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A few weeks back, I decided to go cold turkey.
It was the usual experience. Telling myself I don’t need it, trying to distract myself with other things, almost giving up and giving in, you know the drill.
But, it seems to have worked. It has been over a month, and the Facebook app has not been downloaded again, despite advertisements, prods, and other temptations. It has not been a complete withdrawal, though. I still routinely check my timeline on the desktop. However, the constant buzzing that notified me of often-exaggerated developments has stopped.
The decision to go Facebook-free on mobile came in the immediate aftermath of what one could call a social (media) experiment. Not that it was too elaborate or anything; I just put out a few status updates carrying what I thought were non-populist (at least on my social media circles) opinions. In addition, I also posted similar-sounding comments, here and there, to see what kind of reactions they would elicit.
Ka-boom.
The comments and the replies that followed were enough to fill pages. Engagement was through the roof. I spent the better part of one full day arguing, counter-arguing, questioning, explaining, and getting all of those in return, most of it being surprisingly erudite and well-informed. With links to supporting arguments and material being quoted from books, most debates were learned, and opened the doors to fresh perspective. However, not all was hunky dory. With strong opinions on a public platform, nobody likes sounding wrong or being corrected, thus resulting in some not-so-amazing experiences. This led me to a broad inference: Social media ups the pressure to sound right and have well-accepted opinions.
It’s like being in an arena where you are constantly watched. With friends, family, teachers, mentors, superiors at work et al being part of our friend list, there is very little room for error. Judgment, scoff, condescension, are all only a few mouse-clicks away, after all. Not to forget, the horror of having to see a counter-argument to yours garnering more likes.
This, I feel, has its advantages and disadvantages.
The first advantage being that people mostly — if not always — tend to ensure that they quote the right facts and figures. I do it myself, with a few ready-reference tabs open right next to Facebook on my browser. This certainly does eliminate the faf. The pressure to sound right helps, as long as it is confined to facts.
Malleability of opinions also takes a beating on social media — with so many people watching, it is simply not done to accept a change in perspective and move on.
Discussions and debates become well-informed and elaborate, something that is not always the case offline, with references not being as easily available — say — in a conventional debate. Someone quotes something, the opponent sifts through the web and finds a counter-arguing link. A discussion follows, involving more such references to bolster arguments, and it repeats.
Another advantage that I have experienced is situational. As opposed to an in-person debate or discussion, a person’s emotions, gestures, facial expressions, voice modulation, among other factors, do not come into the picture. The tone is purely one-dimensional, save for a few capitalised words or sentences. I think this advantage is situational because, based on the topic or context of the discussion, this could keep the focus on the objective part of the discussion; and, on the other hand, the ambiguous tone can make it easy for someone to construe a comment as rude/condescending/impolite and retaliate in kind, thus hijacking the objectivity of the discussion, and in some cases, perpetuating ad-hominem.
The disadvantages, now. The pressure to sound right, I’ve observed, results in most debates ending up with a few people, all of whom hold similar opinions, shouting down an opponent. This is something that varies with the online social circle. But in mine, and in those of a few friends who provided their inputs, non-populist opinions were consistently shouted down without, in most cases, actual or elaborate engagement. In my own experiments, I eventually gave up continuing the discussion, and the thread fell silent. This isn’t something too conducive to the debating and discussion culture.
To quote an example, in the aftermath of the much-discussed Uri attack and India’s retaliation, I saw a lot of posts that called out those ‘mongering for war’, and even a few posts that proudly stated that they had ‘unfriended warmongers’. While I understand that everyone is entitled to different opinions, ‘unfriending’ is not going help, as it only kills engagement. Similarly, those who were on the other side were quick to denounce those asking for restraint as ‘armchair liberals’.
Malleability of opinions also takes a beating on social media — with so many people watching, it is simply not done to accept a change in perspective and move on. I have also realised that the same discussions and debates, when carried forward on private messaging, are much more civil, and give room for a change in stance.
It also seemed to me that the ‘grey area’ of opinions is next to dead on social media discussions and debates, with a moderate stance almost impossible to defend. There seems to be an increasing culture of ‘with us or against us’, where a person propagating a neutral stance or urging the others to look at both sides of the coin is quickly dismissed as an apologist, in most cases.
Then, there is also the army of those who just don’t want to discuss things, resorting to abuse, slander, and swear words, when they see differing opinions. Though thankfully, it is easy to block such people.
There is also the risk of being caught in an ‘echo chamber’ of views, where most of the posts and discussions you see might be confined to a particular set of views and opinions. This could be because your friend list is populated by people with mostly similar opinions, or because of the way social media news feed curation algorithms (something not a lot of us have an idea about) work. Thus (and this has happened with me, and a few others), most of what you see may sometimes cater only to one side of the topic and not provide a holistic overview of what people may have to say, on a particular subject.
Is it just me, or is most of the modern ‘journalism’ we see morphing into what we see on social media? Open letters, individual rants, heck, even articles on ‘who tweeted what’, and ‘who shared what’, under the garb of ‘news’.
Facebook recently automated the process of their ‘Trending’ news section. With machine learning being the in-thing these days, this seemed an expected move. However, >according to an article, Facebook workers admitted to suppressing Conservative news that was actually trending from appearing on the section and even included topics that were not actually trending on the platform. Facebook later admitted to including non-trending topics, and subsequently removed human curators from the job of sifting through the news.
While we are on the topic of news, is it just me, or is most of the modern ‘journalism’ we see — mostly on new-age web exclusive platforms — morphing into what we see on social media? Open letters, individual rants, heck, even articles on ‘who tweeted what’, and ‘who shared what’ have become the norm, under the garb of ‘news’. This could be a result of what gets the news sites or news curators the most hits, but is an example of how the social media culture has pervaded the news. Whether this is a good thing or bad remains to be seen.
After an overdose of discussions on Facebook, the un-installing of the app from my phone was a much-needed break. Not to mention that it saves me a lot of battery juice and data. The advent of the information-on-social-media age has exposed us to a new discussion culture. While, broadly, this in itself may be a good thing, given how it encourages the formation of informed opinion, the way these opinions are discussed and challenged leaves a lot to be desired.
In times where sensitivities to various issues are reaching a fever pitch, and opinions can tread on a few toes, there is a need for civility and restraint when parading our thoughts online. Because, you know, everyone is watching.
