Social Media and Your Brain: Web-Based Communication Is Changing How We Think and Express Ourselves by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781440854545
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

Concluding Remarks: A Dream Left Unfulfilled

Here is a final question: if the emergence of a new dominant medium implies that something proper to the previous one will necessarily be lost, what is it we are likely to lose? And how fundamental and crucial will that loss be?

Much like the previous questions, for the most part we will have to wait and see. But this much seems certain: the Enlightenment dream, in which each individual will be able to abandon his tutelage and think for himself, thus forming a community of autonomous minds able to engage in careful, reasoned debate about any issue, no matter how thorny, is likely to become increasingly distant as we move to the new world of multitasking and distraction. For, arguably, the rise of immediate, massive, interactive media has coincided with the rise of an emotivism and intuition in the public sphere that tends to bury dispassionate reflection and reasoned debate under a mountain of gut feelings and intense reactions, all quickly expressed, replicated and made viral through Facebook and Twitter.

This, again, is sufficient ground for a Platonist worry, particularly considering that the most pressing problems of the contemporary world—like climate change and global economic inequality—tend to be very hard to understand, require much deep reflection, and not be easily communicated in 140 characters. Some kinds of content are better suited for microexpression via tweets and for comprehension by short attention spans, and they again often coincide with reactionary, emotional messages that people can understand intuitively. So, what we may ultimately be losing, if we lose the dream of the Enlightenment individual, is the very possibility of a functional, reflective democracy that is capable of discussing a topic without being distracted away from the topic by a tweetworthy, rhetorical sleight of hand.

One may think then that digital technology, being an “extension of man,” may help us better understand these problems and more effectively come up with reasoned consensus about them.20 But the problem is that technology, as far as social media are concerned, seems to be pulling in the other direction, favoring attentional breadth over attentional depth, brief spouts of impulse over careful and dispassionate reflection. Instead of building new scaffolds for our attentional control, new technology may be removing the previously set-up scaffolds. (This is, of course, partial. There are new Internet-based scaffolds; it just seems that the new diversions are more powerful, but this is a topic for another essay.)

So, will the cognitive extensions of technology lead us toward a renewed Enlightenment? Or will they push us away and into a social formation that is at the same time newer (in its massive synchronicity) and more archaic (in its focus on collective intuition rather than individual reflection)?

For now, the jury is still out. But I would not get my hopes up.

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