Being social has never come easily for me. I blame it on a combination of natural introversion, compounded by being on the wrong side of juvenile cliquedom and outright bullying. The lingering psychological effects of both often manifest themselves as social anxiety, and have left me ill-equipped when treading the waters of social interaction. At least, this is true in meatspace. Socialization is a lot easier when you have the luxury to do it from behind a screen, at least for some of us.
I think of this when I read people arguing about how online social interactions aren’t real, that they’re unhealthy, or dangerous. These are part of a long narrative about how technology isolates us, how screen-intermediated interaction is false interaction. It’s an attitude that extends back to the rise of the telephone in the home, and even extends to social criticism of novels and other forms of solitary entertainment. If you’re not directly interacting with your fellow human beings, the argument goes, you are not being human. Never mind what you, the human, would rather do with your time and reserves of social energy.
For myself, and many others, technology provides a way to satisfy the natural desire for social contact that even exists in the most shy and introverted among us, and it lets us do it on our own terms. A screen provides a form of safety, a screen name a form of anonymity. When the real world all-too-often forces us to be someone we are not, technology gives us the freedom to be who we are. It also gives us the freedom to be many people at once, to try on identities at will, and find the ones that suit us best. The ability is a double-edged sword, as shown time and time again by anonymous harassers and the Joshua Goldbergs of the world. It’s important to not lose sight of what we gain by choosing our identities, instead of being tied to a “real†self so Facebook can better target ads.
I know that, had I not discovered IRC as a socially isolated teenager, I would have been in a far worse place at a delicate and dangerous time in my life. Had I not found a diverse message board for a now defunct comedy site, I would never have met the love of my life, and my partner for over twelve years. My online social life has been as much of an emotional rollercoaster as anyone’s social life in the “real†world. I’ve been on the inside, and on the outside of circles. I’ve made friends, and made enemies. I’ve broken hearts, and had my heart broken. That most of these interactions occurred through a screen does not make them any less real, and any less emotional. Most, of course, because these online social interactions formed the bridge to real world socializing, bypassing the screaming monster in my head that worries if the other human beings will eat me alive.
This is what critics who decry online social interaction miss. They operate from the assumption that extroversion is the only correct way to be, that social anxiety either doesn’t exist, or can be cured though forced socialization. It’s true that technologically mediated social contact is different from what occurs in “reality,†but for those of us for whom “real†social interaction is fraught with peril, it’s often a lifesaver. More importantly, online social interaction does not preclude “real†interactions. Technology opens up doors for so many of us. Let’s not close them based on some antiquated notion of the “correct†way to interact with each other. To do so closes the door on so many who need that help—myself included.
There’s been a few interesting pieces circulating around about the “web of relationships” and “the web of links” vis-a-vis the blogging environment of the early to mid 2000s, before Twitter and Facebook mucked it all up, siloing our content, locking in our friends, and limiting our interactions. I have a lot of respect for the revolutionary bloggers of the Arab Spring. They did a great service to their countries, got screwed over for it, and are continuing to be screwed over for it. They have every right to miss that world where a good blog post can be shared and responded to at length, rather than through a 140-character—or likely less—Tweet, or an easily missed Facebook post.
Part of why these pieces have been circulating around, though, is a sense of nostalgia among people like me for the old ways of doing things online. We miss the mythical golden age of the web, where it was wild, weird, and wooly. We miss the days of blogrings, of links pages, of early blogs and building up a readership that you could share with. In the mid–2000s was a sense that blogs could change the world, and they did, at least in a small part of the world where the stars all aligned.
Once, there was a dream where everyone would have their own domain, their own presence online that they could own and control at their will. It’s a dream that never happened. Instead, everything got bought up by Google, or everyone jumped ship to Twitter and Facebook. Now everything is siloed off and locked down. Links mean nothing, and if you’re not writing for one of the big media sites, are lucky enough to go viral on Medium, or managed to get an audience large enough to support your work before everything blew up, you’re screwed. Now, a blog link is just another piece of disembodied content in the stream. As Hossain Derakhshan puts it:
Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
In 2002, I set up my first blog right at this domain. I begged my parents to spring for a year of web hosting and a domain name as my high school graduation present. I set up GreyMatter, built a template, and started blogging. Over the intervening years, I switched to MovableType, then to WordPress. I changed hosts, built new templates and themes, and tried to find the right voice, and the right subject matter. I didn’t change the world, or pick up Daring Fireball-level readership, but I’m still here, typing away.
