SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE DEATH OF CIVILITY

Social media and the death of civility: Thanks a lot, Zuckerberg.

A few nights ago, Holly and I stumbled across “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix and watched the entire thing without moving, not even to go pee. Have you seen this? It is a 2020 documentary about the rise of social media and its somewhat shocking effects on our American society. It pretty much scared the hell out of me. It also got me to thinking about social media during this election cycle.

Now, as a self-described Doofus Dad and disgruntled well-seasoned male human (that’s code for “grumpy old man”), I have carefully curated a disdain for social media throughout the years, but as a communications professional and entrepreneur, I’ve felt trapped into using it. I mean, how could I not? Being a business person without using social media in today’s world would be akin to the public-address announcer at a college football game yelling through his own cupped hands rather than using the PA system. It would be impossible to be heard and taken seriously. Chances are very good that without social media, you wouldn’t be reading or listening to this right now.

So yes, there are clearly some good things about social media. It’s fun. It can be informative. You can catch up with and stay in touch with old acquaintances, even the ones that you didn’t really hang out with in real life. Social media has created a sense of togetherness that was absent before. The big question is, though, is this a good thing? Were we really missing this togetherness prior to social media? And do the positives outweigh the negatives?

Honestly, I’m not so sure. For those of you who are seasoned enough, project yourself back to, say, 1997. What was life like? First of all, if we had a cell phone, they were for one thing and one thing only: making phone calls. That’s it. They literally did nothing else. So unless you were either dialing a number or pressing the “answer” button to receive an incoming call, you were rarely if ever looking at your phone. Because you weren’t looking at it, you were looking at other stuff, like 1) each other, 2) the outside world, 3) a book, or perhaps 4) a computer screen. If you were looking at a computer screen, it was probably work-related and just a bunch of numbers or words, unless you were playing computer golf, solving a game like Myst, or waiting impatiently for a naked photo to slowly download, I’m told.

Regardless, your personal sphere of influence was most likely limited to your immediate friends and family, coworkers, and neighbors. You had no idea what they were doing on a daily basis unless they told you with their voice, and as far as your old high school and college buddies were concerned, well, you were clueless. But you didn’t think twice about this because why would you? People moved in and out of our lives all the time, but the ones who really mattered were those you interacted with day in and day out. There were Past People and there were Present People and we were all just fine.

Without social media, we were who we were, not who we projected ourselves to be. We interacted face-to-face, so unless you were simply a real-life asshole, excuse my French, you were nice to people almost all the time. Because we were speaking to each other in real time, we had to be witty, sarcastic, hilarious, or profound off the cuff, and those words instantly disappeared into the atmosphere, never to be heard again. There wasn’t a “like” button or a smiley-face emoji; we either liked what the other person said or smiled at them with our actual mouth or both. And then, it was over and we moved on to things that mattered, like working hard to put food on the table.

One thing we definitely didn’t do in 1997 was to constantly try to influence each other, especially about politics. Things were simple. You showed up at the polls on election day and voted. That was it. The only way to try to influence another person politically, short of running for office, was to either talk to them face-to-face or be one of those people who stand on the corner with a campaign sign and wave at people as they drive past. To be quite honest, we usually didn’t know each other’s political preferences and didn’t care to know. As a matter of fact, it was considered to be impolite to discuss politics around those whose views you were unsure of.

But not in 2020 and especially not on social media. Imagine, just for a moment, that we said the kind of things in real life, in a face-to-face conversation, that we say to each other on Facebook and Twitter these days, as it relates to politics. Just think of that. There would literally be carnage in the streets. Everyone would have broken noses and black eyes.

This leads me to my main problem with social media: civility. Remember that thing? Yeah, social media killed it. Facebook and Twitter, in particular, have provided a platform for humans to openly express the worst sides of themselves. Of those two platforms, I think that Facebook is slightly worse because we are — to use an old expression — showing our butts to people that we know, rather than to strangers, like on Twitter. A few weeks ago, for example, I wrote a piece on how I could vote for President Trump, and my story was entirely non-partisan. It was a comment on the changes in our national media, on how the truth is difficult to get at in today’s untrustworthy journalism, and on voting based on your own values. At no time did I try to influence the reader politically, other than to say that for me, conservative values worked better than liberal ones. I didn’t say that one was better than the other for the reader, but just for myself. But in simply explaining my voting process, I unleashed a torrent of nasty and hateful comments from friends — yes, friends — who would never, EVER say those things to me in real life, face to face.

How does this happen? Simple — distance. It’s easy to be a jerk to someone you’ll probably never run into in real life. When I was in middle and high school, if you said someone’s mom wore combat boots (an insult I’ve never really understood) or belittled them or laughed at them, you’d better be ready to mix it up. In my case, that meant a rendezvous in the boys’ bathroom or on the school bus or maybe behind the bleachers at the Friday night football game. There was a word for this; it was called “accountability.” You were physically responsible for what words came out of your mouth.

Social media, especially during an election year, contains zero accountability and encourages conflict at its most vitriolic level. So instead of enjoying photos of each other’s children and laughing at funny memes, half of the Internet is actively pissed off at the other half, everybody is unfriending each other, and we end up right back where we were in 1997, when we had 10 or 20 actual friends instead of 800 virtual ones, the only difference being that we were happy then instead of pissed off now.

Y’know, all of this started when Mark Zuckerberg created an online poll for his college buddies at Harvard to rank the “hotness” of the girls on campus, which I’m sure they were all enthusiastically on board with. So it began with shallow, inconsiderate divisiveness and has progressed … absolutely nowhere.

So for the next few weeks, I’m asking you to do something for me. Every time you feel the urge to ridicule or belittle someone for their political view, step back, take a deep breath, and instead post a video of cats being frightened by vegetables, or perhaps, goats that scream like crazy people. The Internet will thank you, and so will I.