(They’re not actually “great” in any specific way — it just made a better title.)

[Note: I’ve been doing a little poking around and cleaning up here at the blog, and I found this. I wrote it over four years ago and then apparently decided not to publish it for whatever reason. I’ve read it over and it seems okay, so I decided to publish it now. Fortunately, the articles I linked to are still online.]

 
1. Guilt and shame. This will come up later in this post.

 
2. Terror and horror. When I was in college, there was a class (perhaps Shakespeare, perhaps Drama, perhaps something else) where the professor explained that “terror” is something so bad that you want to run away, and “horror” is something so bad that you can’t make yourself look away. This will not come up later in this post, but it explains why there are “horror films” and not “terror films” — if you showed something on screen which made people run out of the theater en masse, that would not be good for business.

 
3. The Internet (which has existed for around fifty years), the Web (which has existed for around thirty years), and social media (which has existed for around twenty years, depending on how you define the term — Facebook was started in 2004).

I talked about a phenomenon in this blog post (item #2) — the article about how toxic social media can be, quoting from an article which ends with the obligatory “it’s terrible, but we have to be on the internet” sentence.

Then there was this article: “David Baddiel and his daughter on his social media addiction: ‘it can reward and punish you’” I saved the URL, but I didn’t write a blog post about it at the time.

Then, very recently, I read this article: “The Shaming-Industrial Complex“

Interesting article, but of course it ends with the obligatory:

But logging off—and returning to the sphere in which people are apt to forgive one another for venial affronts—is no longer an option. Reality is less real than the Internet, where jobs are lost and lives are ruined in just a few clicks. There is no “off” left.

Before I get to why this is wrong, I want to go into something else which this article clarified for me.

One distinction I learned in college (in addition to the difference between “terror” and “horror”) is that “guilt” is feeling bad about something you did, and “shame” is feeling bad about something you are. Online “shaming” is taking something you did or said and making it into what you are so as to attack you more thoroughly.

The “social media is bad but we can’t quit it” argument is based on conflating the Internet, the Web, and social media. It is probably true for most people that the Web (and therefore the Internet) is pretty necessary for a lot of life these days. But what does that have to do with social media? It’s actually easy not to be on any of those sites — you just get off (or don’t get on in the first place).

The Guardian article I linked to above uses the word “addiction” in the headline, but then it mostly ignores the question of addiction. (I wonder if the headline was added by an editor.)

For example:

At the end of the documentary, Baddiel comes off Twitter for a few weeks and, almost immediately, he finds that he is sleeping better, feels happier and has improved concentration. Yet, despite all these benefits, he returns to the site. “Partly because of my job of being a performer, and also because I’m frightened of being excluded from the conversation,” he says, and I suspect it’s at least 75% the latter and 25% the former.

The math there is obviously faulty, because it leaves 0% for addiction, which is ostensibly what the article is about (and it’s certainly what the symptoms seem to suggest).

Also: “Yet, if social media had no good sides, it wouldn’t attract billions of users.”

Um, no.

I believe that at a certain point more than half of the adults in the U.S. smoked cigarettes. Was that because of the “good sides”? Well, at least in a lot of cases it was because of addiction. Determining whether something is good for people based on how many people are doing it is — to put it mildly — unscientific. Contrary to the song lyrics, fifty million French men can be wrong. Doesn’t mean they are wrong — just that the numbers are, in this case, irrelevant.

(Also, I’ve read in a few places that people in the news business tend to overestimate the importance of Twitter because news people are all on Twitter. I believe Facebook and Instagram are far more popular with the rest of the population.)

I’m not advocating for or against social media, I’m advocating for looking at it clearly, including that what is addictive for one person may not be for someone else. There’s a tendency in casual conversation to label anyone who drinks a lot (whatever “a lot” might be) as an alcoholic, but alcoholism is something very specific, and some alcoholics don’t drink at all.