Social media has its uses, it lets people without a lot of corporate backing advertise underground local events, for example, and lets us maintain connections with those we like but don’t see too often. It is also an excellent tool for self-delusion.
Even if we think of ourselves as open-minded, it’s pretty likely that we mostly see opinions we sort of agree with. This is because of the pages we’ve liked on social media or the bias of the sites we regularly visit for news. If we do encounter significant differences of perspective, they might only be in a mocking or dismissive context, i.e., in an article about someone in the other party saying something stupid. The vast profusion of choices offered us by the internet, especially social media, lets us build online worlds that are mirrors of ourselves and mostly serve to constantly confirm our own opinions. They let us feel we’re reasonable people on the right side of history and those who feel differently are ignorant and insane, that they don’t have many good arguments, because we hardly ever encounter them. This might be one reason, other than overstimulation, that spending a lot of time on the internet dampens our ability to think critically.
The Internet feels like the center of reality now, and everything else seems less real than the internet. Facebook is, after all, where we feel we can officially recognize the beginnings or endings of friendships and romantic relationships.
If our Facebook friends post statuses that we disapprove of, we can unfollow these people. If we really want to send them a message, block or unfriend them, too. Removing people you don’t like on social media makes your world a little more friendly and comfortable, and gives you a pleasant frisson of power. It also may make you feel like you’re making a righteous stand for justice by unfriending your acquaintance from middle school who is irritated and confused by the latest innovation in identity politics terminology, or your awkward Trump-voting aunt.
Bertrand Russell once said that “Egoism, at first, made men expect from others a paternal tenderness; but when they discovered, with indignation, that others had their own Ego, the disappointed desire for tenderness turned to hatred.” Americans in the 21st century tend to have unstable, threatened senses of themselves, and Facebook is so successful because it caters to this worried, hostile, side of ourselves that hasn’t quite aged and desires sentimentality, comfort, and uniformity over challenging difference.
For a long time, we’ve been handed specific stories about the world by our governments and media corporations. These stories, these vague story arcs for real wars, these comfortable empathetic blind spots for violent, poverty-stricken undeveloped foreign nations, these instincts to categorize and stereotype ourselves and others aren’t imposed on us as innocents by some evil secret society. They’re inherited from our culture by accident, and then, if they’re convenient, reinforced by those in positions of authority. Terms we use for the useless and negative elements of our culture, like "the patriarchy," aren't outside us somewhere, they are part of us, to keep, or acknowledge and steadily dismantle. It’s almost as if the powers-that-be are now showing this to our faces, and mocking us for it, by letting us build our false realities for them. Social media lets us protect our wet-cardboard egos by surrounding them with prisons of comfortable nonsense.
