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A Millennial friend of mine was angry and upset because an acquaintance had stood him up. They had made an appointment through Facebook, and she did not show up. While he talked about this event, he started fantasizing about a rating system to be integrated as a Facebook feature. He imagined that a feature could be introduced to enable the network to review the experience with a given person to either motivate people to be more reliable or prevent others from wasting their time with them. This idea is less interesting than the fact that he came up with it. Obviously, it constituted a coping mechanism when confronted with disappointment and hurt, as we can judge from the circumstances when the idea came to his mind.
The situation illustrates how technology has shaped emotional functioning. Instead of being just a neutral carrier of messages, it determines people’s perception of options in dealing with their emotions. Imagine an alternative scenario. Instead of fantasizing about creating a system of punishing people for unreliable behavior with one click, he could simply talk to the person he felt wronged by. Such a conversation would have a different emotional impact on both parties. The relation would have transformed thanks to such a conversation in a very different way than online canceling or rating could ever allow.
A Chinese study, which examined the diffusion of emotions on the social network Weibo, has revealed that anger spreads much faster than other emotions, for example joy, on the Internet.1 Maybe there is something about the Internet that makes it compatible with expressing anger in a more satisfying way than other emotions. It may fit more to the expression of coldness, negativity, or insult rather than warmth.
The Internet has liberated us from the need to store and retain information. Nowadays, these functions of our brain are externalized. Can we observe a similar trend in our emotional system? Anger can be expressed immediately with one click. Does this projection of anger deprive us of a deep engagement with this emotion? GPS has made it easier for us to find places, but it has also disabled our capacity to navigate and connect to the outside world. Similarly, an online expression of anger can provide a quick comfort, but the deeper inner processes behind this emotion may be muted. Perhaps one enjoys an immediate relief, but loses something more important in the long run. Continuing on the subject of GPS, one can imagine that its regular use may determine one’s choices in life. For example, one may be disinclined to become lost or ask strangers for help. This may limit one’s options. Similarly, having the intermediary technology shape our emotional expression may deprive us of choices and risks in the realm outside of online communication because it comes to fall further and further outside our capacity the less we exercise it.
Social media seems to have induced a habit of structuring our conversations. I often see a short-cut in place of argumentation on Facebook comments. There is no discussion about the content of the post. Classifying where an argument belongs on the Right-Left spectrum is treated as an argument in itself. Another way of responding to content is calling it a conspiracy theory rather than explaining whatever flaws one sees in the argumentation or evidence presented. It seems that it is another symptom of our times induced by the transiency of experience amidst the overwhelm caused by the flow of information and distraction. We are so busy that conversation has become a series of swift decisions to label argumentative points and facts to compare them to one’s echo chamber. Instead of engaging in an analysis of various points of view, we choose the path of least resistance so that we can reaffirm our own beliefs, again and again. During in-person conversations, one can ask the clarifying questions that sustain and nourish a conversation or debate. By engaging in dialogue, one has a chance to explore what memories may have caused an emotional reaction. In a communication that goes one way and is received in isolation, people are bombarding each other with messages that fit their need for confirmation or trigger emotional reactions if they are in dissonance with their identity. Self-confirmation does not bring anything new into our understanding. It can only provide comfort that one is not alone in one particular identity. This type of communication is like junk food providing us with some energy but depleting our body in the long run.
A picture comes to my mind, which illustrates the experience in our new infosphere. I see a person being thrown balls at and needing to decide very quickly whether they want to be associated with the person who threw the ball. To catch the ball or let it drop? Of course, our ancestors needed to make quick judgments and gauge whether a stranger was friend or foe once upon a time. Being flooded by small pieces of information, we are exposed to this stress of identifying whom we belong with among hundreds of Facebook ‘friends.’ We are entering a virtual reality, which shapes the habits of dealing with various points of view. If one experiences it every day, there is no other option than to be shaped and affected by it. Being exposed to so many stimuli where the primordial question of belonging is posed may produce a stress reaction that is addictive. Indeed, we can get addicted to our own emotions.
