Society will always get more of what it glamorizes and less of what it stigmatizes. The law of incentives remains undefeated.
Every society has a shame code – certain practices it publicly shames. You can tell a lot about the health of a society by looking at what it shames versus what it celebrates. Shame and stigma, like civil law, have a pedagogical function. They train the populace in what is acceptable and “normal” and what is not.
Think of what society used to stigmatize: divorce, fornication, single motherhood, laziness, taking welfare, mental illness, etc. As these stigmas have fallen, indeed, as society has begun to celebrate these behaviors, we have gotten more of them. We have normalized all kinds of wickedness and perversion. Now, pointing out the problems with these behaviors gets you stigmatized and shamed. We have performed a moral inversion. We call good evil and evil good. We glamorize what is shameful and shame what is good and true.
For example, society was healthier when an out-of-wedlock pregnancy led to a shotgun wedding rather than a fatherless child growing up in daycare and on welfare. We changed the incentive structure of society and now we have a massive fatherlessness problem. Mainstream media will write stories about how wonderful single motherhood is, while simultaneously writing stories about how miserable it is to be a wife and stay-at-home-mom. This is a sickness.
Take another example: there will always be some portion of the population that experiences some form of mental illness (for lack of a better term). But mental illness used to operate under a stigma. The mentally ill would often try to fight to overcome their issues and live noraml lives. They certainly didn’t advertise today their mental illness. Today we have glamorized mental illness. And so not surprisingly, we have a lot more of it. “You are your diagnosis” is a common view today. Bragging about one’s mental illness online is now common — but surely this is a mental illness in itself.
The attention economy of social media acts as a force multiplier. It is acts as steroids for the glamorize/stigmatize dynamic. Attention addicts will do anything for clicks, including revealing private details of their lives that should stay private. But attention addicts – really, attention whores – rarely think about how making their private lives public will impact others around them. What you post about your private life in public can haunt those closest to you, especially a spouse and children. A wife will sacrifice her marriage for clicks because it’s worth it to her to tell the world how her dumb husband always leaves the toilet seat up. She will disrespect her public in front of millions because she loves online attention more than she loves her husband.
I’d like to think many people who treat social media as their diary-gone-public will eventually regret putting the intimate details of their lives online, but unless the way the attention economy works right now changes dramatically, that’s not likely. Maybe the younger generation will figure it out and react in a healthier direction.
There something deeply dehumanizing about all of this. Many things in our lives and our relationships should not be made public. Period. People who use social media as a kind of public journal are making a huge mistake and undoubtedly have deep personal problems. Not all attention is good, and most online attention-seeking is a form of narcissism. None of us were designed to make the most intimate details of our lives openly available to the the entire world. Private things should generally stay private. We don’t need to know people’s sexual histories, the latest fight a couple has had, or even what you had for breakfast. Social media is a kind of public square. It’s a place for public discussion of public matters. Debate politics. Talk about culture. Engage in discussion over history or sports or movies. Argue theology. But keep the private details of your life where they belong — in private. Using social media to turn other people in voyeurs is a foolish misuse of the medium. It is emotional pornography.
The problem is that when people put their lives online to build a following, they are actually practicing self-exploitation. Because the algorithms reward the most extreme and perverse kinds of behavior, we get more of them. Social media addicts think they have captured an audience. In reality, their audience has captured them. They think they influence others – we even call them “social media influencers.” But actually social media influencers are really “social media influencees.” Social media has warped their sense of reality. They think they influence others, but it’s closer to the truth to say they are under the influence of those who see their content. Their followers are really their masters. Once you grow a following, you have to keep it, lest you become irrelevant and lose audience share. When an account is monetized, the pressure towards radicalization for the sake of keeping eyeballs on your posts grows exponentially. It takes real discipline to stay sane.
I remember when Twitter and Instagram were first growing in popularity, a friend remarked, “Social media is going to destroy civilization.” I think that was prescient – and perhaps understated. I am not a Luddite. While I held out for a long time, I obviously do not believe all social media is poisonous or I would not have eventually hopped on the X train. But proper social media use requires maturity and thoughtfulness. Think of this way: Everything you post online goes in your permanent record. Everything you post impacts those around you in real life. Everything you post is available for the entire world to see. Everything you post will take on a life of its own, as others comment on it and repurpose it however they want. If knew you could say anything to 10,000 people at once – or even a billion people at once – surely you’d put some thought into what you wanted to say (or show). Surely you’d craft your message carefully. But instead people are even more careless with a global social media audience than they would be at a kitchen table with three other people. It really makes no sense. Social media all too easily makes us dumb. It makes us fools. It makes us crazy.
Social media can have a good use. It can be engaged in wisely. But the temptation to the play the fool on social media is a reality.
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