What we so easily forget is that, in the early 2000s, it was a huge pain in the ass to get anything up online. There were two options. The expensive, hard, but more respectable way, was to do it yourself—either by setting up your own web server, or paying for hosting. Either way, then you had to set up blogging software, which was also a pain in the ass. FTPing to a server to upload the files, SSHing into the server to set the permissions using the arcane incantations of the UNIX command line. Finally, running the configuration software on the server in your browser, crossing your fingers, waving a dead chicken, and hoping very hard that you didn’t mess anything up. (This is how I did it. Even that process is easier now.)
The cheap and easy way was to sign up for Blogspot or LiveJournal. Even a paid account on LiveJournal, and the cost of a domain was less than paying for web hosting. You had less control, and you could be linked to by the outside world, but let’s not kid ourselves. Among the tech-elite, having a Blogspot or LiveJournal account was usually a sign that you couldn’t be taken seriously, unless you were Jamie Zawinski. Thank goodness for those free services though, because if you told an ordinary person in 2003 that they needed to learn how to use FTP and UNIX just to put words online, most would check out. Tumblr is the closest thing we have to a 2015 version of LiveJournal and Blogspot, and while a few tech elites use it, most just eye it warily. At least you can link to Tumblr posts.
While I’m no fan of Facebook or Twitter these days, I have to admit that they do something well that a lot of people want. They let people put out their words, pictures, and ideas in front of an audience without requiring too much effort or financial outlay. Could DeRay McKesson have the reach and importance he has now if he were a self-hosted blogger, instead of leveraging the low overhead of posting to Twitter? You can still tweet via text message from a flip phone, if it really comes to it. As long as you are connected and have an account, you can put your words out there.
Centralized publishing platforms carry the risk of censorship, of course, but this isn’t new. Even in the days of Blogspot and LiveJournal, there was the risk that some regime change at the publisher could come down on something they don’t like. Even my web host, if I should do something on here that violates their Terms of Service, and they learn about it, cancel my hosting account. But that’s direct, human action. The new worry is the risk of algorithmic censorship. This is something not enough people are talking about. At least Zeynep Tufekci brings it up:
Facebook engineers will swear up and down that they are serving people “what they want†but that glosses over the key question that if the main way to tell Facebook “what we want†is to “like†something. How do we signal that we want to see more of important, but unlikable, updates on Facebook? We can’t, it turns out.
Of course, this isn’t a zero-sum game. The existence of social media, of Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat Stories, Apple News, et. al. doesn’t mean that blogging and linking is going away forever. If you’re looking at this in a web browser, that’s proof enough. If you’re looking at this in an RSS reader or a Read Later service, that’s also proof. We can save the web of links, of people, and of connections without dismantling the new social media infrastructure. We need tools that make it easy for people to have a space of their own on the web that isn’t necessarily part of some giant network like Twitter, or locked into a service like Facebook.
How do we maintain the balance of making it easy and accessible for people to use their voices online, without getting them bogged down in the technical details? I don’t have an answer to that question. I just know it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing world. It’s going to take an act of will, and some new tools that balance ease, cost, and flexibility for a world where people’s primary way of access isn’t necessarily a traditional computer. There’s bound to be some push-and-pull along the way between the extremes of the social media silos and the full control of independent spaces. Nothing is set in stone yet, and we can still figure this out. Let’s take the good parts of the web we have to save, and merge it with the ubiquity and easy of the web we have now. The rest are implementation details.
The web has become noisier and noisier of late, with the constant chatter of its denizens. Not just the din of ads, trackers, and signup forms, which can be avoided with minimal effort, but with “social” interactions. Not just our streams, like Facebook and Twitter, but on social aggregators, news sites, anywhere that needs people to come, and people to stay. Social is the glue on the flypaper of the modern web, and the flies will not stop buzzing.
Why is “social” so prevalent? It’s easy, it’s cheap—if you don’t want to bother with moderation—and it’s effective. More clicks, more impressions, more ad views, more metrics: social is an easy way to get it. The voices of friends and strangers alike cry out into a din, filling the Internet, that void that cannot be filled, with endless noise.
I want out.
Part of why is because too many of the voices you can make out above the din are those of anger, violence, racism and sexism, transphobia, and hatred of all kinds. They drown out the good voices, the voices of kindness, understanding, acceptance, and support. And, worst, the people running the sites, setting out the flypaper for us to land on, they don’t see this as a problem. To them, the noise is just noise, a sign that people are coming and people are staying. Sure, if someone gets too loud, too obnoxious, does something truly beyond the pale, they get a smack down, but this happens all too rarely.
