Category Archives: Social Media

Looking At The World Through Zuckerberg-Colored Glasses

Mark Zuckerberg has managed to do something almost no one else has been able to do. He has actually been able to find one small patch of common ground between the far right and the far left in American politics. It seems everybody hates Facebook, even if it’s for different reasons.

The right hates the fact that they’re not given free rein to say whatever they want without Facebook tagging their posts as misinformation. The left worries about the erosion of privacy. And antitrust legislators feel Facebook is just too powerful and dominant in the social media market. Mark Zuckerberg has few friends in Washington — on either side of the aisle.

The common denominator here is control. Facebook has too much of it, and no one likes that. The question on the top of my mind is, “What is Facebook intending to do with that control?” Why is dominance an important part of Zuckerberg’s master plan?

Further, just what is that master plan?  Almost four years ago, in the early days of 2017, Zuckerberg issued a 6,000-word manifesto. In it, he addressed what he called “the most important question of all.” That question was, “Are we building the world we all want?”

According to the manifesto, the plan for Facebook includes “spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science.”

Then, two years later, Zuckerberg issued another lengthy memo about his vision regarding privacy and the future of communication, which “will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure.” He explained that Facebook and Instagram are like a town square, a public place for communication. But WhatsApp and Messenger are like your living room, where you can have private conversations without worrying about those conversations.

So, how is all that wonderfulness going, anyway?

Well, first of all, there’s what Mark says, and what Facebook actually does. When he’s not firing off biennial manifestos promising a cotton-candy-colored world, he’s busy assembling all the pieces required to suck up as much data on you as possible, and fighting lawsuits when he gets caught doing something he shouldn’t be.

You have to understand that for Zuckerberg, all these plans are built on a common foundation: Everything happens on a platform that Facebook owns. And those platforms are paid for by advertising. And advertising needs data. And therein lies the problem: What the hell is Facebook doing with all this data?

I’m pretty sure it’s not spreading prosperity and freedom or promoting peace and understanding. Quite the opposite. If you look at Facebook’s fingerprints that are all over the sociological dumpster fire that has been the past four years, you could call them the Keyser Söze of shit disturbing.

And it’s only going to get worse. Facebook and other participants in the attention economy are betting heavily on facial recognition technology. This effectively eliminates our last shred of supposed anonymity online. It forever links our digital dust trail with our real-world activities. And it dumps even more information about you into the voracious algorithms of Facebook, Google and other data devourers. Again, what might be the plans for this data: putting in place the pieces of a more utopian world, or meeting next quarter’s revenue projections?

Here’s the thing. I don’t think Zuckerberg is being wilfully dishonest when he writes these manifestos. I think — at the time — he actually believes them. And he probably legitimately thinks that Facebook is the best way to accomplish them. Zuckerberg always believes he’s the smartest one in the room. And he — like Steve Jobs — has a reality distortion field that’s always on. In that distorted reality, he believes Facebook — a company that is entirely dependent on advertising for survival — can be trusted with all our data. If we just trust him, Facebook will all be okay.

The past four years have proven over and over again that that’s not true. It’s not even possible. No matter how good the intentions you go in with, the revenue model that fuels Facebook will subvert those intentions and turn them into something corrosive.

I think David Fincher summed up the problem nicely in his movie “The Social Network.” There, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin nailed the Zuckerberg nail on the head when he wrote the scene where Zuckerberg’s lawyer said to him, “You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.”

Facebook represents a lethal mixture that has all the classic warning signs of an abusive relationship:

  • A corporation that can survive only when its advertisers are happy.
  • Advertisers that are demanding more and more data they can use to target prospects.
  • A bro-culture where Facebook folks think they’re smarter than everyone else and believe they can actually thread the needle between being fabulous successful as an advertising platform and not being complete assholes.
  • And an audience of users who are misplacing their trust by buying into the occasional manifesto, while ignoring the red flags that are popping up every day.

Given all these factors, the question becomes: Will splitting up Facebook be a good or bad thing? It’s a question that will become very pertinent in the year to come. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Second Thoughts about the Social Dilemma

Watched “The Social Dilemma” yet? I did, a few months ago. The Netflix documentary sets off all kinds of alarms about social media and how it’s twisting the very fabric of our society. It’s a mix of standard documentary fodder — a lot of tell-all interviews with industry insiders and activists — with an (ill-advised, in my opinion) dramatization of the effects of social media addiction in one particular family.

The one most affected is a male teenager who is suddenly drawn, zombie-like,by his social media feed into an ultra-polarized political activist group. Behind the scenes, operating in a sort of evil-empire control room setting, there are literally puppet masters pulling his strings.

It’s scary as hell. But should we be scared? Or — at least — should we be that scared?

Many of us are sounding alarms about social media and how it nets out to be a bad thing. I’m one of the worst. I am very concerned about the impact of social media, and I’ve said so many, many times in this column. But I also admit that this is a social experiment playing out in real time, so it’s hard to predict what the outcome will be. We should keep our minds open to new evidence.

I’ve also said that younger generations seem to be handling this in stride. At least, they seem to be handling it better than those in my generation. They’re quicker to adapt and to use new technologies natively to function in their environments, rather than fumble as we do, searching for some corollary to the world we grew up in.

I’ve certainly had pushback on this observation. Maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe, like so many seemingly disastrous new technological trends before it, social media may turn out to be neither bad nor good. It may just be different.

That certainly seems to be the case if you read a new study from the Institute for Family Studies at Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institution.  

