The Empty Chamber of Online Intimacy

I grew up with an experience of social media that I can only describe as stand-off-ish. These were the halcyon days of Myspace, before Mark Zuckerberg suckerberged billions of people into joining his drone network.

Myspace was gloriously stupid: with the lovely 90s-remnant of personal themes (usually consisting of web graphics that would flash and glitter across each person's personal page). Say what you will: Myspace allowed for a lot of individuality.

And yet, I joined this service reluctantly, just as I joined Facebook reluctantly a few years later. All of my friends were crowding toward the excitement of these new platforms for community, but I came to the stage late, disgruntled by something that I could not (at least then) describe.

Human beings are communicative animals by nature. We live and breathe the art of speech and writing, the subtle nuances of body and scent and tone. A whole world might be made or broken on the artifacts of such interlocution.

Indeed, communication is a web of meaning, much too subtle to grasp at a conscious level. What's even more confounding is that simply being good at communicating doesn't make one good at understanding communication!

Nor is communication the art of persuasion and argumentation. As the renowned physicist and philosopher David Bohm once pointed out, “communication can lead to the creation of something new only if people are able freely to listen to each other, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other” (Bohm, 1996, p. 3).

Communication is, in fact, a web of complexity, a space for dynamic interrelationships that form and reform in the moments between the microseconds. To hold forth a dialogue is to hold open the doorway to another human being's soul.

Now, most of us do this unconsciously, and find it natural only with those to whom we are well acquainted. Yet at this instinctual level, there is much room for error and confusion. Those we think we know all too well may suddenly deviate from the path of our own understanding. Those we think are different may suddenly climb in through the window of our minds and lay out upon the well-worn furniture of our inner monologues – revealing, as it were, the sameness of their own secret wonderings.

Now, online forms of communication tend to offer the possibility for something profound: the ability to share, from the seeming safety of one's solitude, aspects of the innermost dialogue that runs throughout our lives.

Each of us, whether in words or some more nascent form, contain a stream of internal perception and perspective that inform our relationships to both self and surroundings. Through social media, we have become habituated to the sharing of that dialogue, that chatter.

Yet, we must question whether or not such sharing is, in fact, a matter of truly connecting with other human beings. Truly, such sharing can lead to bountiful connections; lifelong relationships can be built upon the principle of open exchange through the digital medium. This perhaps most frequently occurs through the mechanism of sharing our inner monologues and finding kindred monologues among the throng.

When I share my thoughts online, it allows others who think similarly to see themselves in me: to briefly correlate their own secret stream of consciousness with another person, and thereby find the joy of recognition and validation.

Just as easily, however, we might share our innermost beings and be confronted with those who do not share such perspectives. We might even find vast swaths of humanity who are hostile to our most natural views. What then?

A decade ago, with online communities just freshly ossified into the media conglomerates they are today, one researcher suggested that “the same people who are addicted to drugs and alcohol are also likely to become addicted to Internet activity” (Twenge, 2013, p. 17). They pointed out that those who are more likely to spend time engaging fully online (rather than in person) are those who lack a certain degree of impulse control, and who therefore trend more towards the habit of aggression. “The helpful, likeable, mentally stable people are still online, but perhaps not for as many hours.” (Twenge, 2013, p. 17).

Another, quite recent study, makes a similar point, that “Facebook users often shared misinformation out of habit, reacting automatically to the familiar platform cues in which headlines were presented in the standard manner” (Ceylan et al., 2023, p. 6).

Habit, as the study showed, was the main driver of uncritical online interaction – even beating out the demands of political affiliation (though naturally reinforced by one's worldview).

To be sure, as a pre-teen, I did not have the language to describe why I found it so distressing that all my friends were turning to social media. Their gradual distancing from me, and from the world around them, seemed at-odds with the people that I had known.

Yet, this pattern is one we see in addicts all the time: the shift in behavior that friends and family cannot, at first, understand. The alterations that begin so subtle and yet trend toward an inevitable outcome of loss and dismay.

The addict is the same, across all forms of drug, when reduced to the fundamentals: they have lost the ability to think for themselves; their will has become supplanted by an external force or mechanism, and they very rarely have the wherewithal to recognize and self-correct in time.

For those of us on the outside, their behavior can seem outlandish – impossible to correlate to reality.

If this seems to you to be a depressing outcome: I would agree. And yet, the outcome itself need not be certain. Social media, like many other experiences where addiction is possible, does not have to lead down that road of addiction.

There are those who enjoy the occasional taste of alcohol for its delight as an apéritif, and there are those who cannot become comfortable without a six-pack in their hand. So what makes the difference?

As was the case with big tobacco, disruption of the addiction norm is possible. It is possible for a society to build bulwarks to disrupt the bad actors who seek to profit off the unconscious habits of our fellow citizens.

Lest you think that there is some difference between tobacco and the titans of social media, however, let me leave you with this passage: “habitual users are integral to social media sites’ ad-based profit models... and thus these sites are unlikely to create reward structures that encourage thoughtful decisions that impede habits” (Ceylan et al., 2023, p. 6).

Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube, TikTok – all such platforms exist for one single purpose: to generate wealth for the wealthy; to profit off the “content” you create (which, of course, is the very content of your lives). The thrill one gets at seeing feedback from friends and strangers is the thrill of a habitual user who cannot control their own actions – one who is likely unable to introspect in the manner required to alter their fate.

And this, my friends, is entirely by design.

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I’m Odin Halvorson, a librarian 📚, independent scholar 📖, film fanatic 🎬, fiction author 📝, and tech enthusiast 💻. If you like my work and want to support me, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter for as little as $2.50 a month! 📣

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References

Bohm, D. (1996). On dialogue (L. Nichol, Ed.). Routledge.

Ceylan, G., Anderson, I. A., & Wood, W. (2023). Sharing of misinformation is habitual, not just lazy or biased. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(4), e2216614120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216614120

Twenge, J. M. (2013). Does Online Social Media Lead to Social Connection or Social Disconnection? Journal of College and Character, 14(1), 11–20. https://doi.org/10.1515/jcc-2013-0003