A few thoughts on why social media is a cancerous institution.
Every single person on the face of the earth thinks they’re special, different from the rest and that their motives are so intricate and complex nobody could possibly decipher them.
Modern data-aggregation empirically throws these unfounded thoughts right out of the window.
Many years ago there was a “viral” story around the internet which depicted a man furiously wanting to sue Target (the US supermarket chain) for sending his daughter coupons for pregnancy paraphernalia; such as baby clothes and cribs. The man was angry because he thought the store was encouraging his daughter the become pregnant. This same man later on issued an apology to the store when it came to light his daughter was in fact actually pregnant. Target had figured this out by analyzing a sudden change in the girl’s shopping habits. These weren’t real people looking at what she bought and what it meant, it was just an algorithm which iterates through every customer and every purchase and finds relations and meanings.
That anecdote is not an isolated incident and it’s happening daily everywhere in the world. To everyone. Big corporations aggregate all the data at their disposals to make assumptions, minimize risks and just plain predict what their customers want even before they themselves do.
Nowhere is any of this more prevalent than in current day social media. Everyone is compulsively posting every detail of their lives to platforms owned by vastly wealthy corporations which gather it all and store it for various reasons, non of which are of any benefit to the poster. It may not be readily apparent how giving every detail of your life away could harm you, but you can never know how it will be detrimental to you in the future. Any of you familiar with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook data scandal? This was only possible because Facebook had nigh-infinite access to its users’ data.
Another point I’d like to bring up is that these websites are a fucking cesspool of self-propagating ideologies (most likely implanted by its owners in an effort to direct society’s behavior in whatever manner they deem more profitable, but I digress) they are a modern day Skinner box. Social consensus becomes so important that critical thinking is completely discarded in favour of “likes” and “upvotes” or whatever they are called these days. Getting upvotes in your pictures or comments is the ultimate goal and therefore your entire time is spent adapting to whatever it is the person who gets most upvotes does. And all of this to what end? Social validation seems the most likely answer, very pathetic in my opinion; not to mention devoid of any intrinsic value or meaning. Simply put herd mentality at its finest.
It actually comes as no suprise when one finds out high executives for the major social media sites do not allow their family members to participate in them. They are at the top and are seeing the damage these things can do to the human brain.
Hopefully in the near future more people will realise this as well and abandon social media entirely.