Social media and Twitter are bad because you can form virtual tribes and yield to age-old instincts.
The more individualistic people are, the less they join those tribes. Individualists tend to be grumpy though, for which they are bullied by the perfect Twitter moralists.
We exchanged Christmas presents. They helped me sort out how to raise my challenging children. I always had someone to talk with any time of the day or night when I was having insomnia or whatever.
And I haven't had stuff like in recent years. I just thought it was me because I spent a few years homeless.
But then I run into comments like this one that posit people can either connect socially and be assholes or have a mind of their own and (implicitly) no friends and be grumpy.
I don't know what the hell is going on in the world, but maybe my internet life going to hell isn't just about my life going to hell. Maybe there's something else going on and it's sort of "coincidence" that my internet life went to hell at the same time that my actual life went to hell.
But in my experience life does not compel you to either have a mind of your own or have social connections. And having social connections doesn't compel you to go along with being part of a lynch mob or some shit.
That's never how my life worked. I used to have friends and a mind of my own. I still have a mind of my own, but I've mostly not had friends in a long time.
I kept thinking "I must be doing it wrong," but maybe not. Maybe the internet isn't what it used to be or something.
I've found HN to be much better for discussion in general (recognizing that this is not the case for everyone), and have participated in IRC rooms and whatnot where if I spent more time I could probably consider the people there friends, while still retaining individualism.
I tend towards grumpy isolationism however, so I may not be a good standard.
I'm currently working on an early-stage startup on this space, and we're specifically trying to solve the discoverability problem while keeping the group chats themselves small and private (or at least private enough). Do you think you could see yourself using something like this?
How you end up in these groups is you either get invited by real life friends or you hang around in a big public group for a while, make friends with people who will then invite you to these smaller groups.
Because users have to be invited rather than just finding the group on a search page, the users are of higher quality and share similar interests.
Myself personally, probably not. I mentioned I tend a bit towards grumpy isolationism, that's very much the truth.
I will participate in communities I stumble on, but can't see myself seeking them out.
That being said, if I were seeking a community, I could definitely see myself using a service like that.
I really think this is what it is. Internet discussion forums used to self-select for curious people actively seeking out discussion. It wasn't hard to find meaningful interactions because most people who sought out forums were looking for something similar. Now that everyone is on the internet, the random person you interact with likely doesn't have the same disposition as before.
I do know that my own and others expectation of Tech (from the mid 90ies) was just another utopia and I resent myself for drinking the Kool-aid, and hate myself for having gotten a job in Tech and playing my tiny part in being an ambassador for this type of future among the small group of people I had influence over (family, friends etc who all wished they did the same seeing my salary and lifestyle with much envy). I was so convinced of science and Tech being the answer to all problems we create that I thought teaching my kids to use Tech is a good use of time. But today I can't bring back time and I hate myself for it because I could have gone for a walk with them in the woods and created real memories instead.
another thing that hits me as I get old is it's becoming harder to make new connections IRL. I see my old friends having given up on life by refusing to get out of a stuck marriage, getting fat and lazy, having lost their confidence and ability and interest to do anything new, and the best I can get from them is a statement about what's cool on Netflix these days.
Then I look at myself and realize that I'm as much a slave to the algorithm as them even I do everything to not be part of this. There simply is no escape[1]. I gave up all social media years ago (except HN) and spend at least 2-3 hours outside every day. And my hate shifts from "Tech in general" to myself because I know there is no way out. Perhaps people like David Foster Wallace and others who are no longer with us have seen it coming years ago, and knew there are only 2 options: a) avoid others and be happy with just myself or b) off myself. I'm doing an OK job (I think) managing a) but I can't claim that I'm not looking forward to the day I snuff it either. It feels like the only thing that is worse than dealing with my own judgement and myself is dealing with the judgement or opinions of others (see the idea of "Hell is other people" from "No Exit")
[1] The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
Because of the internet, I've had friends -- real friends who were extremely important to me -- in Canada, in Guam and in the Middle East. They helped save my life and shape my character.
While largely housebound due to my health, the internet was how I had close relationships with people the world over without exposing me to their germs or them to mine.
I left my corporate job that was helping to kill me and slept in a tent for a few years while trying to figure out how to make a few bucks online. That helped save my life and helped me get healthier when there's not supposed to be any hope for me.
Once, my oldest son said to me "There's both good and evil in all things." I thought that was profound and life giving and eye opening.
I asked him where he learned such profound wisdom given his relative youth. He told me I taught him that. He learned it from me.
That was even more surprising. I didn't have any memory or awareness of having done any such thing.
I don't hate tech. I see tremendous untapped potential in it to build a better world and I flail about trying to figure out how to write about it knowing that I have no audience and I have no credibility and no one believes my story.
I start little blogs that peter out and go nowhere. I start little reddits that sometimes have me as the only member for ages.
And I'm sorry to hear that someone who likely de facto helped to save my life by being one of the cogs in the machine that built the tech that helped me live when, by all rights, I should have died is someone so bitter and disillusioned with the very thing I still find wondrous and life giving and a means to connect with people in spite of my incurable condition and compromised immune system.
