In the aftermath of the 6 January 2020 siege of the US Capitol, the two dominant news stories have been Trump’s impending impeachment and the role of big tech in the public sphere. Shortly after the siege, President Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter and Facebook, while the reputedly conservative platform Parler was removed from nearly all app stores. This has sparked outrage against big tech and conversations about the US law Section 230 are once again in the news.
But, frankly, I would be delighted if we all left social media.
Twitter and Facebook have cheapened the world of ideas. On social media, individuals hope to score likes and retweets by posting witty one-liners and half-baked thoughts. We seem to have forgotten that ideas that can be distilled into 280 characters are almost always superficial. Given how divisive modern political life has become, I believe that we need a return to longform writing.
Historically, essayists have left an indelible impact on society. With the cheapening of ideas that the social media era has ushered in, these once powerful masters of the pen have vanished from the public sphere, to society’s detriment.
Thomas Paine’s writings in Common Sense were vital to the success of the American founding, as they crystallized the colonists’ revolutionary fervor. Edmund Burke’s writings on the French Revolution helped spark the conservative intellectual movement. The essays of George Orwell, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot and others have shaped the modern era.
But the essay form is now dead. Magazines and newspapers still have regular columnists and contributors. But the classic essay is an attempt to understand and, in the age of social media, the desire to understand has simply disappeared.
The great essayists understood that their craft was about ideas: words were just the medium through which to express those ideas. Social media functions on precisely opposite principles. It didn’t matter what ideas Sir Roger Scruton discussed in his 2019 interview with George Eaton of the New Statesman. Shortly after a deliberately fragmentary description of the interview went public, the Twitter mob got to work, levelling the most horrific accusations at Britain’s most prominent conservative philosopher. Within five hours, Scruton’s character had been smeared and he had been sacked from his government position. As Douglas Murray noted, “anyone, it seems, can claim a scalp using Twitter: twist the words of your victim and let the outrage mob do the rest.”
This collective character assassination was possible because the Twitter mob focused primarily on Scruton’s words, rather than his ideas. The New Statesman facilitated this by their hit job piece, which deliberately takes his words out of context. But the obsession with words and not ideas is a product of social media.
We can see this at work in the hashtags that trend on Twitter. In 2020, the most popular hashtags included #BlackLivesMatter and #DefundThePolice. These hashtags are utterly vacuous. What do they mean? No one knows. The message of #DefundThePolice appears simple: take monetary support away from police departments. Yet we were told to ignore the plain meaning time and time again because this was not an idea: it was a slogan. And, as Scruton himself once remarked, “There is no way in which a chanted slogan invites an answer.”
Social media does not provide platforms for the dissemination of ideas. Instead, Twitter especially is, in the words of Kevin Williamson, “a sad, sprawling bazaar in which attention is exchanged and bartered.” What captures the attention of the masses? Take a look at Twitter’s most prominent recent user: Donald Trump. His tweets contained random capital letters, the occasional exclamation mark, juvenile name calling and provocative words, but a dearth of ideas.
The world of ideas encompasses ideologies that have almost destroyed mankind and others that have rescued it. Ideas are a serious business. They ought to be grappled with and debated. The essayists of yore committed the time and energy to expound on ideas in a medium conducive to intellectual growth. That is why those great writers changed the world. Social media, however, is on the brink of destroying it.
A world that moves away from social media and returns to the proper written word is a world destined for great achievements. This would signal a move away from tribalism, one-liners and banter and bring us one step closer to a healthier society, focused on finding those ideas that will allow mankind to flourish.
15 comments
To indulge myself just this once in a one-liner, I sometimes feel like saying that Facebook could almost as well be called fecebook. :=)
I work in an academic library, and I wince every time in passing conversation, I hear someone remark on how very little people read anymore.
I do wonder, thinking back to the 1970s and comparing the blizzard of literary activity then to now, what would a 50-year comparison reveal?
I still write pen to paper as a matter of course. I still turn pages and arrange proper lamplight.
