“Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.”
- Wendell Berry
The case against social media seems to be growing. Facebook has well and truly fallen out of favour, Instagram is accused of fuelling teen anxiety, and Twitter is often little more than a seething mass of bile. As Jeffrey Bilbro points out in a new article, social media is so embedded in our culture that even those who opt out can’t avoid its influence—it “is becoming the grammar of all social relations.” Accordingly, there are many and varied attempts to fix social media and, because this is a technocratic age, many of them rely on the authority and expertise of social science. But this, Bilbro says, is a false promise. He makes an elegant and important case which I’ll summarise briefly here.
It’s not just that social science can’t supply the solutions we need; the problem is deeper than that. Social science holds out the promise of truly understanding human behaviour including as it manifests on digital platforms, and using these insights to create new, better platforms through modified algorithms, new incentives, and more conscious consumption by users. Fundamentally, though, Bilbro points out that social media and social science suffer from the same defect: they both reduce fully-fleshed humans to bundles of data. The scientists parse and catalogue the data, and the technologists manipulate it down the redesigned information superhighway. The bundles themselves—you, me, our family, friends, and neighbours—learn to “beta-test and fine tune” our presentation online and off, and to curate our relationships with real people and the real world. Our reality, far from being augmented by this technology, is flattened, depersonalised, stripped of nuance or context.
Perhaps a flawed technology can still be used judiciously, but perhaps we also need to lay it down to recover life in its fullness. Bilbro argues that “to begin healing the damages caused by distorted digital approximations” we need “to return deliberately to the full-orbed complexity of life in the flesh.” In this mode, we might “commit random acts of poetry”, we might inhabit a moment without thinking about how to post it, and we might listen to a person rather than argue with an account. We might even, as Bilbro suggests, draw inspiration from this advice given by Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer:
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Amen.