The pleasure principle2 seems to be one of the main elements of modern interpretative framework defining happiness and fulfillment. It leads to individualism as a norm. Social media provides the structure to pursue such atomized pleasure-seeking quasi-activities. They stimulate an individual’s neurochemical system. They provide a replacement community – an illusion of belonging without the challenges of a real community. Such a socialization shapes the way people interpret the social world and their role in it. Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, who we met earlier, depict the activities within online realm as interpassivity. They observe that men (or boys) more often adopt online presence as their lifestyle because they have not been compelled by their social and cultural context to leave the sphere of pleasure-seeking in order to enjoy the challenges of taking responsibilities and actualizing their creativity.3
The example of food can help us understand the impact of technology on us against the grain of the popular opinion that technology is neutral. It is presented as a tool to fulfill various functions in our lives without having any influence – at least, not a bad one – on ourselves. Food also misleads us in this way. We may think that it provides energy to fuel whomever one wants to be. Some evidence demonstrates that this self-determination is a myth. The science linking nutrition and mental health suggests that diet develops our personalities. Iron deficiency may cause attention problems and fatigue. The gut may be destroyed by junk food, which is identified as a potential cause of autism, depression, and other mental health issues. Food determines our looks and our attractiveness. Food providers can exploit us by causing health damage. Despite making themselves dependent on pharmacological intervention, many people keep buying unhealthy products because of chemical addiction to them. Indigenous people were capable of meeting their needs and living as independent groups because they had access to and cultivated healthy food. Food determines the structure of our society.
Even though food has always been part of our lives, it takes such a long time to become aware of the damages the food industry is causing us. Increasingly, we know more about the negative impact of Internet communication technology on our lives despite it being a relatively recent element of our daily lives. Research has demonstrated the effects on children who are exposed to the technology in the years when their brains are still in the stage of high plasticity.4 Following the free will ideology, we could assume that the food that we eat is adapted to the life that we want to have. However, someone depressed or having difficulty concentrating may not have the capacity to even think about some activities. Food affects will. The fatigue induced by the nutrient deficiency may limit someone’s capacity to imagine that they could do something outside of their routine. Nutrition conditions our guts by fostering some bacteria over others, which generates cravings. For our mind, feeling like eating something may appear as a free choice, but physiologically this thought is induced by industrial chemicals added to the products.
Internet communication technology may lure us into thinking that it brings us the kind of life we want. Without reflecting deeply on how it changes the opportunities to spend time and shape human relations, we cannot be sure that we choose. Digital natives have no opportunity to feel and experience a different mode of living because the way people interacted and spent time together has been changed by the mode of living imposed on us. Even if something looks like a choice, it is not a choice. One needs to be capable of creating a different reality and have imaginary alternatives in order to choose consciously. Otherwise, one goes for the only choice, hence no choice at all. Before we affirm our freedom in the way we use technology, it is worth asking whether one can have a different life that is able to meet one’s needs in a different way. Similarly to someone who is malnourished and cannot imagine the energy and vitality that one would have if one had access to different foods, we may not be capable of imagining the vibrancy and richness of our lives in the absence of Internet communication technology.
A transhumanist fantasy about being amplified by a machine has come about. We have not been given an add-on to enhance ourselves, but machines change how we are in the world. We may have additional functions such as built-in GPS, but this comes at the expense of other parts of us atrophying. Repeating an action increases our propensity to do it because it becomes easier and faster. This comfort may give the impression that one is more productive and efficient. However, we have hardly ever asked about what is being lost in the simplification transaction. It is difficult to notice that one is losing something that has never been fully developed. We may have lost an experience of interpersonal presence that cannot be intermediated by technology.
Clicking and texting engage a sensory experience of limited scope. The quality of our experiences cannot be engineered by technology. Transhumanists may prefer to spend their lives trying to prolong their time here on Earth instead of just enjoying the present moment. Paradoxically, they lose their time because of their fear of missing out. The pursuit of prolonging their time defines the way they spend their time. We do not need to submit to this limiting ideology of technological elites.
In order to understand how intermediated communication and the lack of deep personal ties affect emotional functioning, we need to go a step back and focus on trauma. Both body-oriented and talk therapy are applied in trauma healing. Technology deprives both of these realms of the oxygen necessary to flourish. We have lost opportunities for inhabiting both our bodies and being fully present in the conversations with others. For example, sitting in a fixed position at work all day does not give our body the possibility to release stuck emotions. While various body-oriented activities do not guarantee trauma healing, they could help in releasing emotions. Similarly, the lack of personal conversations and deep presence keeps people away from potential healing that building ties of trust may foster. While having deep relations with other people is not a guarantee to heal from trauma, there is a chance. Screen-focused lifestyles do not give us much chance for spontaneous healing, which is predominantly a lost chance for people not able to pay for therapy.
