The Relationship Between Social Media & Mass Conformity
The punishment for violating social orthodoxy might be enormous but the cost of forcing groupthink is much more pernicious
LB and I stopped by a little café we like on Melrose to get our daily bread (aka coffee) but when we got there, the place was jampacked with Asian American teenage girls all dressed in black, talking loudly in large groups, taking pictures of their drinks, taking mirror selfies, & taking pictures of the café’s sign. Later on, I spotted an Asian 20-something dressed in all beige, stop and point to the café and then at her phone in confirmation, like, Yup, this is the place! It was obvious simply be scanning the café clientele that our once under-the-radar café had gotten a frequency boost by an Asian female influencer. Now, I’m not saying this café doesn’t serve good lattes because it does—though a bit sweet for my tastes—but the hype simply isn’t matching the product. This isn’t Maru. This isn’t intelligentsia. The drinks are good but not amazing. God forbid if my favorite LA haunts got the same influencer frequency boost.
For the record, I completely understand why we rely on influencers and celebrities for product curation because that’s one less thing we have to research now that is going to delight our tastebuds and give us the dopamine rush we crave. I don’t understand, however, for the life of me, why we as Americans aren’t more skeptical and more deconstructive of social codes, influencer endorsements, & social orthodoxy at large. As a Gen Xer, I find this truly concerning. Gone are the days when rugged individualism, screwing the system, thinking for one’s self, & no-labels culture were aspirational cultural principles in America.
Now, Americans seem to be stuck in two diametrical and antagonistic roles: never screw up and follow social orthodoxy to a tee by exposing and canceling all offenders, even innocent mistakes, even decontextualized bad faith clips while participating in campaigns that have the vaguest whiff of social justice to them but are, in fact, really about temporary outrage posing as online crime and punishment for viewers impatient for digital karma or monetize contrarianism by breaking all the rules and relishing in this defiance (and hopefully making money off the outrage this behavior creates). Surely we as a young democratic republic, have more than two modes of response to our own socially constructed rules of behavior.
I just read a fascinating—and depressing—article the other day in the New York Times about a Black, conservative flamethrower who basically makes a living by clip-farming all day just to stoke the outrage of his fellow conservatives. Dude got invited to the white house for basically pissing off liberals and infuriating his own base every step of the way.
But for everyone else, the advent of social media seems to correlate to incredibly high rates of social conformity if for no other reason than people fear being dragged into the dirt now for committing a public faux pas or being accused of racism or sexism. The flip side of this is the bizarrely obsequious attitude that so many Gen Zers and Gen Alphas seem to have towards influencers, influencer consumption, capitalism, privacy relinquishment, & digital self-commerce as if there could be no other way. Under the guise of the technological democratization that social media has created is the simultaneous death of the author and by that I mean, the death of the expert. There is no original author anymore, just a bunch of people parroting each other’s comments and stealing (or reacting to) each other’s content. Who needs a food expert to analyze their Chinese Chicken salad when we can just watch a beautiful 19-year-old pretty-boy with perfect skin and feather-dry bangs scarfing down an overpriced chicken sandwich, pointing to his food in dramatically, & making exaggerated yum expressions to his 3 million followers? Likewise, who needs book critics (or fashion experts or climatologists or scientists or devoted readers even) when we can just watch a movie star pull out an untouched copy of your MFA classmate’s novel out of her Gucci backpack and say she loved this book so much even though it’s about the narrator being tortured in war-torn Cambodia for three hundred pages?
The contradiction here is that expertise has always been a gatekeeping industry because it takes a lot of time, labor, discipline, luck, & self-application to become an expert at really anything and influencers can bypass the exigent demands of expertise, especially those involving training, craft, licensing, apprenticeship, & education, by simply being pretty or popular or famous or outrageous or clueless or offensive enough. Whatever it takes, evidently. Influencers are paying for their second mortgages for million dollar homes in Brentwood simply by monetizing other people’s desire, hatred, envy, lust, & rage while creating the appearance of being anti-elite, which is incredibly appealing to Americans who have long held hostility towards the upper class and their privileged lifestyles. Even though the political, media, film, and business spheres are rife with elites in every corner of the room and elitism is the reward for wealth in almost every country.
Influencers make this process seem almost egalitarian and they do so without the slightest hint of expertise or training or education or knowledge. Many Americans find this lack of expertise to be an inspiring antidote to the closed-door elitism of East Coast culture with its private boarding schools and its yacht clubs and it’s sawed-off R’s and its disdain of everything that doesn’t come from old East Coast money. Influencers are proof to young Americans that even the most white trash country girl from a town of ten people and one stop light might strike it rich with the right face and the right kismet. It doesn’t matter if this rarely happens, only that it could.
But the democratization of media and the collapse of both journalism and subject matter experts has caused immeasurable epistemic damage to our culture by creating the mirage that everyone is an expert and everyone’s opinion is equally valid, when this is clearly not true. This is why Americans are both functionally illiterate when it comes to media consumption and source citations as they are with systems of knowledge and professional credentials. Now, we have Google doctors arguing with epidemiologists about Polio vaccines and herd immunity. Now, we have Redditors who own five shares of an S&P 500 ETF in a Robinhood account and who don’t know the difference between a t-note and a t-bond acting like they know as much about stock valuation, market corrections, & portfolio management as licensed financial professionals. It’s insane. Now, we have Fox commentators in control of the Pentagon and Wrestling executives in charge of the American education system and reality TV bullies in charge of our nuclear codes and Dr Oz trying out for US Senator and no one under the age of 30 thinks that’s the slightest bit strange. But it is. Even if everyone pretends it’s normative.
Of course, it’s true that the average person knows more about more things than they did thirty years ago thanks to the internet, but it’s also true that there are more dilettantes with a superficial understanding of well, everything, who think they’re experts (or potential experts) about everything than in any time in modern history. And the point here isn’t that experts aren’t wrong or that they don’t make mistakes or that dilettantes can’t be right. The point is that experts tend to have a much more nuanced understanding of their subject matter and they’re the most capable of learning from their mistakes and evolving whereas dilettantes, with their superficial understanding of their material, will have an incredibly simplistic and reductive understanding of the subject matter and are the least likely to learn from, and evolve from, their own mistakes because they have a fundamentally simplistic understanding of their own knowledge that is often binary and unnuanced.
Here’s what I would like to see in this country, many of these things even had a brief moment in the ‘90s but some of them have never been common America but must be in order for us to evolve:
Intellectual skepticism about everything, even intellectual skepticism
A redefined American culture that is pro-intellectual, pro-progress, pro-expert, pro-science, pro-technology, pro-data, & that doesn’t assume that college is right for everyone or wrong for everyone
Citizens need informational, data, & evidentiary literacy
Bringing back the art of nuance, the social stigma against lazy generalizations of entire groups of people, & cheap either/or fallacies
Celebration of training, knowledge, craft, expertise, experience, & education as it pertains to training
Pushing back against simplistic labels, formulas, & monetized outrage as a way of understanding reality (or making money from our anger)
Demanding that Americans become better students of the world, the global south, & of history in general
Presumptive civic participation & collective responsibility for our political system (and stigmatizing civic apathy and political disengagement)
Critiquing media manipulation with informed and critical analysis, not emotional reactions or partisan dismissal
The belief in, and the endless pursuit of, objectivity as a cultural value and making credibility important again. As important as the claims or warrants themselves
Reprogramming social media algorithms to reward views for education and personal knowledge and to stop monetizing bait-clicking, rage-watching, & misleading headlines
Requiring all news outlets to bring back a both-sides doctrine and evaluate the quality of any and all news sources