I started a BBS network. That was my social life. Those digital pen pal friends were my life line. Probably the most intense, intimate relationships I've ever had.
I don't know what happened in the medium transitions since. Dial up to internet, FidoNet to UUCP & NNTP, FTP & Gopher to HTTP, multiuser to MMORPG, blogs to social media, desktop to laptop to mobile, social media to livestream.
Maybe it's like Chomsky tried to warn us: Anything ad supported is bad for us.
Maybe it's like David Graeber suggests: While winner-takes-all is something like a natural law, we can always find nooks and corners to connect with each other and have genuine relationships.
I really dunno.
Long ago, I trusted people I met online in a way I can't anymore and that creates a barrier that protects me from potential predators, but it also keeps out potential friends. Multiply that across literally billions of people and it's a hard problem to solve.
I don't think the tech, per se, is the problem. We opened a social Pandora's Box and having seen how things can go wrong at scale, we optimize for trying to guard against potential evil rather than for fostering good.
With that, our fears deepen. It becomes a case of "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
Ultimately, it comes back to the people and how they live their lives and what is in their minds. Tech is a problem because we've decided The Tech is the problem rather than deciding how we use it is The Problem.
Then we very ironically design new apps to remedy our problems rooted in the idea that The Tech is the problem rather than designing new philosophies and new ideas and new social norms which has historically been the effective remedy for social ills.
I'm casually rereading the media and technology critics. McLuhan, Postman, Chomsky, Shirky, Orwell, others. It's kind of amazing how prescient some of their observations were.
Thanks for the Ellul tip. Will read.
As a counter anecdote, I have a group of about 15 real friends on the internet that I met mostly on an instant messaging app. Real friends to the point of meeting up and going on holidays together without actually knowing their full real names.
I'm not suggesting that it's simply impossible to make constructive connections anymore. I'm only saying that I spent some years thinking the change was 100 percent about me and my life and maybe it wasn't 100 percent me.
Maybe it was at least partly general conditions. And I couldn't see that because my life being derailed was very in my face and I just figured that was the entire explanation.
My Twitter avatar is a picture of a fractal I generated with my own software. That reveals (fuzzily) a certain non-obvious aspect of my personality, which you couldn't get just from looking at my face. The majority of people have faces; mine isn't much of a signal to strangers.
Faces are for recognition. If we met at a conference, you could recognize me again by my face. If you don't know me, my face isn't very useful unless you expect to meet me in person. So, a face on Twitter is unhelpful to the point of being counterproductive.
Anyway, that face might not even be theirs.
As a grumpy individualist, I'm not on Twitter, so it's pretty hard to bully me there. There's people there, why would I want to be there?
Because we've given every single person a voice and the promise that their opinion is just as important as everyone else's, despite their understanding or their qualifications, and it has made people collectively entitled and vitriolic.
Couple this with absolutely batshit insane current events for the last ~5 years and you have massive divide.
Then multiply that by the expansion of technology into every day lives, where everyone is connected and has an up-to-date, moment-by-moment window into literally thousands of other lives, and people get extremely detached from their own selves and their own beliefs. They stop thinking for themselves, almost entirely.
Not to mention things like Twitter, with quirks like "you have to fit very heavy conversations into cute little limited messages" so as to even further increase the pressure on public discourse.
All of this friction creates heat, so to speak, and people start realizing that outside their circles are people who are so foreign and different that they MUST be idiot enemies, and thus everyone begins to despise each other, categorizing people and using assumptions about their character against them, all formed from a few blurbs of random information either from context or a few textboxes on a social media profile.
It's just like when one is unable to effectively communicate, they often resort to violence. I firmly believe this is the same thing happening online - it's just a huge, crowded shouting match and since nothing ever happens despite how loud you're screaming, you have to resort to other means to get a rise out of someone else.
I'm not a particularly happy person and I really, _really_ dislike interacting with other people, so I can certainly understand why some of this happens. Life sucks for a lot of people, and being able to express that whilst having the buffer of a computer screen and ethernet cable between you and the other person is certainly a "great power, great responsibility" type of situation.
I said These studies almost never ask questions like ... That was very intentional.
"I'm being abused" is merely one example of someone having a crappy life. There are lots of ways a person's life can be crappy.
So your comment doesn't really disagree with my suggestion, though it sort of seems to. I'm only suggesting that bullies are probably miserable and taking their misery out on other people and that element isn't actually examined by most studies.
The study characterizes these cyberbullies as males who spend too much time online. I object to that.
That more or less smears men and people who spend a lot of time online without finding any real cause. I think it's a characterization that amounts to harmful disinformation.
It's not much different from racial profiling which people object to for the implication that "people of color are just immoral and inherently inclined to be criminal." (Among other reasons.)
I object to this study essentially pointing fingers at innocent characteristics as if they are causal without finding any meaningful causes. It doesn't even seem to look for meaningful causes.
I spend a lot of time online. That doesn't per se make me more inclined to bully people.