Trauma can manifest in very diverse symptoms. One of them can be the urge to control the environment as a preventive strategy to avoid pain. This may lead to getting rid of any elements in the outer reality that may cause emotional reactions or bring back memories to the surface. This may be a way one tries to achieve a state of peace: fixing the outside world to find inner calm, which results from attributing the inner turmoil to the outside stimuli. I am not suggesting that it is all in your head or that people should not take responsibility for the way they treat other people. However, there are other ways of dealing with these unpleasant sensations prompting us to try to eliminate anything or anyone triggering.
We should look at the attempts of purifying the outer surroundings of the past’s reminders as a subconscious cry for help. Unfortunately, help is not available to many in need. We cannot blame them for their reactions. However, we should ask how the availability of these measures could be enhanced instead of submitting to avoiding any triggers.
Online life provides many more opportunities to engage in activities replicating the dynamics of a traumatizing event. However, such situations can hardly enable an emotional process that a person may subconsciously seek. Humiliating others may have a function of relieving emotions from the past. Online reality gives an impression of a real-life situation, but our emotional system processes it differently. By receiving small doses of an experience that one is searching for – usually without being aware of it – one may become addicted to the micro-dosing of the feeling and convince themselves they best operate in the world by occupying most intimately an insular online one.
New types of interactions with people that have been enabled by the Internet communication technology participate in the emotional management system. One can attenuate or distract oneself from the feeling of loneliness. Virtual life disconnects from the sources of belonging that one could have in real life. For example, one can have strong ties with one’s family and be rooted in human ties thanks to those relations. Concentrating life energy in the virtual realm weakens these ties. Since cognitive and mental dimensions are the basis for virtual relations, the identity and ideological aspects become more prominent sources of belonging compared to the opportunities for belonging in real life. The result of this narrowing of the bases for belonging is of growing importance in defining oneself along with ideological and other forms of identity. The mental process becomes the fundamental element in dealing with loneliness. The medium liberates or disconnects people from their bodies in the construction of their belonging. It imprisons them in the disembodied forms of belonging, which may constrain them from fully meeting their human needs.
Since formulating opinions serves to attenuate the feeling of loneliness through anchoring oneself in like-minded groups, one opts for one-size fits-all platitudes and markers of identity clusters to belong to. This fails to both enrich one’s intellectual life and improve other domains of living such as interpersonal relations in one’s location. In this way, the intellectual impoverishment is twofold. Firstly, people are not motivated to engage in nuanced intellectual processes. Secondly, the outsourcing of our capacity for human complexity to corporations leaves us with one-dimensional, abstract discussions to repetitively bleat. Meanwhile, corporations influence our lives because there is no tangible resistance because distracted online conversationalists are busy fighting each other.
If we teach young people that canceling is the appropriate way to structure interpersonal relations, they may end up with no one in their lives. Canceling is a form of turbo-individualism. Thanks to the alive and dead protagonists of “The Swedish Theory of Love” – the 2015 movie directed by Erik Gandini – we can get an idea where the emancipation from recognizing the need for others may lead us. In the 1970s, the government has encouraged people to think about their relations and interdependencies as something to be carefully chosen rather than accepting people the way they are. This has developed into a culture of such high standards that more and more people decided not to share their lives with others because of the inconveniences inherent in partnership. It seems that the current spike of pruning in public and private sphere announces a similar trend. In Sweden, the interpretative framework accompanying the sphere of relations focused on romantic and sentimental aspects of studied relationships. Nowadays, we observe the growing role of the right wording and intellectual dimension. Cancel culture suggests that we should get rid of anyone who causes a sense of discomfort. Maintaining ideological purity has become the priority.
The teenage stage of brain development is a particularly formative period because this is when our system prunes the neural connections that appear as obsolete in order to function well in their environment. In other words, the capacities that are not being developed during this period may atrophy like unused muscles. One needs to make an extra effort to regain them. How can such an intention emerge in the cultural framework where a discussion is not a norm? If technology removes the need for verbal communication during the teenage years, teenagers may not develop the capacity to discuss. Within the recent Covid-induced trend of living online lurks a severe danger of depriving the young of crucial communication and interpersonal skills.
