How Being Connected Makes us Disconnected
Although it has become utterly obvious and trite to say, social media has both elevated and defiled our relationships, sense-making, and discourse. Never before has one society retrieved so much information from its citizens, and never before have we had the individual power to organize and participate in such homogeneous communities; nor has the average person ever had such access to their favorite celebrities and held such recognition themselves.
These features are deeply influential in how we evaluate information and the relationships we build, which, together, create a type of feedback loop. Making sense of and incorporating new ideas relies on identity, how we understand ourselves and our relation to the world. What we accept as true depends on who is saying it, what we already believe or value, and how innately open or curious we are.
Thus, how we make sense of the world is, in many ways, a collective effort, one that cannot be decoupled from the environment or the people within it. Stories that cause little internal conflict with preexisting concepts are easier to store, and they’ll endure as they are uncritically perpetuated by social groups whose members trust one another to know the truth.
Hyper-connected social media delivers high-volume, mixed-quality information not just about the happenings across the globe, but also about which events and which groups of people deserve the most attention — rather, who and what our friends and pages think we ought to focus on. We become desensitized by the character and scope of information and yet increasingly aware of our own identity. And we possess just enough agency for manipulation and societal degradation to occur without realization or resistance, all while feeling more informed than ever.
When the virtual village highlights the plight of one group, it causes another to feel sidelined or forgotten, which is akin to being assigned last place, an intolerable position. If we aren’t receiving what we think others are, or we believe resources are limited, we begin to sort by the characteristics we trust will award us the advantage. It promotes competition, atomization and identitarianism — the foundations of identity politics. The boundary between what makes us us and them them is drawn by what is easy to understand and by what we assume everyone else thinks.
Globalization and big tech have provided identity politics a much larger stage, and “lived experience” is being substituted for evidence and lent support by anyone who empathizes with it. Policies are being crafted based on these feelings that may turn out to injure and inhibit progress, all in the name of virtue and visceral indulgence. Social categories are constricting, their blurry edges becoming more defined and less welcoming, insisting on group fidelity and activism, rather than removing the armor to see the same fleshy weaknesses beneath. Here, empathy only facilitates self-interest, even if it’s in the form of enforcing our worldview on everyone else.
Empathy is a persuasive feeling, and it is often used to gauge morality and social boundaries, and to direct attention to injustices or dilemmas. But it’s deceptive. While it draws focus to certain problems that an individual recognizes as important, it is myopic and fails to motivate appropriate action. It makes us vulnerable to poor decision-making and support of bad ideas because of how acutely it is experienced, how rigid it causes us to think, and how right it makes us feel. It emphasizes the self rather than the other, and it discourages adventuring outside of our moral viewpoints for potential harms and unexpected consequences. Social media makes us more empathic when it involves our friends and more disgusted when we’re exposed to ideas that threaten our schemas.
It encourages self-sorting and othering, fomenting the belief that those outside of our self-described category are in complete opposition — a hindrance — to our desires and interests, along with the suspicion that we are vehemently disliked by them, increasing defensiveness. Seeing that we usually occupy virtual communities with similar attitudes and receive dissimilar information based on these attitudes, our mistrust and assumptions aren’t nearly challenged enough.
Being in social media discussion and special interest groups can be an outlet for those dissatisfied with the monotony and excesses of their echo chambers, exposing users to a greater range of views, which can allow them to create an identity that is centered on being curious, skeptical, and patient. But it’s likely not enough.
Empathy and identity should then be choices we make. Choices that are guided not by either concept, but by creating environments where we feel safe, seen, and supported. We needn’t diminish the validity of one group in order to bolster that of another; shame festers and later becomes resentment, and for some, grounds for retaliation. In order for our identities to shift and our empathy to broaden, we need leadership and media to value unity, too.
