Social Media: The Digital Echo Chamber Shaping Our Lives
As it stands today, social media completely dominates the way we see and conduct our own lives. Although it can appear in countless different forms, the common goal of social media has stayed the same: to share and connect. Anyone and everyone has the freedom to share photos/videos, information, as well as their own personal thoughts just through the creation of a profile. Profiles that allow us to connect with people from all over the world, building and maintaining relationships across time zones. Profiles that allow us to get involved in our community, environment, and opportunities that we never could’ve had before. Because of this extensive amount of power available across the world, social media is extremely beneficial to furthering our society. However, this power comes with numerous dangers surrounding individuals as well as the world around them.
One of the main concerns around social media is the gamification of communication. Gamification refers to the incorporation of game-style incentives into everyday or non-game activities. These incentives include implementing rules, clear achievable goals, as well as providing constant performance feedback. The goal of gamification is to motivate its users by providing a sense of control, progress, and achievement in a situation that might not have it otherwise. This use of gamification is seen across countless social media platforms, specifically in its use of likes, comments, and shares. A perfect example of this phenomenon is in Nguyen’s article “How Twitter Gamifies Communication”, where he states how Twitter “ offers immediate, vivid, and quantified evaluations of one’s conversational success by offering points for discourse... scor[ing] our communication” (2). Another example of this is in Haidt’s article, “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks”, which reveals how social media, with its displays
of likes, friends, followers, and retweets, has pulled our sociometers out of our private thoughts and posted them for all to see” (1). These quotes describe the idea of how social media
measures the “success” and “popularity” of their users based on a hard coded number. This is extremely dangerous because of humans' natural desire to be recognized as valuable or superior by others, compared to others within their community. When users can receive real-time, direct feedback telling them their rank within the platform amongst others, it can turn the intentions of the user from self expression to a form of competition. This competition leaves users constantly checking their profile to get validation and to see where their “popularity” progress is. Nguyen furthers this point later in his article by revealing how Twitters, “scoring mechanisms have been significantly informed by design strategies fostered in the Las Vegas gambling industry, which overtly seek to increase the addictiveness of their products,” because they know, “it feels good to watch the numbers go up” (2). This psychological addiction of validation and popularity can lead to severe mental health problems within its users. By standardizing what we post or say based on what might be best liked by others, we create an unrealistic environment of how everyone should be, look and act. This causes users to completely rely on this virtual world for acceptance and recognition, thus consequently losing their own sense of real life, real self, and real priorities.
Another main concern around social media is surrounding the transmission and evaluation of information and knowledge. A crucial illustration of this can be seen within the internet phenomenon: fake news. Fake news refers to news articles or other items that are deliberately false and intended to manipulate the viewer. While the concept of fake news has been known for generations, recently it has become a large problem due to the ease and speed with which it can be spread on social media through echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. These systems are both social structures that systematically exclude sources of information and intentionally only expose users to like-minded sources through a series of self-confirming
algorithms. Because of this, users find their own opinions constantly echoed back to them, which reinforces their individual belief systems and blocks them from being exposed to others differing opinions. Nguyen’s “Escape the Echo Chamber” goes further into this, describing how in a bubble, “ we encounter exaggerated amounts of agreement and suppressed levels of disagreement. [In a bubble] we’re vulnerable because, in general, we actually have very good reason to pay attention to whether other people agree or disagree with us. Looking to others for corroboration is a basic method for checking whether one has reasoned well or badly” (3). When people are exposed to opposing perspectives, they develop a greater sense of empathy and understanding of others' positions, beliefs, experiences and viewpoints. Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles eliminate these skills, causing higher amounts of bias, judgment and conflict. People become less focused on seeking truth within the information they were told, and more on defending their point of view without reason, almost to a fault. Nguyen furthers this concept, stating how “a healthy informational network tends to discover people’s mistakes and point them out, [which] puts an upper ceiling on how much [users] can trust even [their] most beloved leader. But inside an echo chamber, that upper ceiling disappears”(3). Without this “upper ceiling” that allows people to challenge reality around them, they become sheeplike: following whatever information they were fed, brainlessly trusting it because that is all they've ever known. Making it harder to step out and see that they are trapped within this chamber.
Personally, my relationship to social media is complex. My generation was the first generation to not know a world without social media. In fact, the rise in popularity of these sites were in direct correlation with one of the most lonely and insecure stages of our lives: middle school. A time where everyone’s body was growing at disproportionate rates, and everyone was embarrassed by their parents dropping them off at school (even though we were all under sixteen
and obviously couldn’t drive). A time where there was already an overwhelming amount of anxiety surrounding fitting in with your peers and finding your individuality. It was almost as if, right as we were beginning to learn about the world around us, we were introduced to this social tool that altered our understanding of how life should be. Personally, I remember joining social media in sixth grade. Not because I wanted to, but because there was an unsaid expectation that if you did not join it, you would be left out and seen as an outcast. I remember downloading Instagram during my school’s book fair, and immediately uploading a picture of a cat poster that I had bought. Right away, I felt this unusual pressure as if everyone's eyes were on me. I recall constantly checking my profile to see if anyone had liked it, and if they did, looking at their accounts to see what they chose to post. Unlike mine, I noticed that my peers were posting pictures of themselves looking their best, teeth white and face perfectly shaped. Looking at their accounts made me reconsider my own, making me want to change the way I presented myself. From that moment on I suppressed my younger tendencies, and took influence from those much older than me. I was no longer “Kassi Winter” the person, I was “kassi.winter” the image I curated for myself on Instagram. And that is exactly what social media has become to my generation today: a way to falsely present your identity to others. Creating a strong sense of anxiety surrounding self worth, trying to constantly reach an unattainable goal. I am sure that if my generation could go back and change their decision to join social media, they would. But the truth is that we didn’t have the knowledge of its power till recently, there is no way we could have known the effects that it would have in our lives. And even if we could go back and warn our younger selves, we wouldn’t have listened anyways. At that time in our lives, we are young and absorbent. We know any other way. We were in an echo chamber. And just how my
generation was the first to be raised by social media, we are not the last. And I am scared for the generations to come.
Refrences —
1. Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell, “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks”
2. Thi Nguyen, “How Twitter Gamifies Communication”
3. Thi Nguyen, "Escape the echo chamber"