![]() Electric speed mixes the cultures of history with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the postliterate. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan was writing this: “Our Western values, built on the written word, have already been considerably affected by the electric media of telephone, radio, and tv…. However misplaced, the hoopla over social media’s malign influence is hardly surprising, because every advance in modern communications technology has been greeted with a comparable storm of negative publicity and apocalyptic predictions. And so, looking backwards from our vantage point today, society seems to have broken sharply downward out of nowhere-just like Rivera’s cutter. In their book The Upswing, Robert Putnam and Shailyn Romney Garrett document the steady deterioration in public life from the 1960s on: “Between the mid-1960s and today-by scores of hard measures along multiple dimensions-we have been experiencing declining economic equality, the deterioration of compromise in the public square, a fraying social fabric, and a descent into cultural narcissism.” As the trends continued, their effects gradually cumulated and became ever more pronounced and obvious. ![]() Its recent sharp downward turn has been caused not by a new force that only recently appeared, but by the accumulating impact of decades of constant decline. Something similar has been happening with American politics. The break accumulated constantly but not linearly its effects were much more obvious later than earlier, for both physical and optical reasons. Only by the last stretch of the pitch, when the ball had moved a few inches off true, did batters notice it wasn’t going straight-by which point it was too late to adjust their reflexes and hit it. So why did batters think it fell off a cliff at the end? Because at first, the ball’s divergence from a straight-line path was so minimal it was almost invisible. The physical forces acting on the ball, however-gravity and spin-were constant, and a graphic trace of Rivera’s pitch’s trajectory shows that it curved continuously from the moment it left his hand. A big reason was his cut fastball, which came at batters in the mid-90s and seemed to break sharply just before it got to the plate, making it very hard to hit. Mariano Rivera was one of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball-the first player ever to be elected unanimously to the Hall of Fame, the moment he was eligible. So, we attribute current circumstances to current causes, even when that may not be logical if looked at over a longer time frame.Īnother factor complementing recency bias is the progressive impact of a constant force. Social media have so dominated life in recent years that it is hard to think of the before times and what life was like then-especially for young people who grew up knowing nothing else. We remember things that just happened and forget things in the distant past. One reason is something cognitive psychologists call recency bias-a built-in mental tendency to exaggerate the significance of recent events and experiences while slighting the significance of those further back in time. Just as eyewitness testimony seems credible but is often inaccurate, so the conclusions drawn from lived experience can be deceiving. It just means we must grapple with the even more troubling reality that the fault lies not in our algorithms but ourselves. ![]() None of this suggests that we are not in a sinkhole, or that social media makes people better. And the claims made for the massive and unprecedented impact of social media-Haidt’s piece is titled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid-have been made about every new mode of communications technology since the spread of television in the 1950s. Important social and political indicators have been trending downward for several decades, starting long before Mark Zuckerberg was born. And when looked at in historical and comparative perspective, the link between rising social media and declining democracy seems accidental. The connection between the rise of social media and the decline of American politics and society seems obvious because we have been watching both trends play out in synch for a decade.īut what if what everybody knows is wrong? What if the recent correlation we have all witnessed is spurious, and social media turns out not to be the driver of our discontents? The contemporaneous evidence Haidt drew on is more ambiguous than initially presented. ![]()
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