I find myself seeking places of calm online, or making them myself with clever hacks from other people just as fed up as I am. There is a wonderful browser extension called “Shut Up” that hides comment sections on websites, so that when you hit the bottom of an article, you don’t have to see someone screaming vitriol into your face. A clever programmer recently found a way to create a fake comment section where the only comments a user sees are their own. You, the site owner, see nothing.
This isn’t to say I want to become a digital hermit. We all, even the introverts, need some human contact in our lives. There are some wonderful oases on the social web. If only they weren’t enmeshed between the garbage fires. It just seems like there’s more garbage fires than oases these days. Fourteen years ago, I met the love of my life on a message board for a now defunct humor website. The web was different then, less interconnected and more siloed. There’s always been a social component to the Internet, but it happened at a slower, quieter pace. You could negotiate it on your terms.
There’s an idea, now twenty years old, of calm technology, “in which technology, rather than panicking us, would help us focus on the things that were really important to us.” A more recent manifestation is “The Slow Web”. Neither have gained much traction, largely because calm and slow isn’t the sort of thing that gets the big VC bucks. The current social web, and its constant demands, constant clamoring, and constant conflict, is the opposite of calm technology. Part of it is a function of volume in that there’s more people using the Internet and its social spaces now than ever before, and we’re still navigating the societal changes that come when everyone has a megaphone. I’m sure it’ll shake out in time, but that doesn’t mean we all have to be standing in the middle of it.
Yesterday, I deleted my six year old Reddit account. I’ve never been deep in the community side of Reddit. I managed one, extremely small subreddit, attended a couple local meetups, and that was it. Reddit was a place I relied on to get interesting news and links for me, and not much else. But, with every horror story in the media about the company: communities dedicated to sexualized images of teenage girls, pegging the wrong suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings leading to their suicide, The Fappening, I’ve grown more bothered by being a member. The recent double-punch of the racist and sexist attacks on now former CEO Ellen Pao, and the new CEO’s disinterest in even moderating the site’s grotesquely racist underbelly forced my hand. I wash my hands of Reddit.
Many pixels have been spilled about Reddit as a failed state. I will not attempt to repeat them. I’ll just link to a few of the best:
The problem is something much bigger than Reddit, and I go back to Charlie Warzel’s excellent piece. One line in particular stands out: “What we now see in Reddit is the crash of internet utopian idealism against the rocks of human reality.”
Or, as Arthur put it, less succinctly, but more accurately:
This is the face of Web 2.0, folks. This is the boondoggle they’ve been selling to all the Web 2.0 investors—that the “social web†is an untapped oil well when in reality it’s a seething underground pool of excrement and bile.
It’s all too easy to see Reddit’s failures, and the problems of the social web as a whole, on a small scale—as failures of technology and algorithms to surface the good things and hide the bad. If Reddit truly fails, that is, fails to make a return on investment for Advance Publications and its investors, some other enterprising, idealistic young rock star coder will figure out a better way and the experiment will begin anew. And will fail.
Anyone who knows me would tell you that I am, fundamentally, a cynic about human nature, but every cynic is a failed idealist at heart. My idealism about human nature has been crushed, again and again, throughout my life. A person can be good, but people, far too often, are cruel, callous, heartless, and outright evil. We’ve seen this play out many, many, many times on the Web. All you have to do is just look at the comments on any local newspaper’s website and you’ll see this in action.
The only thing that works, and has been shown to work time and time again, is strict, human moderation. If there’s one thing technology culture still does not get, the people around Reddit, especially, is that algorithms and systems can, and will be gamed. A post by returning Reddit CEO Steve Huffman summarizes this mistake—the idea that the unsavory elements of any community can be merely “quarantined” is pure nonsense.
Human moderation is, however, expensive. It comes at a high price for the company in terms of salary, and a high price for the moderators, on the front lines against the worst of what humanity has to offer from behind a keyboard. Just read the excellent Wired piece on the contract moderators Facebook pays to police your news feed. You can’t have it both ways. It’s impossible to engineer a community, let alone a safe one, it must be built by human hands and human action. It requires, it demands responsibility, and it must be baked in from the beginning. Any attempt at online community that neglects this is guaranteed to fall prey to the worst of what humanity has to offer.
At a certain point, a community left unchecked will become too toxic to save. Recently, The Verge disabled comments on their articles, claiming:
What we’ve found lately is that the tone of our comments (and some of our commenters) is getting a little too aggressive and negative — a change that feels like it started with GamerGate and has steadily gotten worse ever since.