One of the lead authors of the study, Jean Twenge, previously rang the alarm bells about how technology was short-circuiting the mental wiring of our youth. In a 2017 article in The Atlantic titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” she made this claim:

“It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

The article describes a generation of zombies mentally hardwired to social media through their addiction to their iPhone. One of the more startling claims was this:

“Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan.”

Again, scary as hell, right? This sounds frighteningly familiar to the scenarios laid out in ““The Social Dilemma.”  

But what if you take this same group and this same author, fast-forward three years to the middle of the worst pandemic in our lifetimes, and check in with over 1,500 teens to see how they’re doing in a time where they have every right to be depressed? Not only are they locked inside, they’re also processing societal upheavals and existential threats like systemic racial inequality, alt-right political populism and climate change. If 2017-2018 was scary for them, 2020 is a dumpster fire.

Surprisingly, those same teens appear to be doing better than they were two years ago. The study had four measures of ill-being: loneliness, life dissatisfaction, unhappiness and depression.  The results were counterintuitive, to say the least. The number of teens indicating they were depressed actually dropped substantially, from 27% in 2018 to 17% who were quarantined during the school year in 2020. Fewer said they were lonely as well. 

The study indicated that the reasons for this could be because teens were getting more sleep and were spending more time with family.

But what about smartphones and social media? Wouldn’t a quarantined teen (a Quaran-teen?) be spending even more time on his or her phone and social media? 

Well, yes – and no. The study found screen time didn’t really go up, but the way that time was spent did shift. Surprising, time spent on social media went down, but time spent on video chats with friends or watching online streaming entertainment went up. 

As I shared in my column a few weeks ago, this again indicates that it’s not how much time we spend on social media that determines our mental state. It’s how we spend that time. If we spend it looking for connection, rather than obsessing over social status, it can be a good thing. 

Another study, from the University of Oxford, examined data on more than 300,000 adolescents and found that increased screen time has no more impact on teenager’s mental health than eating more potatoes. Or wearing glasses.

If you’re really worried about your teen’s mental health, make sure they have breakfast. Or get enough sleep. Or just spend more time with them. All those things are going to have a lot more impact than the time they spend on their phone.

To be clear, this is not me becoming a fan of Facebook or social media in general. There are still many things to be concerned about. But let’s also realize that technology — any technology– is a tool. It is not inherently good or evil. Those qualities can be found in how we choose to use technology. 

Have More People Become More Awful?

Is it just me, or do people seem a little more awful lately? There seems to be a little more ignorance in the world, a little less compassion, a little more bullying and a lot less courtesy.

Maybe it’s just me.

It’s been a while since I’ve checked in with eternal optimist Steven Pinker.  The Harvard psychologist is probably the best-known proponent of the argument that the world is consistently trending towards being a better place.  According to Pinker, we are less bigoted, less homophobic, less misogynist and less violent. At least, that’s what he felt pre-COVID lockdown. As I said, I haven’t checked in with him lately, but I suspect he would say the long-term trends haven’t appreciably changed. Maybe we’re just going through a blip.

Why, then, does the world seem to be going to hell in a hand cart?  Why do people — at least some people — seem so awful?

I think it’s important to remember that our brain likes to play tricks on us. It’s in a never-ending quest to connect cause and effect. Sometimes, to do so, the brain jumps to conclusions. Unfortunately, it is aided in this unfortunate tendency by a couple of accomplices — namely news reporting and social media. Even if the world isn’t getting shittier, it certainly seems to be. 

Let me give you one example. In my local town, an anti-masking rally was recently held at a nearby shopping mall. Local news outlets jumped on it, with pictures and video of non-masked, non-socially distanced protesters carrying signs and chanting about our decline into Communism and how their rights were being violated.

What a bunch of boneheads — right? That was certainly the consensus in my social media circle. How could people care so little about the health and safety of their community? Why are they so awful?

But when you take the time to unpack this a bit, you realize that everyone is probably overplaying their hands. I don’t have exact numbers, but I don’t think there were more than 30 or 40 protestors at the rally. The population of my city is about 150,000. These protestors represented .03% of the total population. 

Let’s say for every person at the rally, there were 10 that felt the same way but weren’t there. That’s still less than 1%. Even if you multiplied the number of protesters by 100, it would still be just 3% of my community. We’re still talking about a tiny fraction of all the people who live in my city. 

But both the news media and my social media feed have ensured that these people are highly visible. And because they are, our brain likes to use that small and very visible sample and extrapolate it to the world in general. It’s called availability bias, a cognitive shortcut where the brain uses whatever’s easy to grab to create our understanding of the world.

But availability bias is nothing new. Our brains have always done this. So, what’s different about now?

Here, we have to understand that the current reality may be leading us into another “mind-trap.” A 2018 study from Harvard introduced something called “prevalence-induced concept change,” which gives us a better understanding of how the brain focuses on signals in a field of noise. 

Basically, when signals of bad things become less common, the brain works harder to find them. We expand our definition of what is “bad” to include more examples so we can feel more successful in finding them.

I’m probably stretching beyond the limits of the original study here, but could this same thing be happening now? Are we all super-attuned to any hint of what we see as antisocial behavior so we can jump on it? 

If this is the case, again social media is largely to blame. It’s another example of our current toxic mix of dog whistle, cancel culture, virtue signaling, pseudo-reality that is being driven by social media. 