It still matters, the idea of possessing the stamina to plough through volumes, and the inspiration to express ideas in some fashion at least in imitation of writers one has admired much.
If one were to watch a tv commercial produced in 1960 and one now in 2021, one could hardly assume that any change in the intelligence of the nation has happened at all.
However, the legions of illiterate farmers, fishermen, lumberjacks, and even in some cases, successful small business owners in the 1960s reflects the fact that it was still possible to live a productive life although illiterate.
I wonder how true that would be now. But the thing is – these illiterates I knew as a boy were all grown men (and some women) and were in that state largely because they’d been hauled out of school at an earlier time in the century, for other kinds of work.
Compare that to the reasons for illiteracy in boys and youth today.
And reflect upon the obvious question: what is it that really causes this illiteracy? The answers grow more complicated by the year.
Can we say that it matters what we use literacy for? Cascading layers of deeper understanding? An adventure of exploration that lasts an entire lifetime? Instead of quick zippy “applications” that are supposed to be a stand in for such? As if the 2nd understudy commands the act, instead of the primary virtuoso? It is no fun to play eternally dumb, let alone to be condemned to always feel so.
Or to constantly have to pretend otherwise.
This process of continuous training that avoids the very mechanisms of focused and fine tuned nuance into the very fabric of literacy itself – leaves many living in a comic book world. Eternally and forever placed in a never ending childhood. As if the purpose is to not actually grow up. As if that has become a victim of modernity. As if bright shiny trinkets are the end goal and the primary purpose of life.
I have never “tweeted” in my life, and most likely never will. I like to write too much.
This article reminded me of a wonderful June 23, 2010 essay in THE GUARDIAN by one Peter Geoghegan commenting on a then recent NEW YORKER selection of novelist Saul Bellow’s correspondence, “Epistles at Dawn: The Dying Art of Letter Writing.” Geoghegan’s GUARDIAN piece was inspired by a collection of Saul Bellow’s letters, but he could just as well have been writing about Madame de Sevigne’, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, H.P. Lovecraft, James Joyce, William Faulkner, or Edmund Wilson. At their best, Geoghegan felt, literary letters, “often pruned and published posthumously,” offer “something for everyone.” General readers get a “glimpse of how authors write freed from the expectation to produce a work of conventional literary merit,” while “scholars get enough material for a wheelbarrow full of monographs,” and literary estates. too, can make a nice buck! All this, Geoghegan argued, was “well and good – except for one small snag.” Nobody, he observed (and this was already a decade ago!) writes letters any more these days, “at least not the kind of erudite, humorous missives that are the hallmark of great correspondence.”
As we are continually reminded, we now live in the digital age. Authors, just like the rest of us, now correspond with their agents, friends, contemporaries and, occasionally, fans mostly through e-mail, not through snail-mail any more. Geoghegan himself knew of only one writer who still refused to use “that electronic mail nonsense.” insisting that all correspondence be in writing–but he was “most certainly a dying breed.” E-mails, Geoghegan conceded, are “great for getting in touch quickly and easily,” but “severely lacking” as “literary vehicles.” He found digital messages “severely lacking,” tending to “oscillate between the deathly dull and formal and the blithely irreverent (complete with BTW, FYI, LOL’s and garbled text-speak) with precious little middle ground.” Letters, he felt. can be “revealing, expansive, humorous,” while e-mails, “even at their best,” tend to “exhibit only one of these characteristics of good writing”–though he failed to specify just which of these qualities he had in mind. Of course, he added. many contemporary novelists use social media such as Twitter and Facebook, “sometimes to great effect,” but “publishing revolution or no publishing revolution,” Geoghegan found it “hard to imagine that generations to come will one day download the ‘Collected Tweets of Neil Gaiman’ on to their e-reader.”
