Why Are We So Annoyed
Headlines this week: congressional probe sought on a COVID-19 research agency. A certain political tandem was announced. With all these fantastically outrageous news and the public outcry they regularly produce, Carrie Bradshaw couldn’t help but wonder: were we this annoyed pre-social media?
I read somewhere just this week that posts and articles which have headlines and/or content that rile up readers generate good income. Logically, social media companies make good money from politically-annoyed people. More posts, more user engagement, more eyeballs, more clicks. Logically, if it makes money, there’s an incentive to encourage these kinds of content and to foster irascible characteristics in social media users. Perhaps it’s not too unreasonable to speculate that the more reactive, knee-jerk, denouncing posts you make on social media, the more you feed money into the machine, the more you do your part to keep it going. In other words, the angrier you are, the happier they are. We’re not discounting the fact that awareness on social issues is important too. But that mechanism is a fact.
The workings of social media has always seemed insidious to me, which makes me naturally wary about using it. For one, they are curiously addictive to use. It’s hard to stop scrolling. Second, the sponsored ads and videos displayed are eerily derived from your last Google searches and page clicks. They detect that you let a wild animal-rescue video keep playing on once you saw it on your feed, so they showed you more and more such videos that are too catchy or cute to ignore. Obviously, they know what will get your attention, they know how to make you react a certain way. They know what gets you. No wonder that someone already came up with the bright idea to try to influence social media users en masse to drive home a certain political outcome. Cambridge Analytica and “social media consultants” behind troll farms have already done it with spectacular results.
Our personal data, and perhaps it’s not too much to say our humanity, is the commodity on social media. We know all this, we feel almost violated with this information, but we can’t stop using Facebook. How can we when to do so would also mean extracting ourselves out of an important Filipino ecosystem. That’s the platform where our friends and local communities make important announcements; a lot of local governments even issue their ordinances online exclusively on Facebook! Not even in their own websites.
To conclude, I’ll share an important mindset I learned this pandemic from the podcast The High Low (now defunct): Use social media purposefully. Don’t make it a routine or a crutch. Use it when you need to get or give out specific information. Use it to your advantage, according to your purposes. Don’t let it use you.
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