That’s two possible things that are happening. But if we add one more, it becomes a perfect storm of perceived awfulness. 

In a normal world, we all have different definitions of the ethical signals we’re paying attention to. What you are focused on right now in your balancing of what is right and wrong is probably different from what I’m currently focused on. I may be thinking about gun control while you’re thinking about reducing your carbon footprint.

But now, we’re all thinking about the same thing: surviving a pandemic. And this isn’t just some theoretical mind exercise. This is something that surrounds us, affecting us every single day. When it comes to this topic, our nerves have been rubbed raw and our patience has run out. 

Worst of all, we feel helpless. There seems to be nothing we can do to edge the world toward being a less awful place. Behaviors that in another reality and on another topic would have never crossed our radar now have us enraged. And, when we’re enraged, we do the one thing we can do: We share our rage on social media. Unfortunately, by doing so, we’re not part of the solution. We are just pouring fuel on the fire.

Yes, some people probably are awful. But are they more awful than they were this time last year? I don’t think so. I also can’t believe that the essential moral balance of our society has collectively nosedived in the last several months. 

What I do believe is that we are living in a time where we’re facing new challenges in how we perceive the world. Now, more than ever before, we’re on the lookout for what we believe to be awful. And if we’re looking for it, we’re sure to find it.

Friendship: Uncoupled

This probably won’t come as a shock to anyone reading this: A recent study says that it’s not if you use social media that determines your happiness, but how you use social media. 

Derrick Wirtz, an associate professor of teaching in psychology at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan, took a close look at how people use three major social platforms—Facebook, Twitter and Instagram—and if how you use it can make you happier or sadder.

As I said, most of you probably said to yourself, “Yeah, that checks out.” But this study does bring up an interesting nuance with some far-reaching implications. 

In today’s world, we’re increasingly using Facebook to maintain our social connections. And, according to Facebook’s mission statement, that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen: “People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.”

The interesting thing in this study is the divide between our social activities — those aimed at bonding versus those aimed at gaining status — and how that impacts our moods and behaviors. It’s difficult to untangle the effect of those two factors, because they are so intertwined in our psyches. But according to this study, Dr. Wirtz found that some of us are spending far more time on social media “status-checking” then actually tending to our friendships.

“Passive use, scrolling through others’ posts and updates, involves little person-to-person reciprocal interaction while providing ample opportunity for upward comparison,” says Wirtz. 

We can scroll our newsfeed without any actual form of engagement — but that’s not what we were designed to do. Our social skills evolved to develop essential mutually beneficial bonds in a small group setting.

Friendship is meant to be nurtured and tended to organically and intimately in a face-to-face environment.  But the distal nature of social media is changing the dynamics of how we maintain relationships in our network. 

Take how we first establish friendships, for instance. When you meet someone for the very first time, how do you decide whether you’re going to become friendly or not? The answer, not surprisingly, is complex and nuanced. Our brain works overtime to determine whether we should bond or not. But, also not surprisingly, almost none of that work is based on rational thought.

UCLA psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Laugeson teaches young adults with social challenges, such as those on the autism spectrum, how to take those very first steps toward friendship when meeting a stranger. If you can’t pick up the face-to-face nuances of body language and unspoken social cues intuitively, becoming friends can be incredibly difficult. Essentially, we are constantly scanning the other person for small signs of common interest from which we can start working toward building trust. 

Even if you clear this first hurdle, it’s not easy to build an actual friendship. It requires a massive investment of our time and energy. A recent study from the University of Kansas found it takes about 50 hours of socializing just to go from acquaintance to casual friend. 

Want to make a “real” friend? Tack another 40 hours onto that. And if you goal is to become a “close” friend, you’d better be prepared to invest at least a total of 200 hours. 

So that begs the question, why would we make this investment in the first place? Why do we need friends? And why do we need at least a handful of really close friends? The answer lies in the concept of reciprocity. 

From an evolutionary perspective, having friends made it easier to survive and reproduce. We didn’t have to go it alone. We could help each other past the rough spots, even if we weren’t related to each other. Having friends stacked the odds in our favor. 

This is when our investment in all those hours of building friendships paid off. Again, this takes us back to the intimate and organic roots of friendship. 

Our brains, in turn, reinforced this behavior by making sure that having friends made us happy. 

Of course, like most human behaviors, it’s not nearly that simple or benign. Our brains also entwine the benefits of friendship with the specter of social status, making everything much more complicated. 

Status also confers an evolutionary advantage. For many generations, we have trod this fine line between being a true friend and being obsessed with our own status in the groups where we hang out.

And then came social media.

As Wirtz’s study shows, we now have this dangerous uncoupling between these two sides of our nature. With social media, friendship is now many steps removed from its physical, intimate and organic roots. It is stripped of the context in which it evolved. And, it appears, the intertwined strands of friendship and social status are unraveling. When this happens, time on social media can reap the anxiety and jealousy of status-checking without any of the joy that comes from connecting with and helping a friend. 

On a person-to-person basis, this uncoupling can be disturbing and unfortunate. But consider what may happen when these same tendencies are amplified and magnified through a massive, culture-wide network.

Dear US: Start Thinking Differently about Public Broadcasting

In my ongoing discussion about how to support true and reliable journalism, there is one option I haven’t talked about: public broadcasting. 

In a previous column, I talked about the difference I saw on one day in the way the news was reported in Canada vs the U.S. Largely missing in Canada was the extreme polarization I saw in editorial tone in the U.S. 