I myself, on the other hand, have for a whole quarter-century been in the habit of continually sending many of my own friends and acquaintances 6-, 7-, or 8-page e-mails where I go on and on both about my personal life and misadventures and about my thoughts on intellectual, cultural, and social history, on sociology, on politics, on philosophy, on comparative religion, on linguistics, and even on topics like UFO’s, paranormal phenomena, extraterrestrial life, and other areas of what a friend of mine used to call “weird piss”! And I do think I’ve often been “revealing, expansive, humorous” in my own e-mails, to just cite the qualities Peter Geoghegan thought he found more often in handwritten correspondence than in e-mails.
Sitting here in Australia I feel the sense of what this author says. The media bargaining legislation before our Federal Parliament, which looks like having cross-partisan support following amendments, is a complex issue in its own right, and the professional news sites I’ve been reading try to do justice to that complexity. However, when suddenly all my friends started talking about it on social media, thanks to the heavy-handed tactic of Facebook blocking all sorts of news content yesterday, all they could say was “we hate Rupert Murdoch more than Mark Zuckerberg therefore we oppose a law that benefits the former at the expense of the latter”. In the media, there was some attempt to address the what and why, but on social media, among friends who are well-educated and sharp-witted, there was interest only in the ‘who’ of it all.
I still don”t know exactly what I think of the legislation, but the incident clearly showed the difference between how people think in short one-sentence rants as distinct from many-paragraphed conversations, and I know which one I prefer.
Social media: I used to think that social media was barely either (the shallowest manifestation of the former utilizing—“consuming”—the lowest materializations of the latter); but now I’m pretty sure that the latter actually comes at the expense of the former, that it’s really the former that’s being consumed (digested, decomposed) by the latter. In the end, there might only be media; at the end, even worse.
Somehow this crucial sentence was omitted from my reply to Richard Metzler’s comment, my quote from Metzler’s post that “Conversations in an unmoderated, world-wide free-for-all are a recipe for disaster.” I just wanted to say that I hope Mr. Mertzler does not consider ALL un-edited online conversations to be a “recipe for disaster.” I think many of us want, even crave, MORE conversation, whether online or face-to-face, not LESS! I agree with Mr. Metzler and with the article author, all too many Facebook “likes” and Twitter “tweets” ARE a recipe for disaster–certainly, a tragic come-down from civilized human conversation and discussion/ Only, I don;t think it should be limited to on-line magazines–which all too often end up as just vehicles for the editor’s or listowner’s own views, opinions, prejudices, tastes, and likes and dislikes. People should be free to post long, rambling, chatty, conversational essays about intellectual, literary, historical, and philosophical (as well as of course political) topics and interests to friends, co-workers, relatives, and old college or high-school classmates–which shouldn’t be censored or edited by an editor or listowner–If I weite a long rambling historical or political essay to my old college roommate, I wouldn’t want some online magazine editor or listowner censoring it! All in all, I myself personally think one of the things that’s very, very wrong about today’s world is that so few people these days really want to take the time to sit down and exchange their thoughts, with people who may otherwise well be suffering from isolation! I really think more of us should make an effort to reach out to our isolated brethren and sister, and try to overcome our impatience with what we may quite unjustly and unfairly call their “long-windedness”!
I agree that social media are detrimental to public discourse and that Twitter in particular is poison. Conversations in an unmoderated, world-wide free-for-all are a recipe for desaster.
I disagree that the art of the essay is dead. We not only live in the age of social media, but also the age of online magazines and blogs. Check out Scott Alexander on Substack and on his previous platform SlateStarCodex, you’ll have enough brilliant essays to read for weeks and months.
Richard Metzler wrote, <>I just hope Mr. Metzler did not intend to demonize ALL on-line conversations! Some of us, because of our job and family situation, the Covid-19 pandemic, the simple laziness and uncaringness pf many former “friends” and classmates, are starved for intelligent leisurely essayistic exchanges of thoughts with people who can understand our viewpoints–but nobody ever cares to exchange long-formed thoughtful 2-, 3-, 4-, or 5-page letters with us, even cares whether we live or die–or mock us if we yearn for anything else than cat videos and “OOH-ing” and “AAH’ing” over their niece’s school play or first communion picture or their nephew’s bar mitzvah picture! Or else tweets about the latest political scandal!!Where oh where oh where are the rambling leisurely on-line (or handwritten) missives on philosophy, art history, linguistics? Did we even perhaps just make a stupid mistake just deciding to go on living after the day we left college? (some of us may well have had doubts, I suspect, as to whether our post-college or post-university lives were even worth living!) Will the people who thought we were too prolix in our letters or e-mails even think of us after we’re gone? One sometimes wonders!
