You can scroll through a dozen news feeds and not learn a thing.
Social media claims to connect people through information but never sees anything built.
The internet is inert, remaining a place where even these words will fade and have no impact in time.
This isn’t nihilism about life but about our misguided methods of receiving life through a screen. Media theorists have long seen this problem of the digital age coming back when the television launched a new multi-media era:
For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of diminished social and political potency...
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
More headlines and breaking stories of more corruption and less goodness across industries, empires, and neighborhoods has only bred more distrust. And not simply distrust, but a disproportionate distrust to the truth. We no longer have a sense of what is true and who is really being represented by the screen. Media paints every character as an extreme— a saint or sinner, an angel or demon, an extremist or pariah. It creates a thin veneer of life that could so easily be poked to fall if only we took our noses out of our screens and lived again.
Information is additive and cumulative. It is not a bearer of sense, whereas a narration carries sense. The original meaning of ‘sense’ is direction. Today, we are perfectly informed, but we lack orientation…
The Crisis of Narration, Byung-Chul Han
Our direction in life is dictated by algorithms not internally coherent narratives of the good, true, and beautiful. Even when engaging “wholesome” content online—content that is not inflammatory, manipulative, or false— we are lulled into thinking the screen can offer personal growth in the form of wisdom, community, or artistic expression.
The trouble is that all we do online is push bits of data around. This is wonderful for the tecno-oligarchs and social platforms themselves who are perpetually fueled by our activity, but there’s not a world where this is a good thing for us.
This is a world where information overcomes all our senses and leaves us less human.
The elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity…
Technopoly, Neil Postman