And, as I mentioned in my previous two columns — one on why free news is bad news and one on the problems with “news” analysis — the divide between news on the right and news on the left has the same root cause: the need for profitability.

The one thing I didn’t talk about in that U.S. versus Canada column is that we have a robust public broadcaster in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). 

“Ah,” you say, “We have public broadcasting, too. We have PBS and NPR.” 

Well, yes, but no. There are important differences in how these institutions are funded.

Let’s take PBS, for example. PBS stations are independently operated, and each have their own financials. They are members of PBS, which is not a network but rather a programming partner. Affiliates pay member dues to belong to PBS.

For example, the Seattle PBS affiliate is KCTS, whose 2019 financials show that the lion’s share of its income, over half, comes from individual donations. Corporate donations represent another 16.5%. Just 9% of its funding comes from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB), supposedly representing U.S. taxpayers’ support of public broadcasting on PBS and NPR.

CPB has been a punching bag for Republicans for years now. What meager support public broadcasting does receive from CPB is constantly at risk of being chopped by Congress.  Most recently — and not surprisingly — Trump threatened to cut funding for CPB from its current level of $445 million to just $30 million. 

He did this after an NPR reporter asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo if he owed an apology to the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. Conservative radio jumped on the altercation, with one station tweeting, “Why does NPR still exist? We have thousands of radio stations in the U.S. plus satellite radio. Podcasts. Why are we paying for this big-government, Democrat Party propaganda operation.”

Trump retweeted, “A very good question.”

It actually is a good question, but from a very different perspective than what Trump intended. 

I am Canadian. I come from a social democratic country. I am free of the knee-jerk reactionism of many Americans (as shown in last week’s election) toward the word “socialism.” You have to start with that idea to understand our approach to broadcasting.

While the CBC does sell advertising, it’s not dependent on it. In its last financial report, just 14.5% of all CBC revenues came from advertising. Sixty-five percent of the CBC’s funds come directly from taxpayer dollars. As a comparison, the amount of money CBC received from the government last year was 1.1 billion, almost three times the total budget of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting in the U.S. 

That highlights the difference in attitude about the importance of public broadcasting in our two countries. In Canada — following the model of Britain and the BBC — we have enshrined public broadcasting as an important part of our society that we directly support through our taxes. Not only do we have the CBC across Canada, but each province also has its own public broadcaster. 

In the more capitalistic and laissez-faire U.S., public broadcasting largely depends on the kindness of strangers. What little taxpayer support it does receive is constantly being used as a pawn in political posturing between the right and left. 

So, who’s right?

I’ll be honest. There are many Canadians — not a majority, but a significant percentage — who would like to see Canada pursue a more American path when it comes to broadcasting. “Who needs the CBC?” they say. 

But I believe strongly that the relative health of Canadian journalism when compared to the U.S. is largely due to our investment in public broadcasting. The CBC sets the norm of what’s acceptable in Canada. Its biggest private competitors, CTV and Global, don’t stray far from the relatively neutral, reliable and objective tone set by the CBC. 

If we look at reliability when it comes to public broadcasters in the U.S., we see that both NPR and PBS score top marks when it comes to lack of bias and reliability on the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart.

Unfortunately, Canadian broadcasters are not represented on the chart, so we’ll have to look for another measure. Luckily, one exists. More on this in a bit.

The doubters of my proposed hypothesis that taxpayer-funded public broadcasting means better journalism will be quick to point out that Russia, China, Cuba — heck, even Iran — all have state-owned broadcasters. These are all — as the conservative radio tweeter above said — simply “propaganda machines.” How is this different from public broadcasting?

Again, we have the conflation of democratic socialism with the U.S. right’s favorite bogeyman: communism. Y’all really have to stop doing that. 

Public broadcasting in places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden are all modeled after the originator of the concept: Britain and the BBC. Although there have been many British prime ministers — Winston Churchill included — who sought to co-opt the BBC for their government’s purposes, over the past century a legislative firewall has been built to maintain the public broadcaster’s independence from the government of the day. Similar legislation is in place in Canada and other democracies with strong public broadcasters. 

So, how is that working?

Pretty well, according to Reporters Without Borders, the “biggest NGO specializing in the defense of media freedom.”

The organization’s World Press Freedom Index ranks media freedom in every country in the world. The top five countries (all Nordic and northern European countries — and all social democracies) have strong public broadcasters. In case you’re wondering, Canada scores 16th on the list. The U.S. scores 45th out of 180 countries. 

Public broadcasting — real public broadcasting, with taxpayers’ skin in the game — seems to be working pretty damned well in Canada and other places in the world. (As an interesting side note, the Reporters without Borders ranking of countries bears more than a little resemblance to US News’ Quality of Life Index). 

You should think differently about public broadcasting, because the biggest problem facing journalism in the U.S. isn’t socialism or government propaganda. It’s capitalism. 

Lockdown Advice For A Long Winter

No matter where you live in the world, it’s likely you’re going to be forced to spend a lot of time at home. And if that home includes others  — like your beloved life partner — living under the same roof, you may experience a little friction now and again. In anticipation of this, I thought I’d share a few insights on what might come.

There is No Gender Equality with COVID

A recent study by Oxford, Cambridge and Zurich Universities found that women’s sense of mental well being took a more significant drop then men due to COVID. The researchers speculated on a number of reasons for this, but were unable to narrow it down to any identifiable factor. Perhaps, they reasoned,  it had something to do with women losing jobs at a greater rate than men, taking on a greater share of the burden of home schooling — or the fact that even when both men and women were home all the time, women still did more than their fair share of domestic chores. But no, even when controlling for these factors, it didn’t explain why women were becoming more distressed than men. 

