Harvesting Minds: The Reverse Gutenberg Process
Without social media many of you who enjoy the writing and analysis of OZFest, Cultural Courage and Severed Conscience would not be reading this article today. In fact many of those kind of enough to subscribe have come from the social media function Notes in Substack and from social media platforms likeTwitter. I do want to point out that I think Substack is more of a reading platform and not a social media platform, yet clearly there are shared characteristics between Notes on Substack and social media. We have many powerful mechanisms for conveying ideas and information, but as with many things, misuse and overuse leads to atrophy of other skills, muscles and even our thinking. Something is gained while something is lost.
Consolidation is our enemy.
Yes, consolidation is our enemy. There, I said the unthinkable, knowing what a contradiction this appears to be. Let me clarify before you turn away: centralized control of communication that is constrained and only allowed at the whims of the central agency providing that communication is our enemy. It is enslaving us, and social media is that drug that is aiding this process. And it reduces the sources of information that we are exposing ourselves to, as I am targeted with information that the algorithms determine I should see. And while the number of items that I am exposed to has increased dramatically, my capacity to make use of these sources is severely hampered due the distracting nature of constant rapid fire change by the volume shown to me.
More importantly, there is suppression in distribution of communication depending on the subject you pursue. The majority of Big Tech platforms have admitted that certain topics will be de-emphasized. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that Meta succumbed to censorship requests by the Biden Administration. The degree that social media platforms still do so today is very high. I liken it to ATT dropping my phone call before I can dial a friend to talk about healthcare.
There is a contraction in the distribution of our ideas. The Gutenberg Press revolutionized human thinking. Books were no longer in the sole possession of monasteries or of vassal lords and monarchs. Printing the Bible paved the way for Martin Luther’s 13 points as it put the Good Book in more hands, allowing for less reliance on a clergy for exegesis of scripture. The Gutenberg press fueled the Renaissance and led to the Reformation which in turn spawned the Enlightenment. A technology spread ideas and allowed self reflection and self education.
Today our ideas are chopped into smaller, less complete phrases as we engage in rapid challenge and response communication. It’s more direct and less thought out as we type furiously to communicate quickly. “Stream of Consciousness” is what we used to call it. We are getting really good at reacting with the shortcut of emojis, memes and funny videos. I am the guiltiest of all, I can’t stop my mind from reaching out and snagging a snarky meme based on the association I have formed. I admit I get a rush from it, so there is a bit of dopamine and adrenaline stimulation going on when I do that, and that creates a behavior. But are we communicating ideas coherently, and in our fury and excitement, are we covering new ground or stuck in a pattern?
Let me draw an analogy. Parents are succumbing to the pressures of culture and exposing their kids to excessive time in front of screens. It is, in great part, due to our daily activities as adults and the nature of businesses where we work or that we operate. We forget that there was a time when we were analog creatures. So in a sense, our generation is more likely to have mental triggers that ward off some of the effects of cogitated study while sitting for long periods. But we also had time practicing steps to counter all the ill effects.
In “A Cure for Child Anxiety Hiding (and Seeking) in Plain Sight Kevin Stinehart wrote
This was exactly what I was seeing in my students. Nearly every one of them had no unsupervised play. Instead, they went home to a screen of some kind, and the ones who didn’t went off to extracurricular activities like music lessons, or organized sports, always led by an adult (which, of course, has its benefits). And it wasn’t just the kids in my class. One national report found that “Children ages 10 to 16 now spend, on average, only 12.6 minutes per day in vigorous physical activity. Yet they spend an average of 10.4 waking hours each day relatively motionless.”
A Thought Experiment
But as adults are we venturing out from the comfortable zones where we get our information? Let’s perform a thought experiment. Without going back to your timeline in the social media platform(s) of your choosing, run through the steps you perform in your mind as you research headlines or seek out something interesting. I’ll describe what I see in my mind and you can judge if it matches your experience.
On Twitter I see perhaps a post from someone I follow but it’s usually a day or 12 hours old. Sometimes there is a link to an article with the headline in question, and depending on who is tweeting I may just add a comment in a quote tweet, because I am confident that I know the topic and it is a confirmation of a belief. Depending on the topic, I may read it or bookmark it for later. I bookmark if I need to come back and use the Tweet to do further research for a podcast or write an article. I do this for 30 seconds per tweet, if I don’t click the link and follow the link to the original site.
