“We become what we behold.
We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”Marshall McLuhan
Earlier this year I listened to a wonderful podcast series entitled The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. It looked at the two times in Rowling’s career where she came under attack by the public.
The first was when Harry Potter first came out. The book was banned and attacked by Christians who believed she was encouraging devil worship. The second was when Rowling tweeted her thoughts about transgender issues in 2020 and was seen as not supporting their rights.
You might be thinking “oh boy, is Dave about to give his thoughts on J.K. Rowling and trans rights”? The answer is yes and no. I’m going to be using examples from this incendiary topic but I’m not interested in her opinions, or whether she was right or wrong for saying what she did. I’m interested in going a layer (or two) deeper. I want to go to a place that even the podcast, in it’s seven hours of content didn’t go. I want to talk about Marshall McLuhan.
History Under the Influence
Dan Carlin, the host of Hardcore History (my favorite podcast ever) published an episode in 2008 called “History Under the Influence”. It takes a look at the way that drugs and alcohol may have influenced history in ways we don’t fully appreciate. At the time it may not have been apparent, but we can look back now with a better understanding of mental health and addiction and see just how much the great figures of history may have been shaped by these substances.
As an example, Alexander the Great and Winston Churchill were notorious alcoholics and Sigmund Freud had a serious cocaine addiction. Countless other influential figures had a relationship with substances and/or serious mental health problems that should be considered context for the work and influence they had on society.
So what about social media addiction?
Here we are in 2024, and as almost all of us are aware, social media addiction is real and pervasive. I believe that in the not-so-distant future we will collectively look back at this time (starting around the early 2010s when social media apps on phones became ubiquitous) and see how the behavior of many of our thought leaders and change-makers were influenced by an addiction to social media. To illustrate this point, let’s go back to our friend J.K. Rowling.
One of the things I came to understand after listening to the podcast about J.K. Rowling (which featured her recounting her story in great detail) was that she didn’t care much for social media until fairly recently in her professional life. While she had a twitter account for a while (since 2009) she didn’t use it much. She wrote in her first couple tweets, “I should flag up now that although I could twitter endlessly, I’m afraid you won’t be hearing from me very often as pen and paper is my priority at the moment.”
Then, she got hooked on twitter. She twittered hard, and seemingly out of nowhere, wrote these two tweets on June 7th, 2020.
Now… regardless of what you think about trans rights and these issues, you have to admit that her tweets are both overly reductive, passive aggressive and lacking a massive amount of empathy for the real pain and suffering that trans people have to deal with on a daily basis. These were her opening statements! That’s a terrible way to begin a conversation.
I don’t say that to take sides on this issue. In fact, I think J.K. Rowling and others like her make important points that should be listened to. It’s how she communicated it that’s important, because she wasn’t sober. She was in an altered-state, and the worst part is she didn’t even realize it.
High on Twitter
What does being high on twitter look like? This is where Marshall McLuhan is so important. McLuhan was a mid-century media scholar who became famous for helping point out the influence television was having on our collective consciousness. He attempted to have us understand that the influence media was having on us was less related to the content, and more related to the medium.
Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
McLuhan was trying to have us see that, as Wittgenstein suggested about writing, that these platforms aren’t just the vehicle of our thoughts, they are also the driver. In the case of Twitter, Rowling wasn’t just using Twitter, it was also using her.
Twitter is a platform that reduces all ideas, complicated or not, to “tweet-sized” posts (used to be 140 characters before the limit was removed). Thanks to this structure and the fact that Twitter’s algorithm is directed to maximize user engagement, the platform rewards inflammatory messages with attention.
J.K. Rowling wasn’t just on Twitter, she had become Twitter. If we look at the metrics of Twitter, her tweet was a smash hit. It generated massive outrage, which brought attention and significance to the platform. If Twitter was a person, it’s exactly what they would have wanted.
In contrast, look at this mild-mannered, well thought-out blog post she wrote just three days later. Her first sentence is, “This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.” That sounds like someone who has sobered up. It’s worth considering what the situation would have looked like if instead of two inconsiderate tweets, she published this blog post first. Maybe she (and we) could have avoided a lot of unnecessary drama.
This is exactly why you are reading this on my blog. I’ve made the mistake of being sucked in by social media (mostly Facebook) and I witnessed first-hand how it made my arguments dumber, because it incentivized me to reduce issues down to black and white statements, which would reward me with lots of comments and attention.
The Lockdown Blues
When we look at Rowling’s tweets, not only is her twitter addiction apparent, but take a look at the date. June 7th, 2020 was right in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown, just around the time when people were definitely “over” being stuck inside and not seeing their friends.
What were most people doing while stuck inside? They were addicted to their screens filtering their lives through social media. The collective mental health of the folks stuck inside during the lockdown was severely impacted, so it’s no surprise we saw an uptick in social media outrage, depression and mental health problems a mile long.
I’m not saying this to blame J.K. Rowling or to exonerate her, I’m saying this because this is a dynamic we all experience, in one form or another. If we blame anyone it’s the social media companies who are choosing this reality over one where our collective mental health is better and their stock price is worse.
Avoiding the impact of social media is impossible, because even if you don’t use it, it’s influence on everything around us (the news, politics, our families, our friends) is still there. I’ve done a few things in my life that have helped, so I’ll recommend them here as a conclusion to this essay.
1. I eliminated my news feed. Some of you have already read the piece I wrote, but if you haven’t, I truly believe is the most useful writing I’ve ever put on the internet. I took the actions suggested in this essay 7 years ago and I’ve never looked back.
Read: A Practical Guide to Taking Back Your Power from Social Media (Without Deleting It)
2. I produce long-form content whenever possible. Thanks to the existence of this blog and my desire to write on it, I’m incentivized to write long-form essays, versus short polarizing posts on Facebook. This is especially true when the topic is controversial or potentially incendiary. I know there are many times when I could get more attention by reducing my thoughts down to a few hundred words and posting it on Facebook with a click-bait picture, but that makes me dumber, and I’ve chosen to play a long game.
3. I rely on email lists vs social media. After writing these essays, they usually get shared on social media. I began to realize that even though I was writing for my blog, I was actually writing for Facebook. A big shift was when I started writing for the readers on my email list instead. For the most part, the people who have signed up to get the emails when I post new essays will open my emails at a consistent rate. That helps me focus on the quality of the relationship with readers, versus the quantity.
J.K. Rowling may be an extreme example of what happens when we let social media get the best of us, but we all do this. When I think about some of the insensitive things I’ve posted on social media over the years, it makes J.K. Rowing look like a saint. I imagine some of you can relate.
There may come a time when we look back on this time in history and realize we were all high on social media, and making poor choices because we didn’t realize how influenced we were by these platforms. We may not be able to totally disconnect from the influence of social media, but we can make better decisions if we are able to understand and accept when we aren’t sober.
