Social media can blur our view of reality
Social media is a powerful communications vehicle. It taps into our human tendency and desire to feel connected.
Having grown up in the early 1960s and
’70s, the idea of being socially connected meant establishing eye contact when speaking to adults, being respectful and told to behave myself at family gatherings — a childhood where a hard-line emphasis was instilled by post-World War II parents as to what was considered tolerable and appropriate social behavior.
I grew up in an era when cellphones didn’t exist and home phones were something that you had to dial a seven-digit number in order to speak with the person you were calling. And once received, you would then tangle yourself up in a long chord while talking into an ear-to-mouth apparatus that usually hung from the kitchen wall.
Owning a wrist watch meant winding it so it would show the time and date. It was only with wild imagination that we could ever have pictured a futuristic parallel of communicating via video and audio feed from your wrist. This, for baby boomers, only occurred while sprawled out on the TV room floor watching their favorite episodes of
“The Jetsons.” And for anyone old enough to remember, it left an entertaining and visionary impression of what the future had in store.
Advancements in technology have always changed the way we live and will continue to evolve for the next generation. Today, we conduct our lives through cellphones or the newest electronic gadgets: paying bills, monitoring medical reports, FaceTiming with three sisters far away, joking and checking in on college roommates, making and confirming appointments/reservations, playing games, saving picture after picture, watching your favorite team. We click on polarizing news reports that leave us shaking our head, expressing opinions on contentious social/political issues — and then — deploying them into the ether for all to see with just a tap of the finger.
Before cable TV and wireless communication became mainstream, most people received their news from professionally edited newspapers, magazines and the three major television networks, which largely disseminated well-researched stories from reliable sources. It was those telecasts that forged the careers of high profile news personalities. My father’s favorite was to tune in every weeknight and watch the trustworthy and amiable Walter Cronkite on CBS.
Now, consumers in this high-speed, Wi-Fi world are overwhelmed by a firehose of information that they must sort through — good from bad. Take, for example, social media like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, X and others. They use clever marketing techniques that allow 4.9 billion people (according to Forbes) to post and share
their commentaries, videos and pictures with authentic captions and accounts that can often be engaging and educational.
However, new innovations like AI and other outside factions can look to create chaos by negatively riddling the web with falsehoods and blatant misinformation.
So how do we filter through what is fake and what is real?
MIT Sloan professor Sinan
Aral speaking at the Social Media Summit in 2021 said, “Social media is rewiring the central nervous system of humanity in real time.” And he cautioned, “We’re now at a crossroads between its promise and its peril,” the Guardian reported.
Recently, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Florida and
Texas lawsuits about whether state governments can set the rules for how social media platforms curate content.
Other questions worth asking: How do we crack down on the high volume of offenders spreading inaccurate information? And, does regulating unlawful content that masquerades as free speech constitute censorship?
“There’s always been this division between your right to speak and your right to have a megaphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people,” Renee Diresta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said, according to 2021 reporting in the Guardian
Now, more than ever, during this presidential election year,
that megaphone is going to blare louder and stretch even further with a greater amount of deceptive and erroneous material that will undoubtedly stir the reactionary pot.
As responsible citizens, it is imperative that we are vigilant and work with absolute determination to decipher between falsity and fact.
And for me, I’ll also be checking my iPhone in the hope of finding an episode from “The Jetsons” for an amusing and captivating dose of reality.