Social Media and Social Disruption

     The media are still obsessing about the effects of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and his rebranding it as X. It seems to me that Twitter was always more important for the media than the rest of us. If the media hadn't reported on the latest Twitter kerfuffle, I wouldn't have had a clue. Without the media, Twitter would have had no presence in my life. That's still so.

     From where I sit, "social platforms" differ from previous media in one crucial respect: the audience controls the content. Newspapers, radio, TV all had a passive audience. You bought the paper, switched on the radio/TV, and got the news the purveyors thought was fit to tell. Despite different political/etc viewpoints, those media created a mass audience with a common culture. Cable began the shift to audience control. The internet has made it the default. We now have a fractured culture, with no common narratives, and hence no widely held understanding of how the world works. Worse, we have an increasing number of people who believe that they and those who agree with them know the truth. Too many people no longer  understand that all insights about the world are provisional and at best merely good approximations to the truth; and at worst they're delusional.

     In many ways, this fracturing repeats the fracturing of the common religious culture when print made books cheap, and so fostered reading. The almost immediate effect was individual interpretations of the sacred texts, which led to disagreements about creeds, which triggered wars. It took two centuries before something resembling a consensus about the social role of religion emerged in Europe.

     Every time a disruptive communication medium appears, there is cultural reconfiguration. People "do their own research". The effect is profound disagreement and mutual distrust. It is always painful, and often bloody. We're living through such a reconfiguration. It's more complicated, difficult and dangerous than previous ones because we're also living through a major environmental change. It's going to be a very rough ride.

Edited and extended version of a comment posted in the New York Times 2023-10-19