Facebook proves that the internet is still a social experiment

All of the current revelations about Facebook and its role in spreading harm and danger are, of course, troubling. And I think there needs to be public discourse about what to do about Facebook specifically. But that’s like talking about what to do about one tumor when the disease has already metastasized to the whole body. I’m much more interested in the larger question of what it means to have the whole world so easily and instantly connected to one another.

This isn’t a Luddite piece — I neither think we can or should seriously imagine a future without the internet. That genie is well and truly out of the bottle. But in the rush to judge individual platforms like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram on their individual behavior (and we SHOULD judge them), I think we forget it’s not just the algorithms these companies use for connecting people and ideas that should be on trial here, but the very notion of instant connectedness itself.

I’m old enough to have lived both with and without the internet (roughly half of my life in each time period). I clearly remember the days when our only ways of communicating were landline phones and written letters, and the only broadcast media came from maybe 6 TV channels plus a handful of radio stations. You had to really work to organize a group of people to do anything. Just getting a few friends together for a movie was a challenge. If you were going to organize a group of people around an actual cause or movement, you had to actually talk to these people, see them all together in a room, and witness how they actually behave around other humans.

And yes, it did happen. All sorts of groups (from nutbags to noble altruists) did self-organize, even in the days before the internet. But there was one crucial brake on the growth of these groups: You had to actually learn what the other people in this group were like. You had to hear them speak. You had to watch their mannerisms. And sometimes, you got to see the ugliness in such a stark, unvarnished way that it turned people off before the group could reach a critical mass. Sometimes this limited the group’s membership to only the true believers.

So yes, the particular way that internet platforms today use algorithms to amplify engagement (even when that engagement is based on hate and lies) clearly makes it nearly frictionless to create an angry, misinformed mob. But even without those platforms, the underlying internet itself was designed for instantly connecting diverse groups of people. This is what the internet IS, at a fundamental technological level. Sooner or later we’re going to have to face the fact that while Facebook accelerates the damage done by connecting violent mobs and seething pits of lies and propaganda, the company is only building on a technological foundation that predates it. If we’re going to reap the benefits of instant connection (and I acknowledge there are many), we’re going to have to also deal with the side-effect: Instant connection means instant connection of the bad guys as well as the good guys.

After 100,000 years of basic communication between modern humans, we’ve begun an experiment, now only 30 years old, to fundamentally alter the way those humans connect to each other. It seems naïve to think this would only have positive consequences. The truth is this is still, in the context of human sociological history, a very young experiment.

We’ve survived such experiments in human communication before. The development of spoken language, written language and the printing press all come to mind. These are almost universally seen now as positive developments. They are experiments that seem to have succeeded. So it’s not unreasonable to hope this experiment will eventually turn out the same way. But let’s not forget, 30 years in, that this is still a hope. It’s by no means guaranteed.

I think we have a decision to make as a society. What aspects of the free flow of information on the internet constitute actual freedom, which needs to be defended, and what aspects are just plain harmful? I’m not asking a new question here. This question is as old as information itself. It certainly was asked after the invention of the printing press, if not well before.

What’s new here, and what makes this an experiment, is the one new variable we’ve introduced: speed. We are just now beginning to understand the consequences, both good and bad, of instant contact and connection between human beings. Does this speed remove thoughtfulness or deliberation in a person’s decision to join a group or to buy in to a lie? Or are we doing exactly what we would do anyway, just faster?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. It might not be possible to answer them satisfactorily for decades yet. But I think we need to keep asking the questions, or we will forget that the experiment is happening.

Related posts:

The Liquid Filled Hard Capsules Market report by Persistence Market Research goes by the changing trend of consumerism all across the healthcare vertical. “Going cashless” is amongst the “new”…

This is so amazing. A year ago we introduced an amazing commodity aggregation and trading technology called the Micro Aggregator Platform (MAP *800*008#) to scale commodity aggregation and trade in…

How To Brand Your Instagram Profile. Clear Bio Picture — Make sure to stand out with a high quality picture or your logo. The purpose is to grab the audiences attention….