It’s a bizarre time to be alive – and online – in the world. Rishi exiting Downing Street with his love of sandwiches (you would think that a man with £651 million in the bank might enjoy a slightly more exciting culinary life). War in Europe and the Middle East. Football not quite coming home to our neighbours. The most expensive wedding in history shutting down much of flooded Mumbai, while Kim Kardashian posed for photos in a sari. An assassination attempt on a US presidential candidate, and the disastrous debate that preceded it. The endless talk of talking heads. The Republican National Convention. Joe Biden isolating with Covid at the age of 81, then quitting the White House race. People panicking, theorising and condemning on social media in every imaginable direction.
The whole thing can feel a bit much to handle in tandem with conducting a healthy life. It’s like having fragile objects tossed to you from all sides when your hands are clearly already full. The discourse creates pressure. Pressure to form a view on topics that we may not really be all that informed on, and about which everyone else seems so suspiciously certain. Pressure to ignore the decent people immediately around us and fall into extreme narratives about those who may see the world differently. It can make us judgemental and afraid of one another.
It is not a coincidence that most of us tend to believe what the people around us believe. It’s how we function within family, community and the wider world – we accept reality as it is described to us, first by our parents first and later by other authority figures. If you were raised in Ireland, you will likely believe that it’s rude not to buy your round at the pub with friends, or not to make a bit of small talk when you meet an old acquaintance.
If you’re raised in China, you might believe that it’s rude to pass or receive an object – like a gift or giving money to a cashier – without using both hands. There’s nothing objective in these practices. They’ve become rude within their specific cultural context. We operate within and reproduce the norms of the society we live in. If most people you know are left-wing or right-wing, religious or secular, then you probably are too.
Social media has its own norms and culture, and we largely conform to these too despite the fact that online, we can in theory be exposed to an endless variety of ideas, perspectives and cultures. In her work on the banality of evil, the philosopher Hannah Arendt described how immersing uncritically in the norms of our society can, at the most extreme end, lead us to conflate good and evil actions so that we are actively harmful to others. She tells us that it is dangerous not to question the basis of our beliefs and behaviours.
This can also apply in less dire contexts than those described in Arendt’s 1963 report on Adolf Eichmann’s trial, in which she coined the phrase. It can apply when the stakes are lower. When we outsource our views and barometer for good ideas to those around us, we unthinkingly reproduce the status quo.
The discourse creates pressure. Pressure to form a view on topics that we may not really be all that informed on, and about which everyone else seems so suspiciously certain
Online, we appear to operate under a tacit – and sadly sometimes directly expressed – belief that a person doesn’t hold a view until they have expressed it publicly. That whatever you’re doing outside the confines of social media – donating to charities, volunteering your time, working to better understand a complex social, political or cultural situation, or choosing to do nothing at all – is irrelevant. We live our moral lives in the public square of social media, evaluating the morality of others primarily through the statements they make there.
At best, this obviously ignores what it is that people are actually doing in support of their professed beliefs. At worst, it can make us feel like saying something online – generally saying what everyone around us is saying, just when they are saying it – equates to doing something. In reality, it has no meaningful impact but to make us feel morally righteous and important without burdening us to think for ourselves.
Within the wider social media culture, silence is suspect. It is interpreted as complicity, complacency or culpability. When everyone around you is screaming for one interpretation, one view or one team, silence is often taken as quiet support for the opposition. It isn’t. Silence is just silence. Space in which to think and question, something we can’t do when we’re shouting. When the world is loud, silence can be subversive, and it can be a refuge.