Engines of conformity
In social media's earlier days, it was often assumed that they facilitated weak ties and helped build "social capital," a measure of one's ability to draw on extended networks of support. Much was made of scenarios where one reached out to online social networks for advice: You could post that you were going to visit Pittsburgh, and then someone you barely know could respond with some advice about what to do there.
Since social media platforms shifted to algorithmic timeline sorting, that kind of functionality seems diminished. Who knows if anyone will see your questions? The people most likely to add new and useful information — the weak ties — are probably the least likely to see your posts, since the algorithms tend to weigh against people you rarely interact with. If you need to know where to go in Pittsburgh, you might be stuck relying on search engines and apps like Yelp, which come freighted with a lot of commercial incentives that distort the information. If you have to search for information, that triggers ad auctions, which enriches platforms; if you ask your extended group of friends and get a useful answer, platforms lose out.
This suggests that platforms would like your friends to be entertaining enough to keep you consuming their content but not so informative that you don't have to expose yourself to sponsored content. That is, platforms may want your friends to be homogenous, or at least they have an incentive to suppress your experience of difference. They are engines of conformity.
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When I was in high school I had friends who would steal their parents' car so we could go to the mall. Now the malls are dead. Online retail is presumed to have killed them, but that story feels incomplete. I rarely went to the mall to shop back then. The mall served a different purpose; it was the staging ground for a kind of indoctrination that must now no longer feel necessary or pleasurable.
My friends and I used to want to go there out of a vague sense of having something to do, which in practice meant looking at posters and novelty gifts in Spencer's and maybe playing video games or trying on clothes we couldn't actually buy. But over and above what we actually did was the idea that the only diversity in our lives consisted of a diversity of stores. The mall contained the real-life opportunity to see and experience something different.
When the internet came, it most conspicuously seemed to offer a different kind of difference; those who wanted to escape from places where the mall was the only thing going had a strong propensity to imagine the internet was a new kind of unbounded space to explore, one that didn't indoctrinate but instead liberated you.
Maybe because of that intuition, we were slow to recognize that online connectivity could make for a narrower experience of the social world. It was comparatively easy to see online culture as offering an escape from geographical restriction, presenting an opportunity to interact with (or lurk in the vicinity of) a wider variety of people. It was easy to conclude that the internet would diversify everyone's point of view, expend everyone's sense of what was ordinary or normal or even possible.
But that presumes a strong, a priori wish to be exposed to difference, to be challenged, to possibly be drawn into conflicts. It means inconvenience, discomfort, potential confusion, and the need to pay more careful attention to others. How often are we in that position? Maybe when the internet was new, people prepared themselves to "go online" as though they were going on a trip to a foreign country, curious and mentally ready for challenges. When I look at my phone, the last thing I want, typically, is more confusion. Usually I am looking at it because I want a quick and immediate distraction that provides an immediate reward of some sort, or I want it to help me get some task performed as expediently as possible. Every time I look at my phone, it is conditioning me in my demand for immediacy and convenience.
So even if the internet expands our potential contact points with difference, it doesn't necessarily build the disposition to engage with them. The way many tech companies design their products feeds into this. They presume users who demand convenience, and they typically work to remove the primary obstacle in the way of convenience: other people. So you can, to use the paradigmatic example, use your phone to order a car and get to where you are going without speaking a word to the driver if you don't feel like it.
Convenience as avoidance carries over to spheres where engaging with other people would seem to be the whole point. The social media apparatus, especially on a phone, is geared toward making the experience of other people efficient and expedient, something that can be consumed in spare moments. Social media promise users an impossible reconciliation of sameness and difference: They present sameness as difference in the form of ever-refreshing feeds, and they present difference as sameness, homogenizing open-ended social interactions into standardized units that can be counted and manipulated only in formulaic ways. Social media promise an experience of diversity and difference while in practice they nullify difference by making it seem predictable and manageable at a distance.
This can all make for a "good-enough" substitute for sociality, saving lots of time and focus. (It's sort of the same as how the mall was once a good enough substitute for public space.) Social media can allow for interaction with other people without the need for negotiation or uncertainty; you don't even have to wait for your turn to talk, or simulate the process of listening. You don't have to build any trust or take any chances.
