The philosophy social media dilemma

After over 10 years of being on FaceBook, I quit the platform over increasing worries and concerns I had about transparency, privacy, and other issues. This was the culmination of a gradual withdrawal. First, a few years ago, I deleted the app from my phone. Soon thereafter, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, I deleted all its permissions to log in to other websites I use (Typepad did not make the switch easy). Then, I asked on Twitter what revelation, if anything would cause people to quit, and many people responded that nothing would make them quit. I thought the same, that I was stuck for good, and that thought worried me. A couple of days ago, in what I feel to be a moment of clarity, I deactivated and cut ties brusquely. 

It's early days now but I feel happy and liberated with the decision. I notice how my behavior had become too dependent on it, I still check it often without thinking, as I take a break from writing, even though checking it will now bring me to the login screen. These habits will take a long time to unlearn. I worry that other media I am still part of (such as Twitter) might soon take over and play the same role. I'll decide what to do when I get to that point. 

I thought it would be difficult to quit, as I have moved country several times and use the platform to keep in touch with friends (my extended family, fortunately, are social media shy and so I keep in touch with them through other means). But especially, I used the platform for professional engagement.

This started a few years ago, maybe around 2015 or so, when the philosophy blogs I contributed to started to dwindle (except when it concerned "issues in the profession"). Concurrently, informal philosophical engagement on Facebook increased. Soon, there seemed little point to blogging and I put blogging on the back burner. This brings me to the central point of this blogpost, to which I have no answer: the philosophy social media dilemma. What happens and what should a philosopher do if the academic community massively has moved on to making its informal engagements happen on one platform, specifically, Facebook? 

There are many philosophers on Facebook. This has a self-enforcing and amplifying effect. Often the value of being part of a platform is the mainly a function of the number of people in your network. Michael Chwe understood the power of such communal meeting places which he explores in the book Rational ritual (2001). Briefly, the book argues that rituals are rational because they solve coordination problems. Rituals take place in public places where we all see each other and can see what the other is doing. This creates knowledge and meta-knowledge, knowledge of what others will do. Meta-knowledge is important to solve coordination problems, particularly non-zero sum games where we can coordinate action and receive goods. A classic example is the stag hunt (invented by Rousseau), where you get a large payoff if you all cooperate, but no payoff (no stag) if you don't. If others don't coordinate with you, it is better to go hunt hares on your own. So you ideally need to know if others will want to play stag. According to Chwe, ritual spaces afford us with this crucial knowledge by bringing us together.

The value of ritual meeting spaces thus depends crucially on how many people (especially people you want to reach) there are. He regards the Super Bowl as a prime example: it is a big ritual for Americans. When Apple launched its Mackintosh computer there in 1984, it crucially relied on this meta-knowledge. Macs were not compatible with existing personal computers. But people present at the super Bowl knew that other people had also seen the ad, thus they were more likely to buy it as other people might also buy the product.  Similarly, engaging as a philosopher on Facebook is useful given there are already many other philosophers. 

 

The Apple super bowl ad. 

So being part of Facebook philosophers find community, fellowship with others, they signal cooperative intent. So far so good.  But is it also a good public forum for rational, ritualized engagements between philosophers? I am not so sure that it is. I think it is problematic that the platform has become so dominant for philosophers to engage with each others. It's good to have low-carb alternatives or complements to in-person meetings, but there are downsides to doing this on FaceBook: 

1. The platform's algorithm for post visibility is not transparent. We do not know which posts are seen and which ones aren't. I'm leaving now aside worries I have about election meddling and data selling, which were foremost in my mind when leaving the platform (see this post of mine, and also this post by Matthew Liao). It is kind of stunning that you put things out there, and you don't know who sees it. The platform controls who will see it. Why would we accept such an opaque way of doing things? Worse, we get "trained" to put content that people will react to. This is what Facebook calls posts that will elicit "meaningful interaction". This means, innocuously, not linking to Youtube videos or news sites, but less innocuously, putting posts out there we expect will make an impact. We hopefully would move away from a situation where you say things just to make an impact in the attention economy, but this is what is happening. As the number of philosophers on FaceBook grows, your posts will have to compete with many other posts. 
2. The ambiguity of saying things private/public. I tried to only write things I would be comfortable sharing in a public venue because I knew friends whose posts were screenshot and gleefully shared. Still, the faux intimacy of the platform creates an ambiguity of the private/public. You will sometimes put something there in a position of vulnerability, and that can be misinterpreted, abused, etc. People who are already in disadvantaged positions are more likely to suffer the negative effects of this. I know this is also a problem for Twitter, but Twitter feels more public. 
3. The ambiguity of signaling group membership and philosophical engagement. Given that Facebook serves as a ritual space, you would want to signal certain relevant parts of your identity, for example, what your position is in debates on transgender identity and rights. Such positions tell something about who you are as a person. I do not think there is anything wrong with this per se. I concur with Neil Levy that there is nothing morally suspect about signaling group membership in this way. We cheaply signal all the time that we are part of certain groups and subgroups. For example, religious believers sitting in a church are (relatively cheaply) signaling to other churchgoers they hold similar beliefs and probably values too. Sure, you could be a hypocrite, but what would be the point? Cheap signaling works well if you are already well aligned and not much can be gained by false signals. If you signal your position on certain moral issues, you are signaling where you stand without (I believe) thereby necessarily making claims about moral superiority. But the problem is that we engage as about these moral issues in a philosophical way to. Soon, the waters get muddied and the line between philosophy seminar room talk and real world talk that impacts people becomes hard to draw.
4. Facebook entrenches power relations and privilege relationships, with people who are more central nodes in the network (either because they are great at networking, or have prominent positions, or both) benefiting more from engagements than others. 
5. Facebook can lead to will-depletion. As James Williams argues social media is like a faulty GPS. It leads you away from your goals, toward its own goals. Our goals are connecting with other philosophers and learning from them. The goals of Facebook only align with those insofar as they can create a dependency of us on their platform. This requires habituating us in engaging with the platform frequently. When is it enough? Well, it's up to you. Problem is: it's hard to put boundaries on social media use, especially as it is socially acceptable to scroll down on one's phone. Williams argues "the self-regulatory cost of bringing your own boundaries is high enough, it takes away willpower that could have been spent on something else. This increase in self-regulatory burden may pose a unique challenge for those living in poverty, who, research suggests are more likely to begin from a place of willpower depletion relative to everyone else. This is largely due to the many decisions and trade-offs they must make on a day-to-day basis that those who don’t live in poverty don’t have to make." In other words, people who get most out of Facebook thanks to the power of their position in the network will also likely have fewer costs of the habituation patterns the platform instills in us, less will depletion. 

