Dead Sea Scrolling

You never learn anything while you’re talking. Not everyone gets to grow up to be an astronaut; perhaps the same goes for “content creation”.

I decided to name my Substack writing space (as I call it) ”Gunnar’s Ruminations” because it sounded sort of different, and because rumination is literally “to chew over again”, in the sense of thinking deeply about things.  Some might call it a newsletter, my kids call it a blog, and I originally started it out on Facebook with the same name as a spot to park interesting articles I’d read with a bit of public commentary so as not to bore friends on my private Facebook account.  But “rumination” has a more sinister meaning in psychology: “The focused attention on the symptoms of one's mental distress, and on its possible causes and consequences, as opposed to its solutions.” 

A slightly more positive twist on this meaning is part of cognitive behavioral therapy; also from the aforementioned:

“Although rumination is generally unhealthy and associated with depression, thinking and talking about one's feelings can be beneficial under the right conditions. According to Pennebaker, healthy self-disclosure can reduce distress and rumination when it leads to greater insight and understanding about the source of one's problems.[43] Thus, when people share their feelings with others in the context of supportive relationships, they are likely to experience growth. In contrast, when people repetitively ruminate and dwell on the same problem without making progress, they are likely to experience depression. Co-rumination is a process defined as "excessively discussing personal problems within a dyadic relationship",[44] a construct that is relatively understudied in both its negative and positive trade-offs.”

Well, there’s something I’ve been ruminating over in the more negative sense of the word:  I’m starting to despair about how omnipresent modern online interaction is eroding our collective listening, learning, and critical thinking skills.  And not because it’s making us dumber; I think it’s normalizing not being heard nor heeded, which is having a corrosive effect on our self esteem, which then in turn results in a lack of empathy and snarkiness driven by the frustration of not receiving the expected number of sufficient endorphin hits via acknowledgement and/or replies ... and the way to increase the chances of that is to become increasingly gratuitous and downright mean.  And what makes it worse for everyone is that people think they're witty/funny, but they're not.  I call it the Dunning-Krueger of online comments; one has to only spend 10 minutes on Reddit to witness a whole sad ecosystem that’s developed around that.

Since I first read Cory Doctorow’s “Enshittification” theory on the inevitable ignominious end of online platforms, I’ve been jotting down some observations on the topic.  Last night I read a piece by Scott Galloway on listening, and something really jumped out at me:

“Add this to the list of ways social media is ruining society: It’s skewing our perception of the relative value of listening vs. speaking. Social media is a contact sport in which “takes” are the game ball. It’s taught us (incorrectly) that all our opinions matter. Worse, that everyone needs to hear and comment on them. (Pro tip: Words are wind.) Do I really need to express my outrage, and do you really need to hear it?”

“Listening is a gift. When people are in pain, in doubt, or struggling in any way, they may legitimately need to express themselves. For every celebrity village idiot who feels the need to express their ill-formed opinions on social media, thousands of people with an actual stake in events use platforms as an outlet for grief and rage. (But then the platforms feast off this pain and convert it into fodder for someone’s else’s take. And the wheel spins.)  The urge to express oneself when facing a dilemma or in pain is real. I communicate for a living, so I have to resist the need to take the floor and begin speaking in every situation. Something that helps is that, as I age, I’m becoming more introverted, which (oddly) has strengthened my relationships. Today I’m more prone to listen than to perform.”

I’m a talky person, but about 25 years ago I began to modulate that when I heard the phrase “you never learn anything while you’re talking”.  Another one was “make it a dialog, not a monologue”.

This morning I read an Atlantic piece by Ian Bogost on the corrosive effects of social media:

“A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.”

“Content-sharing sites also acted as de facto social networks, allowing people to see material posted mostly by people they knew or knew of, rather than from across the entire world. Flickr, the photo-sharing site, was one; YouTube—once seen as Flickr for video—was another. Blogs (and bloglike services, such as Tumblr) raced alongside them, hosting “musings” seen by few and engaged by fewer. In 2008, the Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink published a book about blogs and social networks whose title summarized their average reach: Zero Comments.”

“You still have to connect with other users to use some of these services’ features. But connection as a primary purpose has declined. Think of the change like this: In the social-networking era, the connections were essential, driving both content creation and consumption. But the social-media era seeks the thinnest, most soluble connections possible, just enough to allow the content to flow.  Social networks’ evolution into social media brought both opportunity and calamity. Facebook and all the rest enjoyed a massive rise in engagement and the associated data-driven advertising profits that the attention-driven content economy created. The same phenomenon also created the influencer economy, in which individual social-media users became valuable as channels for distributing marketing messages or product sponsorships by means of their posts’ real or imagined reach. Ordinary folk could now make some money or even a lucrative living “creating content” online. The platforms sold them on that promise, creating official programs and mechanisms to facilitate it. In turn, “influencer” became an aspirational role, especially for young people for whom Instagram fame seemed more achievable than traditional celebrity—or perhaps employment of any kind.”

“[P]eople just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either. From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality. That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.”