Next I see an ad, so I scroll. Then I see a video, then a quote tweet from someone I follow and I read their reaction first - it is at the top - then I look at the original tweet. Depending on my comprehension I may need to read the quote tweet again. This is about 10 - 15 seconds. I scroll and repeat, and sometimes remember to go to someone's timeline because the “For You Feed is old”, and I want to see the most recent items from people. But once there I am scrolling again, spot checking.
During that activity I just described, there is a plethora of jumble information shown to me. In most of this activity, the content is interspersed with video, images as well as people that I react to but haven’t asked for. Somehow I continue to receive these items I don’t want, and it is very rare that I see something that I branch out to and read directly. Many times what is displayed is just a snippet - one sentence with no link to any external resource article, it’s just someone declaring BREAKING NEWS.
The things that grab my attention are the notifications from those who tag me, specifically telling me to dig deeper. That takes longer because if someone sends something my way and it’s new, I take the time to read the underlying article. And those are the links that jump me off platform, away from Twitter. But many of those articles are from news sites that have other related items and breaking news listed down the sides of their respective page, so I wander through those links too. So once I return to my social media feed it’s like I went from the kitchen out onto the back porch for a while, then back into the kitchen. Slurping coffee and skimming, skimming, skimming.
All of those slices of attention, maybe 10-30 seconds apiece, require a lot of jumping around for the mind to perform. Yet most of that context switching is still on Twitter. And during this time I do see things that trigger anger in me with respect to eroding liberty and depiction of complete inertia on the part of our leaders. Or sometimes there is a video or meme that pokes fun at those who are presented experts and who the establishment claims should never be laughed at.
But for the most part, I am held in this loop. And it is a long duration of short time-slices of attention. Very short attention. Frustratingly, I can do this for an hour at times and not realize that I have spent the time noodling down every rabbit hole but never arriving at a longer train of thought. And even later that day I will return and do it again, despite having told myself “you’re done for the day”, yet the phone is nearby and somehow appears in my hand. It’s undirected time, but it is also unproductive for the mind and body.
It’s as though I am browsing in a bookstore, picking up a bunch of books but never opening the cover and only reading the first sentence of the summary on the back jacket, and quickly reaching for the next book because I am not satisfied.
I know I am extrapolating what may be a “me problem” to the level of societal ailment, but I notice this reduction in my concentration ability and wonder if this has affected others. How do I gauge it in myself? Well, being a software developer I used to spend huge amounts of time focusing on something that looks like this for hours on end. It meant shutting off distractions because you couldn’t lose your train of thought, otherwise you’d miss deadlines. And to answer your question, you go a little nuts staring at the spaghetti mess too.
Yet I am jumping all over the freaking place when I hit social media. And while I did a documentary on the effects of screen use, blue light and social media called Severed Conscience, I still get hugely distracted whenever I have to go on. For what I do these days I have to frequent the social media platforms.
How Do You Know You There Is A Barrier
I know due to the “platform manipulator” label that I received from Elawn’s (my parlance for Elon) minions that my ideas and responses are not widely distributed. How do I know? Twitter Support told me my responses could be removed from threads. And while distributing Substack content on Twitter, my tweets containing the link to the articles on Cultural Courage are de-boosted to 60 views. Elawn ordered the limiting of Substack urls after he announced the ability to post longer article style formats on Twitter. As of yesterday there were reports that preview images from Substack articles are now blocked too.
I am not complaining, I am stating a fact. Yes, my ability to type and tweet all day long is not affected and I do get to interact with my Tribe, but the ability for others to see my ideas is limited, and the invitations to come out of your kitchen onto my back porch for a longer, more intimate conversation are certainly curtailed.
It is what I call the Reverse Gutenberg Process. Many of the social media platforms are like a library with reading rooms where you are only allowed to take certain books with you, and some of those books are not what you have requested, but have been “suggested” to you. The irony is that with so much technology that makes publishing and connecting with people easier, there is a concerted effort to quell people’s curiosity by capturing people’s attention or by outright preventing them from being exposed to new elements that fall outside of the algorithms used to present items in social media timelines.
We are fans of Hillsdale College, they provide fantastic online history and literature courses that focus on the founding of our country, CS Lewis and the strength of Christianity and the achievements of Western society. They reported today that Facebook has now put a warning on their posts regarding their courses. For those determined to pass through the gatekeepers’ eyes this isn’t a deterrent. But you must consider that there is a merit system that tracks the appropriateness of material where you receive a score that garners this result, and this deters people from leaving the safe confines of social media and going to a university website.
Is this a sign of a society that freely distributes information, or is it a sign of something else. It is a harvest, and we are the crop if we let them continue.
