If ever there was something that could be described as a double-edged sword, it is the phenomenon called social media. Nothing beats it in terms of its ambivalence. It reminds me of the the Greek word "pharmakon." Famously deployed by the French Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida in his deconstruction of Plato's Phaedrus, the word can mean both a remedy and a poison.
In quasi-religious terms, I would say that social networking is both a benediction and a malediction, a blessing and a curse.
On social media you can connect with long-lost friends, find inspiration for the day's hustle, and even earn an honest living. The benefits are legion, as any decent user of such platforms will readily admit.
But so are the banes. Prostitution, of the most pellucid and pernicious variety, has made its home on Facebook. It is often accompanied by its first cousin, pornography, barely disguised but no less damaging. On Tiktok and Instagram, you will find all manner of kitsch videos, many of them distinguished by nothing other than their utter lack of any redeeming value or practical usefulness. Perhaps that last sentence is an exaggeration, because a great majority of such videos are valued simply because of their valuelessness. The more banal they are, the more clicks they generate and the more money their producers make. When Neil Postman wrote in 1985 that we were "amusing ourselves to death," he could not have imagined what was to come.
If the debauchery of social media is bad, then its philistinism is even worse. On social media you will hear people pontificate on things they know nothing about, much like kids in kindergarten discussing ancient history or traders in market place about issues they have little or no knowledge of advising Donald Trump. They assume expertise on everything under the sun, exercising polymorphic opinion leadership over a wide range of topics ranging from marital infidelity to marine engineering. The more inane the opinion, the more fulsomely it is trumpeted on social media. Cognitive vacuousness has become the leading virtue of the 21st century.
In spite of all these, what irks me most about social media is the dissembling, the fakery. Vandals re-emerge as victims, scoundrels morph into saints and the pitiless suddenly transform into penitents. In a desperate attempt at historical revisionism, they organise made-for-media events to deodorise their depravity, hoping thereby to photoshop the images painfully etched into our collective memory by their acts of perfidy.
Worse still, because of the ubiquity of smartphones and the near-indispensability of social media, you can hardly avoid being exposed to these things. Years ago, whenever I uttered some infantile baloney, my mother would say "if only the ears had lids." Nowadays, anyone who values his or her sanity must practise selective exposure and selective negligence. We must choose what we expose ourselves to on social media. As John C. Maxwell said, "life is a matter of choices, and every choice you make makes you."