Maybe it was something else.

Warriors and Worriers: Two Approaches to Survival

In 2014, psychologist Joyce Benenson published her book “Warriors and Worries: The Survival of the Sexes.”  As an evolutionary biologist, she has spent years studying children and primates, looking for innate rather than socialized differences between the sexes. 

Her findings turned conventional wisdom on its head. Women may not be more sociable than men, and men may not be more competitive than women. It’s just that they define those things differently. 

Men are quite comfortable forming packs of convenience to solve a particular problem, whether it is defending against an enemy or winning a pick-up basketball game. This could explain why team sports entertainment always seems to have a male bias.

Women, on the other hand, have fewer but much more complex relationships that they deem essential to their survival as the primary caregiver for their family. The following is from the abstract of a 1990 study by Berenson: “Although males and females did not differ in the number of best friends they reported, males were found to have larger social networks than females. Further, for males, position in a social network was more highly linked with acceptance by the peer group. Finally, males were concerned with attributes that could be construed as important for status in the peer group, and females were concerned with attributes that appeared essential to relationships with a few friends.”

If we apply this to the current COVID situation, we begin to see why women might be struggling more with lockdown then men. A male’s idea of socializing might be more easily met with a Zoom call or another type of digital connection, such as online gaming. But connecting in these way lacks the bandwidth necessary to properly convey the complexity of a female relationship. 

Introverts and Extroverts Revisited

Of course, gender isn’t the only variable at play here. I’ve written before about what happens when an extrovert and introvert are locked down in the same house together (those being my wife and myself). One of the things I’ve noticed is a different level of comfort we have at being left alone with our thoughts. 

Because I have always been a writer of one kind or another, I require time to ruminate on a fairly frequent basis. I am a little (lot?) dictatorial in my requirements for this: my environment needs to be silent and free from interruption. When the weather is good outside, this is fairly easy. I can grab my laptop and go outside. But in the winter, it’s a different story. My wife is subjected to forced silence so I can have my quiet time.

My wife functions best when there is some type of sensory stimuli, especially the sound of voices. She doesn’t have the same need to sit in silence and be alone with her thoughts. 

And she’s not unique in that. A 2014 study found that most of us fall into the same category. In fact, the researchers found that, “many of the people studied, particularly the men, chose to give themselves a mild electric shock rather than be deprived of external sensory stimuli.”

A Difference in Distraction

When we do look for distraction, we can also have different needs and approaches. Another area I’ve touched on in a past post is how our entertainment delivery platforms have now become entangled with multitasking. 

I like an immersive, interruption-free entertainment experience. The bigger the screen and the louder the sound, the better. I suspect this may be another “male” thing.  Again, this preference tends to cast a dictatorial tone on our household, so I generally retreat to my media cave in the basement. I also tuck my phone away while I’m watching. 

My wife prefers to multiscreen when watching TV and to do so in the highest traffic area of our house. For her, staying connected is more important than being immersed in whatever she might be watching. 

These differences in our entertainment preferences often means we’re not together when we seek distraction. 

I don’t think this is a bad thing. In a normal world filled with normal activities, this balancing of personal preference is probably accommodated by our normal routines. But in a decidedly abnormal world where we spend every minute together in the same house, these differences become more noticeable.

Try a Little Friluftsliv

In the end, winter is going to be long, lonely and cold for many of us. So we may just want to borrow a strategy from Norwegians: friluftsliv. Basically, it means “open-air living.” Most winters, my main activity is complaining. But this year, I’m going to get away from the screens and social media, strap on a pair of snowshoes and embrace winter.

Why The World is Conspiring Against Us

With all the other things 2020 will go down in history for, it has also proven to be a high-water mark for conspiracy theories. And that shouldn’t surprise us. Science has proven that when the going get tough, the paranoid get weirder. Add to this the craziness multiplier effect of social media, and it’s no wonder that 2020 has given us a bumper crop of batshit crazy. 

As chronicled for you, my dear reader, I kicked over my own little hornet’s nest of conspiracy craziness a few weeks ago. I started with probing a little COVID anti-vaxxing lunacy right here in my home and native land, Canada.The next thing I knew, the QAnoners were lurching out of the woodwork like the coming of the zombie apocalypse.

I have since run for cover.

But as I was running, I noticed two things. One, most of the people sharing the theories were from the right side of the political spectrum. And two, while they’ve probably always been inclined to indulge in conspiratorial thinking, it seems (anecdotally, anyway) that it’s getting worse.

So I decided to dig a little deeper to find the answers to two questions: Why them, and why now?

Let’s start with why them?

My Facebook experience started with the people I grew up with in a small town in Alberta. It’s hard to imagine a more conservative place. The primary industries are oil, gas and farming. Cowboys — real cowboys wearing real Levi jeans — still saunter down Main Street. This was the first place in Western Canada to elect a representative whose goal was to take Western Canada out of a liberal (and Eastern intellectual elitist)—dominated confederation. If you wanted to find the equivalent of Trumpism in Canada, you’d stand a damn good chance of finding it in this part of Alberta. 

So I wondered: What is about conservatives, especially from the extreme right side of conservatism, that make them more susceptible to spreading conspiracy theories?

