Was social media a terrible mistake?

All the furor over Elon Musk and Twitter has me considering the question: would it actually be terrible if he ran Twitter into the ground? Social media has done nothing worthwhile for society, on the contrary it has brought out the worst in people. Too many people fighting over politics, religion (or lack of), or stupid shit that has no impact or bearing on life. Its largely a waste of time.

What do you all think?

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SatanBurger · 36-40, F

Without social media, people still fought over things like religion. Take the witch hunts that was nationally on a much greater scale (still is in most countries) and there was no social media back then. Let's not even bring the Inquisition into it.

I happen to think it's lack of learned skills that more cause the issues in society rather than social media as we have two types of brains and if you don't nurture both, we are constantly stuck in being reactionary due to evolution. We have our conscious brains and then we have our subconscious brains where biases, survival instincts and trauma tends to hide.

There's things you can do to make the subconscious brain better like work on logical thinking, identifying and becoming comfortable with emotions, working through trauma, getting help, identifying biases but most people don't because it's a learned skill. These skills are not taught in public schools, they're learned. If you don't have those "learned" skills naturally then you're pretty much stuck at being constantly reactionary through life, constantly overreacting to any environmental stimuli.

Social media isn't so much the problem as public education and the fact that awareness of one's self is a learned trait that most don't learn or don't get a chance. That's the underlying issue. We have too many people trapped in unhealthy environments where they can't be themselves and where toxicity is their learned behavior.

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@SatanBurger Very interesting assessment.

Perhaps the lack of learned skills is due to many people not even realising the nature of thinking as you describe. So their way of becoming comfortable is to latch onto ideas that seem "right" emotionally without stopping to consider if they are "right" in fact and logic.

They find others who agree with their ideas and so become drawn into hermetic, cult-like circles that abjure and oppose any others, because the others make them uncomfortable.

You mention the witch hunts, and these do have a technical parallel with the rise of the Internet.

The 15C German Catholic clergyman, Heinrich Kramer, wrote a particularly unpleasant book called Malleus Maleficarum ("Hammer of the Witches"), an anthology of demonology and the like. Despite it being heavily criticised by many leading bishops and theologians of its time, it was heavily responsible for the wave of fear-driven persecutions that swept across Europe until the late 17C. They didn't need the Inquisition either, the Church of Rome's theological "security branch", as the witch-hunts continued just as zealously in the post-Reformation, Protestant countries.

The technical parallel? This was not long after the invention of printing by Caxton, furthered by Gutenburg; allowing books to be copied and published far more widely and rapidly than hitherto possible.

'
It is heavy going, but have you read Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds?

Mackay was a 19C journalist and historian who studied those very things, including the Witch Mania, Alchemy, and the South Sea Bubble. All linked by mass-delusion; but its notable that some of these had their doubters even at their height.

Do these three have parallels now?

- Imagined "witches" are safe now, in most countries anyway; but what of the on-line persecution of people for expressing opinions not shared by the [at]-Hermetic-Anonymous brigade?

- Alchemy was pushed away, gradually, by its own obvious failures and by the Age of Enlightenment bringing rational, scientific method and thought; but those qualities are now threatened by assorted anti-knowledge, anti-science campaigns with their own motives.

- The "Bubble" share-dealings collapse even has its digital-age descendants with the banking crisis several years ago, and the precarious nature of "Bitcoin": mass speculation and greed overtaking analysis, to become unsustainable.

Heavy-going only by its prose style of the time; but a book to be considered in the light of the grimmer aspects of "social[?]-media", and looked at with your insight.