Social media elevates irrelevant opinions to mainstream discourse
Get. Off. Twitter.
Social media has a perverse, discombobulating way of making you think that two-bit opinions from people with no influence at all are somehow representative of mainstream discourse. I don’t know why this is the case—that is to say, I don’t know why more people can’t recognize this. I suppose because if this were widely understood and acknowledged, most of social media would cease to exist. Essentially the whole system runs on convincing you that the thoughts of a guy in a one-bedroom apartment in Council Bluffs is indicative of the majority opinion in a Pew poll. Take that away and it collapses.
Here’s a great example: With the implosion of the Titan submersible this week, and the death of all five people aboard, a number of random anonymous Twitter users started writing about how the tragedy was actually good because it claimed the lives of a bunch of rich people. I guess the thinking goes that rich people are bad, because they have a lot of money or something, and so anything that ends their lives is really good. I don’t think I need to tell you that this is an exceptionally fringe idea, so far outside the bounds of respectable discourse that it’s not at all worth mentioning. How many people do you know who you even suspect of privately harboring such beliefs? Think through your Rolodex. I suspect you can’t come up with one. Very few people feel this way and the ones that do are comprehensively unimportant by any reasonable discursive metric. But because some of these people posted their thoughts on social media, we’re supposed to believe that this is some kind of meaningful groundswell—to the point that even Matt Walsh, who is normally a profoundly incisive and on-target cultural critic, felt compelled to write:
There is a very large contingent of people who laugh gleefully when one of Elon Musk's rockets explode on takeoff or a submersible with wealthy adventurers is lost to the sea.
These are people whose envy and dissatisfaction with their own mediocre, unimpressive lives have driven them to despise anyone who does anything different, bold, or daring. They take pleasure in failure because they will never have any successes of their own to celebrate.
I guess pathetic assholes of this type have always existed. But it worries me that they are so numerous in our culture, and that over time they are only becoming more and more cartoonishly sadistic.
I have made it clear that I really hate writing about online controversies of this variety. It’s just so tedious and never-ending and unimportant. And I suppose there’s a sort of meta-irony here in that commentary like this, about irrelevant Internet opinions from anonymous users on the extreme periphery of the discourse, is itself irrelevant by dint of association. Still, though: “They are so numerous in our culture.” Really? How numerous? Do we really think these people constitute even a meaningful sub-fraction of the population? Like 0.1%? There are a whole lot of people out there and virtually none of them “laugh gleefully” when stuff like this happens. Most of the ones who do, do so via anonymous Twitter accounts online, because the broader culture is so hostile to that kind of psychopathy that they have to do it under a pseudonym. How serious are we supposed to take this sort of thing?
It’s worth pointing out that this belief—that there is a meaningfully sizable contingent of “cartoonishly sadistic” people holding these beliefs—actually does bleed over into the real world. Guys like Matt Walsh spend so much time fighting battles online that it’s kind of understandable that they might suffer snow-blindness from time to time. But even people who are not permanently situated on the Internet seem to pick this stuff up: You go over to a friend’s house for dinner or meet some guys after work for a drink, and someone says, “Did you see there are people who are, like, laughing about that sub that imploded? Can you believe that?” Then you have to sit around and talk about a non-phenomenon and display the requisite amount of indignation over something that doesn’t matter. This is a profoundly irritating declension. I want to talk about important, relevant things. Okay, mostly I want to talk about how they should bring back Joan of Arcadia on CBS and which brand of masa is the best for making fresh tostadas. But I can assure you even my intensely idiosyncratic fixations are more relevant than whatever AppleScrapper443061 said three days ago about a bunch of people none of us knows.
In the pre-social media era you’d have never even thought about such things. We can get there again. Just get off social media. Don’t use it like they want you to use it. Platforms like Twitter have a really narrow usefulness if they’re done right—they can be fantastic transmitters of important information that bypass legacy media gatekeeping in a way that’s really meaningful. In most cases it’s like this: Unimportant and irrelevant conversations you don’t need to care about. Treat 95% of social media that way and your life will be happier, truer, freer of stress and more interesting. You have nothing to lose.