or stance. Instead of the product, the process.

Such platforms can never become a medium that treats us as rational beings or that nurtures and fosters rational engagement, and pleading with individuals to change their behaviour merely hides the systemic effects and places the burden on individuals, while supporting the delusion that our own actions are free from this unconscious influence.

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation

Narcissism

At times it seems as if the modern social media landscape is overrun with narcissists and bullies, as if a groundswell of morally deficient individuals have suddenly been given global reach and visibility. It is easy to simply treat these as an inherently flawed minority, an approach which tends to support pre-existing political biases. When high profile individuals of different political beliefs are dismissed as narcissists or virtue signallers, their politics are by extension seen as inherently, morally flawed as the individuals espousing them.

However, McLuhan renders an interpretation of the story of Narcissus I had not encountered before:

The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.

Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.

This is a very different understanding of the origins of narcissism as it applies to these new forms of media. Rather than straightforward and inherent love of the self, it can be seen as an involuntary fascination with the reflection of the self in an online persona. Not simply adoration from some innate moral weakness, but an involuntary response to a technological system that humans are ill-prepared to cope with.

In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function.

The overload of being presented with a digital avatar - an instant extension of our central nervous system into the digital realm - who is held up in our stead for public adoration, demonisation or indifference, and the constant demand to curate that online persona to maximise adoration, and minimise ostracisation leads to a numbing and dissociation. We recognise this self that is not the self, but which the world judges as if it were us ourselves, and it creates within us an addictive, narcissistic fascination, as a physiological defence mechanism.

Thus narcissism becomes an inherent aspect of the media itself, and not merely a moral failing of a few who use it poorly. We have not given narcissists a platform, so much as the platform has made us narcissists: unconsciously, reflexively. The platform demands that we consider it as a total extension of self:

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs.

But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness.

Maintaining an externally visible persona as an extension of self becomes a necessity, but this digital self-extension presages the mechanisms of modern “cancel culture”:

Sudden social failure or shame is a shock that some may "take to heart" or that may cause muscular disturbance in general, signaling for the person to withdraw from the threatening situation.

The Message

But all these assessments of this new reactive media’s consumption of human behaviour for profit - and what it does to our sense of self - isn’t what it truly is. That is just how it is monetised, not what it communicates.

So returning again, what is the principal information being conveyed, the subliminal impact of typography and pictures, so ruthlessly optimised for grabbing attention, so sensuously organised to encourage seamless, tactile, unthinking reaction?

By providing an instantaneously updated stream of reactions - of what other people are reacting to and how they are reacting - in a form that is unconsciously assimilated, reactive media is a system for enforcing conformity:

In the Asch Conformity experiment, participants were asked to select which line was the same size as the target line in diagrams like the one below:

However, this experiment took place in groups where all but one participants were secretly actors instructed to pick the wrong line. Under social pressure of the rest of the group, the single unknowing participant would reliably succumb to the group beliefs, in defiance of what they could see with their own eyes.

Now imagine that we have built our modern society around communication systems which work by taking hundreds of millions of people and, based on their reaction to situations like these, partition them automatically and invisibly into groups that responded the same way. Systems that identify those who conformed with what they conformed with, and on that basis control what information they should be shown in future. We have created a mechanism for discovering and enforcing completely arbitrary group conformity and inter-group polarisation.

These systems have no real idea what they are enforcing conformity to either, merely algorithmically optimising for the content most likely to garner a reaction from individual users, all to generate more reactions. They create conformity of thought and action by sheer numeric pressure, with no concept of truth or merit. It is the Asch Experiment playing out in real time, across hundreds of millions of people, but where absolutely no-one can say definitively which line is the longest, each cocooned in a silo of social pressure to go along with what everyone else says, at risk of total social isolation for getting the response wrong when there is no definitively right response.

Everyone using these systems is, on some level, affected by this, all the time, because of the Narcissus idea that the digital self is both separate and connected, ever present out there. The stream demands reaction, where lack of reaction is itself a reaction. Not reacting to something you are aware of registers as either defiance or conformity to some other view. React, retweet, reply, share, like, screenshot, dunk, pile-on, scream abuse, deliver a rational take, change the subject, try to ignore - everything is a reaction, or in service of eliciting a reaction, and every reaction is influenced by what other people think. Reaction is the only form of interaction it understands, and failure to react can still be a losing move. Once our “self” is out there, extended into this new digital medium and exposed for all to see, it is subject to unlimited social punishment, at any time, by every other connected human, for absolutely any past action or inaction, and there is no retracting it.

This power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses. When we are deprived of our sense of sight, the other senses take up the role of sight in some degree. But the need to use the senses that are available is as insistent as breathing — a fact that makes sense of the urge to keep radio and TV going more or less continuously. The urge to continuous use is quite independent of the "content" of public programs or of the private sense life, being testimony to the fact that technology is part of our bodies. Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.

This is not something that can be fixed by encouraging people to “behave better”. This is not something that can be fixed by adding “community notes” and “fact checking” and “moderation”. And it is certainly nothing that can be fixed by setting up completely identical services under the control of different corporate overlords expecting them to be any different. With the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, a good chunk of “progressive-minded” people have left the platform for other, identical ones, most notably former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky. These are little more than clones, communicating the same unconscious conformity and division in exactly the same way, whether that is their intention or not.

The individual tweets, the content, the pretty pictures and funny memes, all sliced and diced to keep your attention - that is not what the medium communicates. That isn’t what this reactive media is. That’s the marketing, the distraction, the hypnosis, the delusion this could ever be a “marketplace of ideas”, the pretence that you are actually doing anything at all of value. What the medium communicates to our unconscious is conformity, dividing people into arbitrary silos based on what behaviours they conform to and inevitably setting them against each other. That is all it can truly communicate. That is at root what this medium is.