The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
"The Danger of Social Media": "It Allows People to Publish Their Internal Monologues"
"Can civilization survive now that we have been made witness to the interior lives of others?"
I much appreciated John Podhoretz's comments on this, and I thought I'd pass them along in their entirety (without the Twitter breaks). Social media has in one way fulfilled the promise of free speech, by making speech cheaper, easier, and more frictionless than ever before. But some friction can be good, and we might be missing it about now. From Podhoretz:
Here's the danger of social media. It allows people to publish their internal monologues.
Our internal monologues and fantasies are often incredibly ugly. People go to therapists because they feel so guilty about them, and one of the tasks of a therapist is to explain that thoughts are not actions. You can rage in your thoughts about your brother, or someone at work, even fantasize about them dying—but you have done nothing and are guilty of nothing, and you need to forgive yourself and learn how to calm yourself down.
This is, I imagine, what Catholic confession is for, though you are, I gather, obliged to do penance for your evil thoughts. But remember—they are still inside you. They are between you and you.
Since 2007, people have a means of externalizing that interior monologue and this means something. A researcher at MIT saying, rather than thinking, "I really want to see that video of Charlie Kirk dying again because it works better than my anti-depressant" has become a public act. [I'm not sure whether this is a reference to a specific post, or just a concrete hypothetical standing in for posts of this sort. -EV] I see it. I am affected by it. The public discourse is too.
My sense of how the world works and what people are really like undergoes a change. I become rageful, and believe people who think this way are evil. It's likely they are not. They just have a means of externalizing the parts of them that no one ever saw.
But another human tendency, the tendency to extrapolate from individual samples to the whole, kicks in then as well. I will assume that anyone and everyone like that MIT researcher is an enemy of everything good and is unsalvageable. In that way my world shrinks.
The part of him that dehumanizes Charlie Kirk and turns his assassination into a joke then threatens to dehumanize me in a way. And seriously, before social media, I would never even know he existed, or that he thought what he thought, and that was better for him and me.
"Use every man after his desert," Hamlet says, "and who should 'scape whipping?" Meaning: if the world knew what was going on inside us, we would all be punished viscerally for it. Until 2007, for the most part, the world would not, could not, know.
The question is, and I mean this literally: Can civilization survive now that we have been made witness to the interior lives of others?
Remember the Seinfeld episode where Jerry and George decide they are going to share their deepest, darkest secrets? George goes first. We don't hear his monologue. We only see Jerry's face when he's done. And he is frozen in horror. And George is his best friend.
Thanks to Ed Driscoll at InstaPundit for the pointer.
