Playing with Fire… in a Dynamite factory

An interesting statistic crossed my sight the other day. It turns out roughly half of all Americans are Facebook users. I have never heard of any other single media source to  achieve such a massive following. The “Googleplex” no doubt exceeds it on total throughput, but the googleplex is a thing of distributed and dispersed functions, no single point accessed through the googleplex really rivals the social media giant. The sum of its’ competitors might rival it from time to time on some specific event, but on a consistent day to day basis the mechanisms of Facebook are without peer and without precedent in terms of a single point of social influence.

In the realms of social psychology Facebook is on uncharted terrain, and the facts of modern history show the terrain it is on is exceedingly unstable, volatile, in point of fact potentially quite explosive. Many, many things are now seen that have never been seen before, many things that had been seen as minor things, perhaps of legitimate concern within their scope but still minor in comparison to the full society, have been exaggerated to seem of such importance as to over shadow what is in fact critical to survival.

Call it fifteen years since the onset of the social media phenomenon, make it four generations of “social media” evolution to arrive at the modern Facebook and company. Across that same fifteen year run it cannot be denied that society has crystallized, polarized, and is at this point hanging over the edge of violent civil war, a war that does not even really have an ideology associated. On second thoughts? No, war is not the correct word. With no clear ideology associated what is seen in today’s news can’t really even be called a war, it’s much closer to a society on the edge of committing suicide.

I do not believe that these two facts are a coincidence of history, I hold that these two facts are linked, that the rise of the former is the cause of the latter. The mechanisms of the influence are hardly defined, of course they are not defined. Even the most casual glance across history indicates the Social Media are a brand new phenomenon. There has never been a single point driver to compare to Facebook and company, there has been no time for the society to actually understand the full consequences of how its’ own psychology will fare in such an environment of massively interconnected emotional transfer.

The facts of modern history make it a very, very open question: Can society remain sane in the face of the exponentially expanded environment of the social media machines? Will society remain sane, and survive as human, or will it collapse into history leaving behind only biological manifestations of the machine intelligence which destroyed it? After six months of observing the operation of Facebook that is the question I find myself facing. What is the nature of the dynamic Facebook has introduced into the human condition, and is it possible for humanity to survive with any fidelity of self in the mutated emotional environment those mechanisms have created?

As always, more to come if I don’t get shot first for daring to challenge Agent Smith.