The Social media dilemma
Humanity is not ready for Social Media. I have become more and more convinced of this as I witness and live through its evolution. It promised to be a bright future of social interaction but has become a solvent, dissolving our societal cohesion.
I want to share a personal story with you. A Gen-Xer’s social media dilemma.
I am torn between the incessant pull to release my ego demon (we all have one) and have a shot at my deserved time in the glow of the adoring masses, and a palpable fear of being consumed by that same demon, mutated into someone I despise. A preening peacock selling off every greater chunks of my self esteem for another shot of dopamine.
I do not have the luxury of detaching from Social media all together. I run a public facing sales business. This means I virtually must engage with my customers in their preferred medium: Social media. But I am ‘deliberately’ terrible at it. I am reluctant to give my ego space to spread its digital wings and fly off with my sanity. I sabotage the potential legitimate success of my business out of both fear and repugnance of what I fear I must become to achieve it.
It gets worse.
I have been an armchair economist for most of my adult life. Hilarious, since I was expelled from my Econ class at highschool and labelled a disruptive failure by my teacher. This hobby has led me to uncover and better understand the pernicious design of our economic systems, but more alarmingly, to get a hazy outline of the catastrophic chasm rapidly approaching the global economy!
Humans want to help each other. If we see a difficulty on the road, we will warn those we encounter of the hazards that lay ahead for them. It is a hard wired instinct. The fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf comes to mind. A tale of a young bored shepherd boy seeking attention by raising the alarm of a fictional wolf, only to abuse this attention and be ignored when a real wolf appears. There could be a subtle rewording of this tale where the boy was in fact honest only to be met with ever greater disbelief when the wolf only appeared for him, only to be finally vindicated at the price of someone's life. A familiar Hollywood horror movie trope.
I feel the pull to warn my fellow travellers of the impending dangers to our economic lives in a Telegram channel I began.
I see the danger aproach, I have prepared my family as best I can for the coming storm. I could leave it at that, and perhaps I should, but the urge to warn others is strong. More accurately, the selfless side of human nature is horrified at the prospect of witnessing others' pain and suffering, knowing they had the opportunity to warn them. Some would rightfully label me a pain in the neck, do-gooder; or even the boy man that cried wolf.
Being mistakenly (albeit understandably) labelled a desperate Social media narcissistic influencer makes me inwardly cringe.
Then there is the ego. That voice deep inside that wants to be heard, craves attention, hungers for the limelight.
My ego demon.
Those rare and fleeting moments in my life that I gained the limelight were enough for me to feel, to fear the powerful allure of stardom. Recently this led me to embark on an introspection. A simple thought exercise. I asked myself the question:
What would happen if my few dozen followers on Telegram grew to a few thousand, or a few hundred thousands of followers along with all the attendant social media ‘luggage’?
A few things were immediately clear to me: My ego would explode into a completely unpredictable beast. And it would take a far more fortified personality that I possess to tame it. Finally, it would almost certainly twist my personality into something unrecognisable to the me of today. All three points scare the pants off of me.
Even writing this post tantalisingly frightens me. What if one day one of these posts gains some kind of traction?
I keep telling myself that I need an outlet for my thoughts and a private diary for some unknown reason does not do it. So I persist in poking the fire. Like an exhibitionist who is horrified at the prospect of being caught, but is nevertheless compelled to streak in public.
So here I sit in the Social media dilemma, wanting to both: promote my business (i.e. engage in a perpetual prostitution of myself and my products) and warn people of the potential dangers that lie ahead on the road. While fearing the awakening of a dangerous beast that lurks deep inside us all.
So this finally leads me to my bombastic conclusion: humanity is simply not ready for social media (in the form we now have it today). Could it work in some other form? I think so, but I can only venture guesses as to what that form would be. One thing is certain, the grotesquely inflated global popularity contest that social media has exploded to become, coupled with the pseudonymity urging many users to a shamelessness and toxicity that would never be tolerated in physical encounters, and finally the centralised profit motive that has found amplification of negative emotion most profitable, could be the most toxic form social media could possibly take.