The thing that struck me was that everything’s starting to feel like multi-level marketing ... or lotteries.  Are we all starting blogs hoping that people pay us $5 a month, so that we can subscribe to everyone else’s $5 blogs to have enough inputs to keep generating periodic content?  I once read someone describe SubStack as “produc[ing] theoretically monetizable content but the real money is in developing a slightly weird para-social relationship with your readers, such that they will look after you through other channels, hire you for jobs, pay you consulting fees and so on”.

Comedian Louis C.K. observed that it takes some real talent to write for a newspaper (which also employs skilled editors) and fit a lot of information into a limited space, but now that space is perceived as infinite.  80% of all email is spam. Some have predicted a dystopia where most of the internet becomes AI chatbots talking to each other and regurgitating text until it all becomes grey goo. Think of the old days of newspapers.  You’d read it for years on the trot, and then feel compelled to write a letter to the editor.  If they printed it, it was a big deal.  Now, all commentary has the ethereal lifespan of a mayfly hatch on a trout stream. 

Who are you addressing when you write a type a comment on newspaper piece shared on social media?  The author?  The paper? Other readers?  Yourself? But there’s already a comment section on the newspaper’s website, and each time the newspaper re-posts the article to social media, there’s yet another brand new comment section that no one will read.  Everything gets remorselessly pushed down the stack to languish on some hard drive in a data center that uses more electricity than the town in which you grew up.  There’s no one on the other side from whom can realistically expect any sort of thoughtful reply in a timely fashion.  And there’s no real engagement:  Report a clearly fake spammy profile on Facebook?  Crickets chirping.  Call someone out for outright falsehoods or fake information?  Nothing.  Point out a grammar mistake or misspelling?  Zilch.  Being utterly ignored every day isn’t a great feeling.  It’s captured well in the play “Death of a Salesman” when Linda Loman despairs regarding her sad sack husband Willy:

 “I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”

Well, no one’s paying attention.  We’re relentlessly asked to write Amazon.com product reviews that never get read, feedback on whether or not we’re “enjoying” an app, TripAdvisor and Google Maps hagiographies on the outside chance the proprietors of the establishment comp you a room or a meal someday, and ÜberCab or AirBnB ratings that can only be 5-star or the driver or owner will badger you that you’re destroying their livelihoods. 

Just a thought:  What if it actually cost something (other then your monetized attention) to post anything online?  What if you had to cough up some dough to make an online comment, or post a YouTube video?  Would we pay it? Probably not.

Back to the multi-level marketing/lottery comparison.  Aspiring musicians and stand-comics have known this for years that their chances of success are miniscule; most of them keep on keeping on because they love what they do.  What’s the percentage of high school athletes who become college athletes?  And who turn professional?  You don’t even want to know.

I’ve truly enjoyed the internet for a long time, and I’ve truly enjoyed social media as part of that journey.  I use it as a highly useful personal diary (thanks for all the free storage, Mark Zuckerberg), and it’s a great source of serendipitous discovery.  Follow the Facebook page of a restaurant where you had a really great dinner, and you get to re-live the experience over and over.  I truly have rekindled old friendships, and have made many new ones. 

I’ve had a long-standing thesis that 1996 was the year the world changed, with a corollary that social media “jumped the shark” during what I call “The Great Diaspora” around five years into the rise of Facebook (and perhaps Twitter); that’s when people began peeling off to other platforms, including Facebook properties InstaGram and WhatsApp, but expanding to TikTok, Twitch, even LinkedIn, etc.  The initial buzz of having what felt like literally everyone in the world you knew, and potentially millions who didn’t (yet), hanging on your every word went flat but quick.  Now it’s largely become a balkanized wasteland where one can sadly watch their sweet old dowager great-aunt turn into a blood-and-soil fascist.

So where does this all go?  Perhaps we need to recapture some of the magic of small groups, rather than forlornly casting lines into the ocean every day with the subconscious hope that we hit the proverbial internet lottery and “go viral”.  Not everyone gets to grow up to be an astronaut; perhaps the same goes for “content creation”. 

I suppose I have to ruminate on this a bit more 😉

Addendum: Q.e.d., I’m very interested in Land Rovers, and there’s a delightful German couple close to where I live who run a YouTube channel on their amazing work; they do it in English, their second language, to increase their global appeal. It’s super-informative, funny, and one of the few things for which I’ve signed up for an active €8 per month Patreon subscription to help support content I really enjoy and find useful. I recently pointed out in a comment on their latest video that I was pleased to see that they were reaching 50,000 (!) subscribers: “You're just shy of 50,000 subscribers, more than 2x when I first started following and supporting you . See ... slow but sure always wins the race.” Their reply was “Unfortunately, subscribers are not what matters in the end. It's the views each video gets which makes them worthwhile in the making. And we are not getting those. We spend up to 15 - 20 hours per video each week. We only continue because of you [Patreon] patrons, so thanks so much for being a patron.” Wait, what? I was happy to recently see my lousy little YouTube channel picking up 200 subscribers. I would’ve thought 50,000 would vault a channel into the realm of Abroad in Japan, Rick Beato, Techmoan, Mark Felton, or even more niche stuff such as PetrolPed , Ed’s Auto Reviews, and hometown favorite Regular Car Reviews. But they’re miserable, and starting to second-guess whether it’s all worth the effort … and say it’s really all about their core of truly engaged patrons. How many others feel like this?