Social Media: A Double-Edged Sword

Would I be a different person if social media didn’t exist, if I hadn’t grown up in the era of Facebook? How different would our world be without likes or retweets? I’m not sure, but I can fantasize about healthier politics, less conspiracies, more quality time with friends and family. But I’ve also seen the amazing accomplishments of social media. I’ve watched a friend’s GoFundMe for a heart surgery meet all its goals in hours. Social media has enabled more people than ever to chase their dreams and make a living doing something borderline ridiculous because it brings joy to their fans. Kudos to them! But social media also connects some of the worst people, the worst communities with each other. It functions as a public square but is not regulated as one. It has given a few corporations incredible power and deep pockets with zero accountability.

I’ve been doing some soul searching on the utility and the dangers of social media this weekend. I guess you could say my relationship status with social media is ‘complicated.’ I try to appreciate the opportunities it provides but always leave feeling like I wasted 75% of my time—time which is infinitely more valuable to me now that I have a wife and daughter.

But what triggered my soul searching was the events in Afghanistan over the last couple of weeks. See, funnily enough I created a Twitter for my Vocal profile to promote my own work and follow other writers. However, the drawback is that one of my hidden passions is foreign policy, geopolitics, and national security. I think we all have passions that hide within us, that only a few ever see. The passion that comes out when some poor ignorant soul asks you a question about the one topic you could talk about until you lose your voice. The passion that makes your friends wince because they know what was just unleashed. The passion that is almost an addiction. So, I made a Twitter and then promptly started mainlining the commentary and the ground reports on the situation in Kabul. Despite being a time suck, it hasn’t been bad for my writing (thank God). It has already inspired four pieces for Vocal. But it was and still is a time suck that I am weaning myself from.

It brings up ruminations on social media, personal agency, and the constant tragedy of the world. We can be thousands of miles away from the crisis but see videos that make us feel a part of it. Social media encourages this closeness. It encourages the sharing, the supposed empathy it inspires. But what is empathy without action? Liking something, retweeting something is an action…but is it any sort of meaningful action? If a million people share a heartbreaking image but not one of them acts on it, does it matter? Our personal agency is stunted by ‘raising awareness’ rather than volunteering, donating, doing anything meaningful. Social media brings the tragedies of the world to our hands. It guilts us into feeling responsible for the suffering of others. But knowledge is not power, it is suffering. Action is power.

The evacuation from Kabul is the exception that proves the rule. Entire families were saved from certain death by DM-ing somebody who then made a connection to someone with a network. Multiple networks of journalists, aid workers, and veterans moved heaven and earth to save people. Their efforts were not enough to fill the gap of what the US government should have done but was unwilling to do.

Social media was assuredly a force for good in the last couple weeks. But what about Uighurs in China? There is no one there to save them from concentration camps. What about doxing people to expose their families to harassment? What about the targeted calls for violence by prominent figures that stay up for long periods of time? The Taliban—the same Taliban that extorted and encouraged mentally handicapped people to become suicide bombers—have Twitter accounts. The same Taliban that kills the families of those who dare oppose them.

And what about the small tyranny of comparison? Social media enables all of us to compare ourselves with others and find ourselves lacking. Or the tyranny of being judged for the person we were a decade ago? Social media is robbing us of our ability to make mistakes, to mature, to remake ourselves anew. Redemption arcs are now confined to fiction and have no place in our day-to-day interactions.

I no longer have social media on my phone. The extra barrier of accessing it through my laptop encourages me to spend less time on it. But I don’t want to be too hard on social media, after all it is only a tool; however flawed, it is up to the individual to use wisely.

But I fear that social media brings false closeness to tragedy. Every day there is a crisis. Every day a new reason to fear, to hate, to despise. I refuse to believe it is healthy to purposefully make ourselves anxious about a world we can’t fix by staring at a screen.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Franklin D. Roosevelt