It turns out it’s not just the extreme right that believes in conspiracies. According to one study, those on the extreme right or left are more apt to believe in conspiracies. It’s just that it happens more often on the right.

And that could be explained by looking at the types of personalities who tend to believe in conspiracies. According to a 2017 analysis of U.S. data by Daniel Freeman and Richard Bentall, over a quarter of the American population are convinced that “there is a conspiracy behind many things in the world.” 

Not surprisingly, when you dig down to the roots of these beliefs, it comes down to a crippling lack of trust, closely tying those ideas to paranoia. Freeman and Bentall noted, “Unfounded conspiracy beliefs and paranoid ideas are both forms of excessive mistrust that may be corrosive at both an individual and societal level.”

So, if one out of every four people in the U.S. (and apparently a notable percentage of Canadians) lean this way, what are these people like? It turns out there are a cluster of personality traits  likely to lead to belief in conspiracy theories.  

First, these people tend to be anxious about things in general. They have a lower level of education and are typically in the bottom half of income ranges. More than anything, they feel disenfranchised and that the control that once kept their world on track has been lost. 

Because of this, they feel victimized by a powerful elite. They have a high “BS receptivity.” And they believe that only they and a small minority of the like-minded know the real truth. In this way, they gain back some of the individual control they feel they’ve lost.

Given the above, you could perhaps understand why, during the Obama years, conspiracy theorists tended to lean to the right. But if anything, there are more conspiratorial conservatives then ever after almost four years of Trump. Those in power were put there by people who don’t trust those in power. So that brings us to the second question: Why now?

Obviously, it’s been a crappy year that has cranked up everybody’s anxiety level. But the conspiracy wave was already well-established when COVID-19 came along. And that wave started when Republicans (and hard right-wing politicians worldwide) decided to embrace populism as a strategy. 

The only way a populist politician can win is by dividing the populace. Populism is – by its nature – antagonistic in nature. There needs to be an enemy, and that enemy is always on the other side of the political divide. As Ezra Klein points out in his book  “Why We’re Polarized,” population density and the U.S. Electoral College system makes populism a pretty effective strategy for the right.

This is why Republicans are actually stoking the conspiracy fires, including outright endorsement of the QAnon-sense. Amazing as it seems, Republicans are like Rocky Balboa: Even when they win, they seem able to continue being the underdog. 

The core that has been whipped up by populism keeps shadow boxing with their avowed enemy: the liberal elite. This political weaponization of conspiracy theories continues to find a willing audience who eagerly amplify it through social media. There is some evidence to show that extreme conservatives are more willing that embrace conspiracies than extreme liberals, but the biggest problem is that there is a highly effective conspiracy machine continually pumping out right-targeted theories.

It seems there were plenty of conspiracies theories making the rounds well before now. The shitstorm that became known as the year 2020 is simply adding fuel to an already raging fire.

Why Technology May Not Save Us

We are a clever race. We’re not as smart as we think we are, but we are pretty damn smart. We are the only race who has managed to forcibly shift the eternal cycles of nature for our own benefit. We have bent the world to our will. And look how that’s turning out for us.

For the last 10,000 years our cleverness has set us apart from all other species on earth. For the last 1000 years, the pace of that cleverness has accelerated. In the last 100 years, it has been advancing at breakneck speed. Our tools and ingenuity have dramatically reshaped our lives. our everyday is full of stuff we couldn’t imagine just a few short decades ago.

That’s a trend that’s hard to ignore. And because of that, we could be excused for thinking the same may be true going forward. When it comes to thinking about technology, we tend to do so from a glass half full perspective. It’s worked for us in the past. It will work for us in the future. There is no problem too big that our own technological prowess cannot solve.

But maybe it won’t. Maybe – just maybe – we’re dealing with another type of problem now to which technology is not well suited as a solution. And here are 3 reasons why.

The Unintended Consequences Problem

Technology solutions focus on the proximate rather than the distal – which is a fancy way of saying that technology always deals with the task at hand. Being technology, these solutions usually come from an engineer’s perspective, and engineers don’t do well with nuance. Complicated they can deal with. Complexity is another matter.

I wrote about this before when I wondered why tech companies tend to be confused by ethics. It’s because ethics falls into a category of problems known as a wicked problem. Racial injustice is another wicked problem. So is climate change. All of these things are complex and messy. Their dependence on collective human behavior makes them so. Engineers don’t like wicked problems, because they are by definition concretely non-solvable. They are also hotbeds of unintended consequences.

In Collapse, anthropologist Jared Diamond’s 2005 exploration of failed societies, past and present, Diamond notes that when we look forward, we tend to cling to technology as a way to dodge impending doom. But he notes, “underlying this expression of faith is the implicit assumption that, from tomorrow onwards, technology will function primarily to solve existing problems and will cease to create new problems.”

And there’s the rub. For every proximate solution it provides, technology has a nasty habit of unleashing scads of unintended new problems. Internal combustion engines, mechanized agriculture and social media come to mind immediately as just three examples. The more complex the context of the problem, the more likely it is that the solution will come with unintended consequences.

The 90 Day Problem

Going hand in hand with the unintended consequence problem is the 90 Day problem. This is a port-over from the corporate world, where management tends to focus on problems that can be solved in 90 days. This comes from a human desire to link cause and effect. It’s why we have to-do lists. We like to get shit done.

Some of the problems we’re dealing with now – like climate change – won’t be solved in 90 days. They won’t be solved in 90 weeks or even 90 months. Being wicked problems, they will probably never be solved completely. If we’re very, very, very lucky and we start acting immediately and with unprecedented effort, we might be seeing some significant progress in 90 years.