One might say that this is inevitable, that this is a digitally fallen world where dependency on large, untransparent and self-interested corporations has become inevitable anyway. Why fight Facebook, Amazon, why bother? Or one might say that on balance it is still good to stay because Facebook helps us realize many goods. On the whole, I do feel the loss, and everyone's calculation is different. Still, even if one might argue that the gains still outweigh the costs, it is still a pity that philosophy, for the time being, is stuck with such a suboptimal platform. I also believe that moving to another platform, perhaps more ethical, will not solve all these problems. 

Comments

[Zuckerberg’s the enemy]

I’ve never had an FB, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social media account. I find the companies pretty immoral and the sites themselves just full of people looking for attention. I really wish I didn’t believe some of the stories I have heard about philosophers on social media, and how they treat each other. It’s despicable.

But I recognize I am in the minority here, and I think it’s simply because I just don’t feel the desire for interaction with other philosophers online. I love talking philosophy with colleagues and students in person, but in my opinion at least the internet is a poor medium for the sorts of meaningful discussions I have with actual people. Beyond social media, I have noticed that the less time I spend on the internet, the happier and more peaceful I feel (irony of making that statement on the internet recognized).

[Filippo Contesi]

DISCLAIMER: I left Facebook a lustrum ago or so, but I use Twitter.

Apologies for the hastily written comment.

In my possibly overly naïve, socio-philosophical view, philosophy networking these days is largely a bad practice, for both moral and collective-academic reasons.

However, I am not sure one or another platform is the main culprit. The way one uses platforms is more important.

For one thing, Twitter (and no doubt other platforms (including blogs) and customs, not only social-media ones) share many of the same negative aspects (to differing degrees): i.e. possibly all of 1 to 5 and, I suspect, plenty more besides.

It should also be considered that moral and collective-academic reasons are not the only ones there are. There are also individual-academic reasons, e.g. securing an academic job, which many of us will keep in mind.

[Martin Cooke]

I used to like the Philosophers' Carnival, and did not like it when it moved to FB. I was not surprised when it died there. This place is what the internet was supposed to be about. FB is what happens to good ideas. FB is to Stalinism what we are to social justice. I am glad that you are still here. This is a quiet place to share ideas in a classically academic way.

[former user]

I deactivated facebook over two years ago, and permanently deleted it a little over a year ago. There are things I miss: the community with friends who live in different cities, the stored memories, the opportunity to network (though I rarely used my feed for philosophical things, with the exception of teaching questions, I was reassured by the idea that I was known by famous people in my field), and access to the Philosophical Underclass group (a faster version of ILL).

But it was nonetheless worth it for me to quit. More than issues of privacy/political influence/etc, the primary reason I quit was the addictive element of facebook. People spend hours a day on it! And I would find myself typing 'f' into the URL space for no reason, at random times. Since I've left, my attention span has increased, I feel more resourceful, and my confidence has gone up. I just feel...cleaner, for lack of a better word.

[Jonathan Reid Surovell]

I also deactivated my Facebook account a couple years ago. (The only social media accounts I have now are LinkedIn and Academia.edu.) I really don't miss it. I've gotten very good stuff out of deactivating and what I've lost feels pretty insignificant in hindsight.

I think that a fair amount of time I put into FB now goes into more worthwhile things, like interacting with close friends (text, email, Messenger, face-to-face) and parenting-related stuff. You're right that it's not sufficient for significantly reducing technoference. But, if it's not necessary, it at least helps. Significantly reducing technoference in one's life will take work and a bit of research but it can be done. (I hope we, as a society, will also make progress in our understanding of technoference as a public health issue; as you point out, it risks disproportionately harming the poor and people with mental health problems.)

As for the what I've given up: the research shows that social networking sites increase people's ("bridging") social capital. Maybe that's the case with me. I have fewer people to, for example, ask about teaching techniques. But, as I think back on how I used that social capital, when I had it, I don't think it's very important. It could be that I just don't know how to exploit or cultivate social capital as well as others.

As for the people I haven't kept in touch with: why should I should stay in touch with them? Why think that the kind of connections Facebook enables is preferable to old-fashioned losing touch with people and being happy/surprised when you run into them somewhere? I think it's easy, in this particular social and technological context, to unreflectively come to value a certain kind of connectedness, including connectedness to The Philosophical Community. For me, that hasn't survived reflection. In fact, I suspect it's a harmful aspect of modern culture.

[Rob Hughes]

I deleted my Facebook profile about a year ago. From a professional point of view, this was an easy choice.

The productivity gains from eliminating a source of procrastination outweigh whatever networking benefits I might have gotten from staying on the platform. It wasn't even a good form of procrastination! My Facebook feed was often entertaining, but there were a lot of anxiety-inducing posts. I don't need that.