I do my damnedest to be a decent person in spite of having a very difficult life. I've been on the receiving end of bullying on a forum where it was mod policy to actively encourage members to pick on certain people and then the mods would act like the people being bullied were at fault for any drama that swirled around them when there was no means for those people to shut that crap down (I have reason to believe I continued to be stalked by some of these assholes even after they banned me).
I was homeless at the time and it was an extremely classist forum.
So there's no doubt all kinds of factors that contribute to such behavior. But this study doesn't seem to list a single thing that looks like a meaningful contributor.
The mods were a large part of the problem on the forum where I was harassed. That doesn't mean "Becoming a mod puts you at greater risk of becoming a bully."
Those people were just assholes who found themselves in an easily abusable position of power. Some of them were assholes who were very open about their childhood baggage, such as having an alcoholic father.
So personal baggage was a contributing factor. But we all can choose whether our baggage is a source of compassion for the suffering of others or a bullshit excuse to kick others while they are down.
These folks chose to kick me while I was down while bragging to the world about what amazingly woke and good people they are. And most people buy their BS about being good people and woke people and fail to see how they actively and intentionally crap on some people for no real reason.
My point is: in both cases it's not "I'm miserable and unhappy", it's either a community-building thing, or it's a social status thing. If you're bullying someone in school, that's a power move to assert status. They're not unhappy, they're just trying to get ahead; under different circumstances, they'd just mug people to take their money. Now they bully them to get more status.
It's kind of sad that this academic system makes it so only well-paid therapists get to do that, because of course looking at the current state of affairs in the world and coming to and reporting on and building insight on the logical conclusion that only hurt people hurt people isn't "scientific research" because the peers in your field only allow themselves and others to repeat what the numbers in the excel spreadsheet say. The psychology and objective journalism fields are great examples of dysfunctional academic systems.
I like Alice Miller's hot take on her field in her book "For Your Own Good". I'm just going to straight up copy her text:
Those who swear by statistical studies and gain their psychological knowledge from those sources will see my efforts to understand the children Christiane and Adolf [Hitler] as unnecessary and irrelevant. They would have to be given statistical proof that a given number of cases of child abuse later produced almost the same number of murderers. This proof cannot be provided, however, for the following reasons. Alice Miller lists off 1) child abuse takes place in secret 2) testimony of victims on their own suffered child abuse is often very flawed to protect their parents 3) experts in criminology have already noted this trend in their scientific research
Even if statistical data confirm my own conclusions, I do not consider them a reliable source because they are often based on uncritical assumptions and ideas that are either meaningless (such as "a sheltered childhood"), vague, ambiguous ("received a lot of love"), or deceptive ("the father was strict but fair"), or that even contain obvious contradictions ("he was loved and spoiled"). This is why I do not care to rely on conceptual systems whose gaps are so large that the truth escapes through them, but rather prefer to make the attempt ... to take a different route. I am not searching for statistical objectivity but for the subjectivity of the victim in question, to the degree that my empathy permits.
Do they start behaving good to other people?
Do they recognize their past behavior and feel bad for it?
With time, most people simply move on, with the bullied party often being the notable exception.
Wouldn't there be worse behavior problems than internet bullying if that was the case? Like, physical bullying or violence or worse?
I was molested and raped as a child. Most people had no idea.
I did attempt suicide at age 17 and I began making two grades per year below a C starting after I was raped at the age of twelve and I spent time in an insane asylum.
But I also was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class, had the highest SAT scores of my graduating high school class, won a National Merit Scholarship (to UGA, in fact) based on those scores, etc.
Most people are not talented at identifying indicators of abuse and people in abusive situations are often doing everything in their power to find some high road solution because they know they are at risk of being blamed and ending up in jail or some shit.
When I was institutionalized in my teens, I was initially presumed to be a badly behaved teenager. I distinctly remember having a conversation with a staff member who assumed I was just some asshole teenager and they markedly changed their tune when they found out I was a victim of being molested and raped and I was suicidal and that was why I was hospitalized, not because I was doing bad things to other people.
A few years ago the 14-year old old daughter of a coworker of mine got into a lot of trouble after being revealed as the person (cyber)bullying two classmates because they were "flaunting their new iPhones on social media too much". Anecdotal for sure, but kids can be mean and with the internet still offering a veil of anonymity, incidents like this are bound to happen.
There is this presumption that they engage in malicious behavior simply because they think they can get away with it, basically. It's an "idle hands are the devil's workshop" theory and generally lacks substance.
Sure, people do all kinds of stupid stuff when bored and when they have time on their hands, but why are these young adolescents online all the time? Does this mean they have a terrible home life and no one is paying attention to them?
I don't really like proxies like "Spends a lot of time online." I spend a lot of time online. I don't bully people.
For me, the internet is a means to have a life when that wouldn't otherwise be possible. I earn income online. I have hobbies online. Etc.
I really dislike the subtext that "spending time online is bad and more time spent online is worse." I would guess it is something more like "Spending time online to try to escape your shitty life in an abusive household means you take your baggage out on internet strangers because that seems safer and more do-able than resolving your thorny problems."