The process of building opinions and finding solutions to the dilemmas defines the outcomes. The outcomes are not the result of arguments by one or the other side. The opinions are also shaped by the fact that those who build their opinions are never confronted with each other in a setting where finding a creative solution is the goal. The process inhibits any creativity and compromise. Instead of argumentation, there is attacking a straw man – a simplified, caricatured point made by the opponent. Such lack of depth and reasoning is induced by the design of communication tools: small screens, short comments, and blocking options. The echo chamber grows around us thanks to social media’s ingenuity in convincing us that we have all the control and thus are in control.
I have listened to a very civilized conversation between a Polish podcaster Szymon and an Orthodox Jew about the history of anti-Semitism. The podcaster was genuinely interested in exploring reasons why this attitude has been so widespread for centuries. The Jewish expert mentioned Adolf Hitler. After it happened, the podcaster said that this episode probably would be demonetized because of the design of the YouTube algorithm. Increasingly, YouTubers have been adopting a new way of speaking in order to avoid words “triggering” the algorithm. It is worth considering how the algorithm affects content producers who rely on a strong relationship with and understanding of the algorithm for their financial stability. They may lose motivation to ask certain questions or invite certain experts because they risk losing income, seemingly small decisions that have undeniably large effects.
Fact-checking is taking place outside of public discourse. Most users will never learn about the disputes regarding censorship and fact-checkers’ decisions thanks to deplatforming and having people live in Facebook bubbles. The users are not informed why a given content does not conform to the truth standards. The fact-checkers are anonymous. We have no opportunity to assess their bias. So, it is not clear what the credentials for stating that something is true or not are. The trend to deplatform and demonetize channels on YouTube are forms of censorship that foster and promote a two-tier stream of communication. The corporate giants like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube on one side and various ventures such as BrandNewTube, Infowars, BitChute, Gap, or Minds as parallel platforms in the infosphere.
Deplatforming is a tool of cancel culture because it marginalizes discussion of topics not approved by the tech giants’ algorithms. It empowers cancel culture because those who cancel find confirmation for the righteousness of their tactics. Canceling by both the powerless and the powerful works for the benefit of corporations. With its aid, they gain cultural buttressing to exercise their power legitimately and skirt any social or moral obligations that a society could theoretically demand its government obligate corporations of such size and scope to exercise.
Fact-checking that aims at an automatic blocking of content and deplatforming completely changes our intellectual life. Since these platforms are increasingly becoming the intermediaries for our intellectual lives, they shape the culture of searching for the truth. They may induce norms against posting any content that fact-checkers may not accept. These invisible individuals overtake the truth-seeking process and make final decisions without engaging people in the process of comparing the evidence and forming their opinions. The mere practice of blocking specific influencers inculcates canceling as the appropriate way of dealing with disagreements, especially for young people who may look up to billionaires as the heroes. This may appear as the legitimate behavior that guarantees that one is on the winning side. Cancel culture legitimizes deplatforming and censorship. As a result of purifying the infosphere, people are not offered opportunities to diverge from a dichotomized space and do not learn to be present when a disagreement happens. Mediums such as Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter empower strong actors by making them invisible and, bizarrely, objective. They have sent a message that the production of truth should be centralized and, crucially, that centralized truth exists on two sides of the same coin, yet somehow cannot interact. As the owners of the medium, they hold the self-appointment to define truth.
1Julien Lausson (2013): La colère se diffuse plus vite en ligne que les autres émotions, selon une étude. Numerama, September 17.
2Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist trace the origin of pleasure principle to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of a savage living in the state of nature, where there is no need for community. Further advocacy for pleasure as the goal of civilization can be found in Herbert Marcuse’s work. Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist (2018): Digital Libido: Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society. Futurica Media, p.16-19.
3Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist (2018): Digital Libido: Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society. Futurica Media, p. 154. They define interpassivity as “[a] concept invented by the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller; it describes all the meaningless quasi-actions that people carry out with the purpose of placating the other in the high-tech environment, used as an opposite of authentic interactivity (…).” ibid, p. 423.
4Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips (2020): How Empathy Has Changed In The Face Of Tech. ScienceFriday.com, February 7. She has authored the book (2020): The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World. Little A.