By emphasizing convenience, isolation, and predictability, social media resemble the structure of suburbs. In that light, it is not surprising that researchers have found that social media use is linked to a fear of crime. It works similarly to the local news, creating a sense that it is best to remove oneself from a disordered world and seek isolation and sanctuary in environments purged of difference. David A. Banks describes here how suburbanization and local news coverage coincide with fomenting fascism. Social media use parallels the way suburbs contain the experience of social "disorder" and difference. Rather than deal with such negotiations outside mediated space, they are contained within media as a spectacle, making the space from which one views difference seem a safe, protected harbor (even as you are terrorized by news).
This is not just a matter of filter bubbles. Social media users tend to be exposed to more diverse perspectives rather than less, at least according to the research detailed here. But that exposure is different from how social media encourage the use of news to express identity, and how they encourage the articulation of identity itself as consistent, legible, purified thing.
Sociologist Richard Sennett's 1970 book The Uses of Disorder examines the dangers of "purified identity" — of committing to "a pre-existent pattern" for the self, and then adhering to it in the face of history. Sennett contends that people reach for this limited, prefabricated self-conception because they never learn to deal with conflict and are not secure enough to trust that they will remain themselves as they encounter difference. Instead there is "the desire to create so clear and unambiguous a self-image that [one] becomes immune to the outside world." This self-image becomes a kind of comfortable trap that one fights to stay enclosed within.
The jarring elements in one's social life can be purified out as unreal because they don't fit that articulated object, that self-consciously spelled-out set of beliefs, likes and dislikes, and abilities that one takes to be oneself. In this way, the degree to which people feel urged to keep articulating who they are, what they want, and what they feel is almost an index of their fear about their inability to survive in social experience with other [people].
Platforms like Facebook, of course, constantly urge us to keep articulating who we are. And many of them process our likes and dislikes algorithmically to convey to us a sense of their significance: our preferences are really important! they are who we really are! If Sennett is right, using these platforms is guaranteed to exacerbate our fears about being able "to survive in social experience" that is more open-ended. What the platforms provide is means to a "purified self," with a pre-existent pattern in the form of a public-facing archive.
Not only that, but social media offer echo chambers into which to proclaim an identity, as if the only reason one has a self is to feel it being reinforced. It offers an illusion of a community that you can carry around in your pocket, to always confirm who you are. (Facebook's aspirations to become a broadly accepted reputation manager is the logical conclusion of this.) Social media can serve the function that in Sennett's argument is played by the "intense family" and suburban life more generally: These provide enough isolation to shelter one's self-concept, while placing people in a position to imagine they are participating in a kind of unified community. But this community they imagine is just a projection of their self-concept: "The myth of community solidarity gave these modern people the chance to be cowards and hide from one another," he writes. They instead bask in a "feeling of nonexperienced solidarity," which is just the fragile illusion that everyone else shares your way of life.
I think social media offers "nonexperienced solidarity" as a consumer good. That is not to say social media can't facilitate experiences of solidarity. But the interactivity they encourage should not be mistaken for it. Liking a news story is more conformist than reading it.
It used to be taken for granted that conformity was a kind of passivity, it was consuming what the mainstream told you to consume. It was going to the mall. But that idea was always flawed. We actively produce our own conformity. I desperately wanted to go to the mall.
Social media refine that conformity production: They allow us to see the "community" they afford as a reflection of ourselves, and they let us broadcast to these communities as though that were community service. Posting online lets us swear allegiance to figments of our imagination we imagine are populating and digesting our feeds.
Sennett suggests that the chaos of city life can work against these imagined communities, producing face-to-face encounters that create a sense of shared stakes from moment to moment, rather than set, comfortable us vs. them scenarios. He figured young people who were raised in safe, isolating suburbs would choose risk and conflict over narcissism and ennui. I was once one of those young people, and as much as I went to the mall, I still wanted nothing more than to escape suburban life. I live in a city now, but I wonder if the way I use my phone isn't resuburbanizing me.
Sometimes I ride the subway home, and I see some of the other riders looking at a phone screen together, laughing, passing it back and forth. More often I see people doing what I am doing, taking refuge in the screen, scrolling down through the messages of people we've chosen to follow and wishing the ride was over.