This is the inconvenient truth of these problems. The consequences are impacting us today but the payoff for tackling them is – even if we do it correctly – sometime far in the future, possibly beyond the horizon of our own lifetimes. We humans don’t do well with those kinds of timelines.

The Alfred E. Neuman Problem

The final problem with relying on technology is that we think of it as a silver bullet. The alternative is a huge amount of personal sacrifice and effort with no guarantee of success. So, it’s easier just to put our faith in technology and say, “What, Me Worry?” like Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman. It’s much easier to shift the onus for us surviving our own future to some nameless, faceless geek somewhere who’s working their way towards their “Eureka” moment.

While that may be convenient and reassuring, it’s not very realistic. I believe the past few years – and certainly the past few months – have shown us that all of us have to make some very significant changes in our lives and be prepared to rethink what we thought our future might be. At the very least, it means voting for leadership committed to fixing problems rather than ignoring them in favor of the status quo.

I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think technology is going to save our ass this time.

The Fickle Fate of Memes

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

Attributed to Andy Warhol

If your name is Karen, I’m sorry. The internet has not been kind to you over the past 2 years. You’re probably to the point where you hesitate before you tell people your name. And it’s not your fault that your name has meme-famous for being synonymous with bitchy white privilege.

The odds are that you’re a nice person. I know several Karens and not one of them is a “Karen.” On the other hand, I do know a few “Karen”s (as my Facebook adventure from last week makes clear) and not one of them is named Karen.

But that’s the way memes roll. You’re not at the wheel. The trolling masses have claimed your fate and you just have to go along for the ride. That’s true for Karen, where there doesn’t seem to be an actual “Karen” to which the meme can be attributed. But it’s also true when the meme starts with an actual person – like Rebecca Black.

Remember Rebecca Black? No?  I’ll jog your memory –

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today it is Friday, Friday (partyin’)
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today

Rebecca Black

Yes, that Rebecca Black – star of “Friday”, which for many years was the most hated video in YouTube history (it still ranks at number 15 according to Wikipedia).

Admit it, when you remembered Rebecca Black, you did not do so fondly. But you know nothing about Rebecca Black. Memes seldom come bundled with a back story. So here are a few facts about Friday you didn’t know.

  • Black didn’t write the song. It was written by two LA music producers
  • Black was 13 at the time the video was shot
  • She had no input into the production or the heavy use of Autotune on her vocals
  • She didn’t see the video or hear the final version of the song before it was posted to YouTube

Although Black was put front and center into the onslaught of negativity the video produced, she had very little to do with the finished product. She was just a 13-year-old girl who was hoping to become a professional singer. And suddenly, she was one of the most hated and ridiculed people in the world. The trolls came out in force. And, unsurprisingly, they were merciless. But then mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon. Billboard and Time magazines, CNN, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and more all heaped ridicule on Black.

That’s a lot for any 13-year-old to handle.  To understand the impact a meme can have, take 11 minutes to watch the video above about Black from Vice. Black seems to have emerged from the experience as a pretty well-adjusted 22-year-old who is still hoping to turn the fame she got into a positive. She is – more than anything – just trying to regain control of her own story.

The fame Rebecca Black found may have turned out to be of the caustic kind when she found it, but at least she was looking for it. Ghyslain Raza never asked for it and never wanted it. He became a meme by accident.

Ghyslain who? Allow your memory to be jogged once again. You probably know Raza better as the Star Wars Kid.

In 2002, Ghyslain Raza was a shy 14-year-old from Quebec who liked to make videos. One of those videos was shot in the school AV room while Raza was “goofing around,” wielding a makeshift light saber he made from a golf ball retriever. That video fell into the hands of a classmate, who – with all the restraint middle schoolers are known for – promptly posted it online. Soon, a torrent of cyber bullying was unleashed on Raza as views climbed into the tens of millions.

The online comments were hurtful enough. More than a few commenters suggested that Raza commit suicide. Some offered to help. But it was no better for Razain in his real life. He had to change schools when what few friends he had evaporated. At the new school, it got worse, “In the common room, students climbed onto tabletops to insult me.”

Imagine for a moment yourself being 14 and dealing with this. Hell, imagine it at the age you are now. Life would be hell. It certainly was for Raza. In an interview with a Canadian news magazine, he said, “No matter how hard I tried to ignore people telling me to commit suicide, I couldn’t help but feel worthless, like my life wasn’t worth living.”

Both Black and Raza survived their ordeals. Aleksey Varner wasn’t so lucky. The over-the-top video resume he made in 2006, Impossible is Nothing, also became a meme when it was posted online without his permission. Actor Michael Cera was one of the many who did a parody. Like Black and Raza, Vayner battled to get his life back. He lost that battle in 2013. He died from a heart attack that a relative has said was brought on by an overdose of medication.

In our culture, online seems to equal open season. Everyone –  even celebrities that should know better – seem to think it’s okay to parody, ridicule, bully or even threaten death. What we conveniently forget is that there is a very real person with very real feelings on the other side of the meme. No one deserves that kind of fame.

Even if their name is Karen.

The Day My Facebook Bubble Popped

I learned this past week just how ideologically homogenous my Facebook bubble usually is. Politically, I lean left of center. Almost all the people in my bubble are the same.

