Social Media and Us

The other night at a zoom poetry session, I read a couple of poems relating to social media. One of the comments on the chat said “But it’s not the social media. It’s the people.” Which sounds like common sense, but it’s rankled, because I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m really not sure it’s true.

I do think that social media is changing the way people think and behave. The thresholds - for personal politeness, and even for physical violence - seem to have changed. Evidence? I just happen to have followed three recent sources, all of which have brought me to this view. Channel 4’s Qanon:Cult of Conspiracy ws quitae as scary as you’d think, a brave exploration of the underworld of the American right, which made very clear that beneath all the bluster and the lies, there are serious human casualties from this stuff.

Jon Ronson’s BBC Sounds podcast is more quirky, a very personal delve into the history of some of these disputes, with some fascinating stories and characters, but equally disturbing conclusions about what’s going on and how we’ve changed. and then there’s David Baddiel, gobby commentator and comic who’s quite open about the self-promotion potential of Twitter but also worried about its effects on users - partly because of the experience of his own teenage daughter. Add these three together and I’d say it’s not just people, same as always; it’s a whole new game, where we don’t know the rules but we need them, very soon.