I’ve long personally wished myself that we would all just give up Facebook, Twitter, and other so-called “social media,” and all stick EITHER (1) to in-depth meaningful face-to-face personal conversations, (2) OR start imitating the great classic 17th, 18th, and 19th century letter writers, and start sending each other 3- or 4=page hand-written(or hand-typed) letters every other day that could all also easily be posted as AREO articles :=); (3) OR stanrt sending each other 3-, 4-, or 5-page e-mails every day that could stand up as classic essays! Compiulsive brevity is for philistines and barbarians!!!! Let us all start emulating MMe. de Sevigne’, MMe. de Montespan, Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson, and H.P. Lovecrat!! Down with sound-bytes and one-liners!!
I disagree with the author because he is blaming social media for the behavior of some of its users. Many of us read essays on social media, post them in groups, and discuss their contents. His proposal resembles a call to stop eating because some people overeat or eat unhealthy food.
By ‘some’ you really mean most. Whilst what you and your friends do exists it’s a tiny minority of what passes for public discourse on Twitter.
Also, there’s something inherent in it that lends it to becoming the toxic sewer it is.
The nature of the format lends itself to ideas and arguments being reduced to slogans, approved jargon and hashtags. Anyone attempting to present a more nuanced argument can easily be picked apart and leapt on. Not only is what we see, puritanical language policing, mobbing, people being deliberately taken out of context inevitable, it’s also an inevitable downward spiral.
It gives those with narrow and dogmatic world views a lot of power, which leads to those who want no part of that opting out of engagement (deleting accounts, or choosing not involve themselves in ‘debate’) which in turn makes the puritans even more powerful as it’s easier to dominate the conversation. It then reinforces their sense of righteousness as any pushback against their world view is either small or easily dismissed as beyond the pale, as there’ll always be countless others willing to reduce discussion to a few approved slogans.
People use Twitter in many ways some positive, but as a kind of ‘public square’ for discussing issues it’s an unmitigated disaster.
I was thinking primarily of platforms such as Facebook. I rarely read Twitter posts and never make them myself. I dislike slogans, and Twitter is too prone to them and their makers for my liking. The forum requires brevity, which may be the soul of wit but can also be the essence of foolishness depending on the user.
I myself have quite frankly just never ever seen the point of Facebook, Twitter, or any other so-called “social media.” I’ve always felt and still feel that having e-mail is enough, at least for my own needs. I’ve been happily, contented using e-mail for some 23-24 years now–to post on forums like “Areo” and a number of others, and also to correspond with friends–to whom I fairly often send 3-, 3-, or sometimes even 7- or 8-page epistolary essays, trying to explore my various thoughts and interests in some depth and with some nuance and precision. Like both Ms. Hemmings and Mr. Dolitsky, I despise slogans, sound-bites, and one-liners, and have little or no use for a medium that forces all ideas and all arguments into a 140- or 280-character limit. As I’ve already noted in my earlier in my comments, I’ve always admired the great letter-writers of history like Mme. de Sevigne’, Samuel Johnson, Jane Welsh Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, H.P. Lovecraft, Edmund Wilson, and Saul Bellow, and the great essayists like Tom Paine, Edmund Burke, and George Orwell.
Social media really does seem like one of those rare technologies that came about before people and society were ready for it. So many people are so completely unable to resist its pernicious effects that I’m inclined to say the problem isn’t with just a few troublesome users.
It is almost as if, with social media, humans were suddenly granted telepathy, and as Douglas Adams reveals in Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, telepathy can be a curse.