Said bubble has been built from the people I have met in the past 40 years or so. Most of these people are in marketing, digital media or tech. I seldom see anything in my feed I don’t agree with — at least to some extent.

But before all that, I grew up in a small town in a very right-wing part of Alberta, Canada. Last summer, I went to my 40-year high-school reunion. Many of my fellow graduates stayed close to our hometown for those 40 years. Some are farmers. Many work in the oil and gas industry. Most of them would fall somewhere to the right of where I sit in my beliefs and political leanings.

At the reunion, we did what people do at such things — we reconnected. Which in today’s world meant we friended each other on Facebook. What I didn’t realize at the time is that I had started a sort of sociological experiment. I had poked a conservative pin into my liberal social media bubble.

Soon, I started to see posts that were definitely coming from outside my typical bubble. But most of them fell into the “we can agree to disagree” camp of political debate. My new Facebook friends and I might not see eye-to-eye on certain things, but hell — you are good people, I’m good people, we can all live together in this big ideological tent.

On May 1, 2020, things began to change. That was when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that 1,500 models of “assault-style” weapons would be classified as prohibited, effective immediately. This came after Gabriel Wortman killed 22 people in Nova Scotia, making it Canada’s deadliest shooting spree. Now, suddenly posts I didn’t politically agree with were hitting a very sensitive raw nerve. Still, I kept my mouth shut. I believed arguing on Facebook was pointless.

Through everything that’s happened in the four months since (it seems like four decades), I have resisted commenting when I see posts I don’t agree with. I know how pointless it is. I realize that I am never going to change anyone’s mind through a comment on a Facebook post.

I understand this is just an expression of free speech, and we are all constitutionally entitled to exercise it. I stuck with the Facebook rule I imposed for myself — keep scrolling and bite your tongue. Don’t engage.

I broke that rule last week. One particular post did it. This post implied that with a COVID-19 survival rate of almost 100%, why did we need a vaccine? I knew better, but I couldn’t help it.

I engaged. It was limited engagement to begin with. I posted a quick comment suggesting that with 800,000 (and counting) already gone, saving hundreds of thousands of lives might be a pretty good reason. Right or left, I couldn’t fathom anyone arguing with that.

I was wrong. Oh my God, was I wrong. My little comment unleashed a social media shit storm. Anti-vaxxing screeds, mind-control plots via China, government conspiracies to artificially over-count the death toll and calling out the sheer stupidity of people wearing face masks proliferated in the comment string for the next five days. I watched the comment string grow in stunned disbelief. I had never seen this side of Facebook before.

Or had I? Perhaps the left-leaning posts I am used are just as conspiratorial, but I don’t realize it because I happen to agree with them. I hope not, but perspective does strange things to our grasp of the things we believe to be true. Are we all — right or left — just exercising our right to free speech through a new platform? And — if we are — who am I to object?

Free speech is held up by Mark Zuckerberg and others as hallowed ground in the social-media universe. In a speech last fall at Georgetown University, Zuckerberg said: “The ability to speak freely has been central in the fight for democracy worldwide.”

It’s hard to argue that. The ability to publicly disagree with the government or any other holder of power over you is much better than any alternative. And the drafters of the U.S. Bill of Rights agreed. Freedom of speech was enshrined in the First Amendment. But the authors of that amendment — perhaps presciently — never defined exactly what constituted free speech. Maybe they knew it would be a moving target.

Over the history of the First Amendment, it has been left to the courts to decide what the exceptions would be.

In general, it has tightened the definitions around one area — what types of expression constitute a “clear and present danger” to others.  Currently, unless you’re specifically asking someone to break the law in the very near future, you’re protected under the First Amendment.

But is there a bigger picture here —one very specific to social media? Yes, legally in the U.S. (or Canada), you can post almost anything on Facebook.

Certainly, taking a stand against face masks and vaccines would qualify as free speech. But it’s not only the law that keeps society functioning. Most of the credit for that falls to social norms.

Social norms are the unwritten laws that govern much of our behavior. They are the “soft guard rails” of society that nudge us back on track when we veer off-course. They rely on us conforming to behaviors accepted by the majority.

If you agree with social norms, there is little nudging required. But if you happen to disagree with them, your willingness to follow them depends on how many others also disagree with them.

Famed sociologist Mark Granovetter showed in his Threshold Models of Collective Behavior that there can be tipping points in groups. If there are enough people who disagree with a social norm, it will create a cascade that can lead to a revolt against the norm.

Prior to social media, the thresholds for this type of behavior were quite high. Even if some of us were quick to act anti-socially, we were generally acting alone.

Most of us felt we needed a substantial number of like-minded people before we were willing to upend a social norm. And when our groups were determined geographically and comprised of ideologically diverse members, this was generally sufficient to keep things on track.

But your social-media feed dramatically lowers this threshold.

Suddenly, all you see are supporting posts of like-minded people. It seems that everyone agrees with you. Emboldened, you are more likely to go against social norms.

The problem here is that social norms are generally there because they are in the best interests of the majority of the people in society. If you go against them, by refusing a vaccine or to wear a face mask,  thereby allowing a disease to spread, you endanger others. Perhaps it doesn’t meet the legal definition of “imminent lawlessness,” but it does present a “clear and present danger.”

That’s a long explanation of why I broke my rule about arguing on Facebook.

Did I change anyone’s mind? No. But I did notice that the person who made the original post has changed their settings, so I don’t see the political ones anymore. I just see posts about grandkids and puppies.

Maybe it’s better that way.