Social media is a great way to learn and have intelligent debates and conversations with many different people. The most coherent and rational people to ever grace the face of the earth can be found in the comments section of any public post or forum, pushing the boundaries of human intellect further than ever imaginable.
Okay that is me being quite facetious. In my opinion it is a waste of breath, time and sanity. I won't be surprised that some neurons in our brains, upon recognizing the absurdity and futility of the interaction, commit apoptosis to save themselves from misery.
Welcome to TrollLandia
According to a poll conducted by YouGov 45% of people reported noticing troll-like behavior at least once per week on forums and chat boards like Reddit, while 39% reported the same kind of behavior on social media such as Facebook, Twitter and other blog sites. Posts on politics or religion faced the most troll-like behavior, 49% and 38% respectively, followed by 25% on sharing of emotions (e.g. trauma, death, etc). [1] Such behavior is aided and exacerbated by the anonymity granted by the internet and the inhibition of empathy due to the lack of human interaction with the other. This phenomenon is referred to by psychologists as online disinhibition [2].
In 1995 Dave Grossman, a retired lieutenant colonel of the US Army and a former West Point psychology professor, wrote a book called On Killing which delved into the psychology of killing in the context of the army and law enforcement. It expanded on studies conducted during World War II which proposed that contrary to popular belief and perceptions a majority of soldiers were prone to not firing their weapons due to an inherent sense of not wanting to kill someone else.
It has long been understood that there is a direct relationship between the empathic and physical proximity of the victim, and the resultant difficulty and trauma of the kill. This concept has fascinated and concerned soldiers, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists alike. [3]
Conversely an increase in distance diminishes the ability to empathize with the other.
"... from a distance you don't look anything like a friend. From a distance, I can deny your humanity; and from a distance, I cannot hear your screams." [4]
This dehumanization, aided by distance, is evident from the ease with which soldiers operating drones are able to bomb targets without actually seeing whom it is they are killing.
Although trolls tend to say inflammatory things intentionally to get a rise out of people, their behavior is instructive of the effect of this physical and emotional divide imparted by social media.
The Empathic Divide
My focus however is not on trolls but on people who resort to dehumanizing with intent. Extrapolating the concept of dehumanization to the realm of social media we can see that apart from the obvious spatial divide, an inherent distance between people exists due to the design of these platforms. Most social media platforms and forums are based on text to create and comment on posts. Even a platform such as YouTube, whose primary method of communication is video, is heavily reliant on text for comments.
The major limitation of social media is the reliance on a medium of expression - textual language - ill equipped to transmit tone and inflection in a way that is immediate, concise and unambiguous.
Textual language is a beautiful means of expression and after all has been the basis for the preservation and dissemination of knowledge over the course of written history. However writing something with nuance requires time and space, which unfortunately is something not afforded by social media culture, thus moving away from the realm of immediacy and brevity.
Attention spans have also been greatly diminished making people skim over things and not having the patience or wherewithal to focus on one thing, leading to an inability to truly experience the other person we interact with; that requires time, patience and the full gamut of human expression. I say experience because we do glimpse a sliver of their being through text (and in some cases audio and video) but other cues, bodily and aural, that are essential to understanding and relating to the human experience are not relayed effectively (video), or at all (text). This gives rise to the possibility of denying the other their humanity.
Such dehumanization results in the usage of disparaging remarks, obscene language and threats of violence (physical and/or sexual). The psychological harm inflicted on the other person is also lost in translation for we do not see the other's reaction, shrouded by the digital divide.
For those who wouldn't fall into the category of trolls, an unwillingness to engage with ideas differing to their own beliefs is still present. That in itself is human nature. Once a belief is ingrained critically analyzing it and finding flaws in it can be a disruptive experience. Social media, rather than being a medium to help overcome such dissonance, aids in exacerbating it further. The outcome being a devolution of the discussion into personal attacks and vilifying behavior.
Let's Have a Face(book) to Face(book)
Considering all the limitations for having a nuanced and empathic discussion/debate over social media that we have thus far expounded upon, let's focus on Facebook's design to contextualize this line of argumentation. The other possibility would be Twitter but let's face it, you cannot have an intellectual discourse over a platform whose basic premise is brevity. Imagine Aristotle or Ibn Sina having to write a philosophical treatise as tweets. I suppose they would be referred to as a "tweetise"? That said they all share a similar mechanism so it is very much applicable to any other platform as well.
Facebook was built as a platform for sharing, not for debate. The center of this virtual universe is the individual where they can share their views, thoughts and events in life. The audience: their friends, acquaintances, perhaps some randoms added after a drunken party, or the "entire" world, depending on how willing they are to share their life with everyone.
When a post is shared, whether publicly or to a limited audience, a certain segment of social media sees and responds to it - as an emoji and/or a comment. There is no guarantee that anyone wishing to provide a rebuttal will be able to reach the same set of people. The comment can and most likely is buried away by comments that are posted afterwards. And the people who already read the initial post will not necessarily become aware of this rebuttal. Either they continue to scroll along or they disengage from the platform.
This asymmetric dissemination of information exists even if a person shares the post on their timeline and gives a rebuttal there instead. The people having this "argument" might not have the same friends, and in the case of a public post, might not have the same level of influence and social outreach. Here the problem of non-intersecting populations arises, where the same people might not receive and see the rebuttal post.
A truly unbiased debate gives an equal footing to the person making a claim as well as to the opponent(s) in order for a holistic discussion of ideas and views to occur. Those receiving the information can therefore formulate their thoughts after hearing the different sides to the argument. Both aforementioned mechanisms - commenting and re-posting - do no simulate this level playing field.
And we haven't even touched upon in detail the other systemic problems of social media: attention span deficits, or the deluge of information we are subjected to (although we would need to take some liberty to label most things as such), which create problems of their own.
So if someone comes around and touts how amazing social media is and how it has brought the world closer together, I won't deny that. It definitely has allowed for people from anywhere on earth to be in touch with each other, aids people with similar views to connect, as well as allow people of all stripes of views and ideologies to be heard and interacted with it. Yet to claim it brings us closer empathically I would strongly disagree.
Should we give up on it entirely? Not necessarily. But at least we need to come to terms with the constraints its design puts on our interactions, and accept that in its current manifestation social media is not cut out for effective debates and argumentation.
O, what a Brave New World we live in.
References
[1] Gammon, J. (2014, October 20). Over A Quarter Of Americans Have Made Malicious Online Comments. Retrieved from https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2014/10/20/over-quarter-americans-admit-malicious-online-comm
[2] Stein, J. (2016, August 18). How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet. Retrieved from http://time.com/4457110/internet-trolls/
[3] Grossman, D. (1996). Distance: A Qualitative Distinction in Death. In On Killing
(pp. 97). New York, NY: Back Bay Books
[4] Grossman, D. (1996). Distance: A Qualitative Distinction in Death. In On Killing
(pp. 102). New York, NY: Back Bay Books
Influences for the article
https://dialogmagazine.com/culture-society/the-human-condition/technology-dehumanizing-society/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/380051/topics-witness-trolling-behavior-internet/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/378629/reactions-to-racist-posts-on-social-media-us/
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Technology is a tool that extends our capabilities and so it raises the same dilemmas and moral questions that have existed for us ever since we became homo sapiens.