The Complexity Of Following The Algorithm - Anti-Social Media and Ego Driven Thinking

This weekend, I finally took the decision to shutter my Facebook account for good.

I had been away from it for a fair amount of time, but was pulled back into a need for an account after doing work with Quest headsets during our brief dalliance with the metaverse in a professional setting.

Why am I getting rid? Let me explain.

I recently needed to create an X account to get in contact with a YouTuber I was looking to collaborate with and, understandably, due to our lack of a personal relationship, it was necessary to establish some method of dialogue - with his preferred platform being X, I create an account through gritted teeth given my "less than ideal" perception of their current owner.

Those who know me well know that I have a fairly low opinion of what Twitter has become - I used it extensively during my time as a professional writer as a way and means to speak to readers of both the papers I wrote for, and my own platform as a columnist.

In that sense, it bore great fruits for me - I got my jobs writing for a living, got to work with the BBC, and also got a massive amount of pride from it as I rebuilt my life after burnout in a cough non-traditional way given my previous career mostly being in technology. Twitter back then was different to what it has become now though - a breeding ground for poor behaviour under the auspices of a contrived version of "free speech".

However, nowadays I feel like the inkling I had back when social media rode on to the scene in the early 2000s - that it was going to turn the village gossip and mistrust into a global melee - is more readily apparent now than it has ever been.

Even modern supposedly-professional engagements in politics have turned into less of a "what can we do for you" platform as much as "let's throw some muck at the other side". Anyone who has spent any time involved in human psychology knows that having a broad society based on these principles goes downhill rapidly - history is littered with examples where a convenient "other" can be the necessary scapegoat for all manner of things.

The Challenge Of A Binary Society

This creation of a split society has profound consequences beyond just whether we have a social media platform account or we don't, but rather it leads the group to be increasingly distrusting, and into polarised thinking.

In this world, the solution to problems are often found in the nuance of conversation rather than the binary positions taken by warring factions - one only need look at myriad aspects of society to see the impact of warring factions, from the ones that war with words, or the ones that war with actual weapons.

So what has led us to this path? The "algorithm" that drives much of our own consumption of content.

Appearing innocuous in the first instance, the idea of personalising content was seen as a great way to market more suitable information to you as a consumer - after all, hyper-personalisation means the ability to sell you just as much "stuff" as anyone else because data can be gathered, and exploited, to maximum effect, encouraging compulsive spending and a high spending economy.

You can see it in your social media accounts, on YouTube, and in shopping - whatever it is you think, we'll make sure we construct a perfect echo chamber to make you believe what you think is unequivocally right.

This is a potentially dangerous system because it leads to serious disconnects between the individual world view and that of the reality we find ourselves in. To quote Stewart Lee's comedic statement around the time of Brexit illustrating echo chambers - "well I've asked all of my friends in this gastropub in Chelsea, and everyone's voting Remain so it'll all be OK!".

Reality Is Often There, Albeit Hidden

Those who didn't see the uprising that lead to Brexit, or Trump, are probably in the same middle-class liberal bubbles that can surround people of all types. Having such an attitude - insular and focused solely on that which we believe - is problematic, not because of any particular opinion or leaning, but that it favours the rejection of other thinking in favour of the delusion that more people think the way we do than actually do.

This is arguably the reason why, as my team will say, I ask such "oddball" questions when we interview others - it's because self awareness and the ability to challenge one's own thinking as well as others is a vanishing art form. As the old saying goes "common sense isn't turning out to be that common, after all".

I get it when it comes to social media - none of us like to see things that annoy us or upset us or otherwise cause us pain, so the algorithm can lead us to a "safer place" in theory.

However, having the ability to have to face up to reality - that which actually exists - is a route forward for change, in a way that ignorance most certainly is not.

The liberal psychologist Jonathan Haidt has spoken in his recent books of the need to cultivate anti-fragility - to sustain oneself in the face of challenge - and I am also minded to keep check of my own propensity as a human to sort things into boxes for convenience.

The challenge with a million self-defined boxes is that it encourages a lack of desire to change and a more crystalline - and thus fragile - way of existing. If I seek only to validate "my truth", I am less receptive to change and, by consequence, any form of evolution - it drives hyper-personalised views which are at loggerheads with the very idea of society, borne of collaboration, compromise, and a shared culture.

Some will cite the Latin phrase - alea iacta est - that the die is cast, but it needn't be. Accepting things as the way they are because it's impossible to change is akin to a statement I said to a colleague who said I may "find myself kicking on closed doors if I move forward with my career", to which I said "the thing about kicking closed doors is they become weakened to be able to break through them in future".

The ego is a powerful thing, but we are in danger of losing our own identities because "the data said so" because abdicating our responsibility is easier than challenging the status quo.

As an old mentor of mine once said to me regarding life - "there are no solutions, only trade offs". The question for all of us should be which trade offs we should consider worthwhile.

After all, one can only trade for an easier life now if they acknowledge a harder one later. I may be making communication more difficult eschewing a social media platform, but it'll reveal for me who are my true friends, and who are just there to pretend to look at what gets shown up in their feed.

For my next step - how do I get rid of WhatsApp too given Meta own that platform as well...