Social media is designed to dehumanize people
Heya! So, I was browsing youtube recently and saw a video called "Pharmacist reacts to Ironmouse: Her Health is MUCH WORSE Than I thought". The thumbnail has now been changed (i think), but back when I saw it, it had a black background, a picture of the streamer Ironmouse, and bold yellow text saying something to the Effect of "Drugs flowing directly into her heart?!?". I don't think I need to tell you why that is really offputting to me. I mean, even just the concept of "reacting" to someone else's health. You're quite literally profiting off of someone else's illness. And while I seeing this sort of video did make me a bit mad, it did not suprise me.1 And that's for one simple reason:
Social media is designed to dehumanize people.
I mean, to some extent that's just something that happens either way when it comes to a medium of communication like the internet. You can't see the person behind any one post like you could if you were standing face to face, having a conversation. It's often easy to forget there's a person behind the screen. But, I think it's a lot worse with modern social media platforms like youtube, twitter or instagram. In my opinion, that's mainly because of two reasons:
- The incomprehensible amount of people we interact with
- The commodification of "content"
I don't think we were designed to be able to communicate with millions of people at once. At some point, humans turn into statistics. If you get 30.000 likes on a post, it's easy to forget that all of those2 are real human people. It's easy to just think of it as a number after a certain point. Same thing for comment sections. When scrolling through hundreds of comments, it's easy to forget that there's people behind them. It's easy to say things that would be completely unacceptable in a regular conversation, because it feels less personal. This is just one stranger out of hundreds. They're a statistic, not a person. The only thing you know about them is this one opinion they hold, so if you disagree with them, it's very easy to just assume the worst. It's a format that almost seems designed to bring out the worst in people.
I mean, obviously, that's not the intention. Tech Billionaires don't profit off of our suffering directly, it just happens to be a byproduct of the systems they use to make money. (which is arguably worse, but oh well.)3 Anyways, what I'm saying is, is that the root cause of all of this is just that these platforms were designed to make money and collect data above everything else. Views, likes, subscribers - they're systems that encourage you to view people as statistics, because that's what you need to do in order to make money, at least to some extent. But, maybe it was a pretty shit idea to introduce profit motives into our social spaces. I think this is especially tough for creators on these platforms. It's easy to view someone as being "just in it for the money", to see them as a corporation and not a human. And, I mean, to be fair, there are literal corporations on these platforms. But that's the problem, i think. We shouldn't have to share our social spaces with corporations. I don't really have a solution to this problem for platforms like youtube. I think it makes sense for it to exist. I think it's cool that people can make being artistic and making cool videos their job. For platforms like mastodon or twitter though, i think the case is a lot more clear cut, at least in my opinion: remove every statistic. Don't show views, don't show likes, don't show the number of retweets4 There's still the problem of comment sections and the fact that I'm really not a fan of the whole "micro blogging"-format as a means of communication, but I think just that alone would probably make these spaces a whole lot more bearable to exist in.
So, yeah. I don't think having profit motives in our online social spaces is a good thing. There's a lot more thoughts I have about this, especially when it comes to how this sorts of system is really good at radicalizing people into believing insane shit, but I think I'll stop it here for now. I need a bit more time to really figure out how I want to talk about that. So, maybe this'll get a part two, maybe not. Anyways, hope you enjoyed reading this :3
To be clear, I did not end up watching the video, but I don't think that matters in this case. No matter how respectful the actual contents are, this sort of sensationalizing of someone else's poor health just seems really digusting to me either way. They could have framed this in a way that was more respectful, but they didn't do that, presumably for the sake of views.↩
Bots notwithstanding, of course.↩
I mean, the suffering is also sometimes the point. The more annoyed you are and the more time you waste with pointless flamewars, the higher the engagement.↩
And obviously don't let people make money off of tweets, but i think everyone already agrees that that was a horrible idea↩