John Gruber noted that Nilay’s post read an awful lot like one by Joshua Topolsky, five years ago. Plus ça change… Temporarily turning off comments is a band-aid on a tumor. Fixing the problem takes surgery, and to save the patient, you’re going to have to cut out a lot more than just the tumor. Too often, the attitude is to simply ignore the tumor under the guise of “inclusivity.” A line has to be drawn somewhere.
The cynic in me thinks the grand experiment of a social web is fundamentally misguided. To hell with it all. Drop a nuclear bomb on Reddit, wipe the content clean, and build something new in its place. In other words, turn Reddit into what Digg became—a human curated place where people can get interesting things from around the web without any of that pesky “community” nonsense. Of course, Digg is threatening to add “conversations, dialogue, and social features” to one of the few calm, peaceful places on the web. The idea makes me ill.
The idealistic side in me thinks someone (maybe Digg?) will realize that the lassiez-faire attitude of places like Reddit, 4chan, and all the other toxic communities on the web is what they need to avoid to succeed. But, of course, I have my doubts. I know in my heart of hearts that human nature, cliquish, horrible human nature will prove me right, when I want so desperately to be proven wrong.
There’s a theory that people with autism don’t lack empathy, but have an excess of it. The social symptoms are parts of the brain shutting down to protect itself from being overwhelmed by emotion. As a theory, it’s interesting to think about, and as someone on the spectrum, who is fully aware of the intensity of emotions that can wash over him in response to someone’s stories of pain, it rings true.
In the early days of the Internet, much noise was made and much ink was spilled about how connecting the planet together would usher in a utopia of understanding. The barriers to understanding between peoples would fall, the lines on the map between countries would be revealed imaginary, and peace would rule the land. You still see a shade or two of this rhetoric in the high-minded idealist language in tech company press releases, but most of us see through it.
As we move deeper into the Social Media age, where all people (who can afford it) are connected at all times, the great promise of universal understanding and empathy looks to be further and further from reality. I don’t need to unspool a litany of the horrors, especially haven written about them here before. There’s been a plenty of attempts to rationalize the horrors of what goes on, the most infamous being John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, better known in polite society as the Online Disinhibition Effect.
I wonder if it’s possibly that over a certain limit, perhaps Dunbar’s Number, the human capacity not only for stable relationships, but for empathy, decreases. The human mind is a hodgepodge of cognitive shortcuts that make it easy for us—all of us—to lump people into categories of who deserves, or doesn’t, our empathy and understanding. I can only speak for myself, with no research to draw on , but I know it’s incredibly difficult for me to empathize with a person who has ended up in the category I’ll call my “shit list.” It’s true that nobody thinks they’re stupid, and everybody has their reasons. That doesn’t mean that I understand. My inability to do so, or even try, for those on the outs with me, is a major shortcoming. My hope is that I share it with others, who seek to overcome.
When writing about topics like these in the past, I’ve often made the claim that it’s too early to tell, and that as we adapt to the new, connected world we live in, things will reach equilibirum. Right now, that rings hollow, as much as I agree that we’re in the prehistoric period of connected life. It rings hollow, despite seeing that the Internet and social media have created new communities of understanding on a certain scale. They’ve helped united disparate groups of the marginalized, and made them a force to be reckoned with. The push towards trans visibility, against racial police violence, and against misogyny in the technology space, they all have been enabled through technology. That’s powerful stuff.
The priorities of the companies who control the experience we have online, who mediate our interactions—even in the lightest sense—have had little incentive to work towards empathy. Twitter has been stepping up their game since the Gamergate fiasco, and I’m glad to see it even if their latest product is failing to protect users. The angle seems to be approaching these problems with a technological solution, but technology only is a dollar store, generic band-aid on a deep wound.
How do we overcome the empathy gap? Simply throwing us together in a virtual room with no rules, and no enforcers, isn’t enough. In their absence, it comes down to us to govern ourselves, and trying to cultivate empathy. It’s within the capabilities of everyone to do so, it just takes practice and work.
I would like to issue a challenge to whoever is still reading. The next time you see something pass through your Twitter stream that irks you, when you see someone else’s outrage, try to think about why someone is reacting the way they are. Don’t half-ass this. Going “Oh, they’re too sensitive and need to get some perspective” isn’t the right way to go about it. You need to actually try. You might fail, but that’s okay. Understand that something might not affect you, but it affects them. It’s not our job to question someone’s lived experience, only to try and understand. Empathy springs from this, hopefully enough to bridge the gap.