Put the phone down, idiot

Picture this: You’re doom scrolling away, happy as a pig in filth, thumb flicking down the screen when suddenly, wedged between a meme about House of The Dragon and a recipe for gluten-free funnel cakes, you see it. Someone is wrong on the internet. Not only are they wrong, but you know you’re right.

Struck with divine fury and righteousness, you engage, launching into your well- thought-out argument. You cite sources, send links, attack this online troll with facts and logic. You bombard this petulant know-nothing with a well-articulated, scientifically backed barrage of informational explosives.

This, of course, goes nowhere. The only reward for your righteous crusade against those nameless, faceless brainless accounts is further aggravation. You roll your eyes, toss your phone down and sigh. “What an idiot,” you say to nobody in particular.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the world, that same person you were arguing with slams their phone down and says the same thing about you.

Social media is here to stay. Whether or not it’s a necessary tool for our survival is irrelevant; whether it’s even useful is irrelevant. Facebook, Instagram, the platform formerly known as Twitter, they’re not going anywhere. They simply make too much money; money they make from you and your engagement. Do you know what kind of engagement makes them the most money? The kind that makes you mad.

Rage-baiting is not a new term, or even a new concept. The idea is simple, people are more inclined to focus on and remember the bad. It’s why you remember the one rude server you had, and not the 100 perfectly kind and lovely ones. It’s why you remember the teacher who was strict and mean. It’s why Facebook’s internal documents show their algorithm prioritized anger and posts that elicit it.

For young people in the age 18-29 demographic, social media is the most popular form of consuming news. Consider first that these billion-dollar private companies have a fiduciary responsibility (meaning they are legally obliged to act in the best interest of) to shareholders.

They are required to take actions that make the most money for the people who invest in them. Nowhere are they obligated, or even encouraged, to design a platform that acts as a conduit for sane, rational, reasonable discussion.

In fact, as you now know, the voices that get amplified are the ones that stir the pot. The squeakiest wheel yelling into the online ether, simply asking to be greased by its loudest, rudest, most obnoxious supporters and detractors. Regular people looking for their dose of thumbs-up fuelled dopamine, and screaming back into the void to get their next hit. Served up and steaming, your daily dose of rage-slop.

Social media is reducing us. It is making us lesser. Fortunately, we don’t have to engage this way online. There are endless things to argue about in this complicated world, ranging from the colour of a dress, what defines genocide and whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza. The good news? We can argue about them in person, too.

Communication theory is the study of the numerous ways humans have explained and interpreted each other over our long history. It also outlines the numerous things that are lost when communicating online.

Many successful ingredients to communication have evolved for humans to signal and perceive. A change in tone might suggest sarcasm. Body language might represent humour. Gestures and volume could indicate levels of anger. We’ve evolved myriad ways to communicate, consciously and unconsciously, the minute details that help the receiver of information decode the full extent of our message.

Most experts agree that 70 to 93 percent of communication is nonverbal. For the most part, what we say isn’t nearly as important as how we say it. When we engage in these serious conversations online we’re trading in our millenia-old ancestral toolkit for emojis and caps lock. I’m no expert, but I’d be willing to argue that’s a bad deal.

This isn’t to say that social media is the devil and we all need to burn our phones. There is plenty of good to be found online, and even in social media. The matter is complicated and intricate; even now I recognize the irony of typing these words onto a keyboard so that someone might one day read them while scrolling on the toilet.

There are, however, some conversations that are worth having in person. Let’s all try our best to remember that the next time we engage online, and let’s also try to remember that the next time we engage in person.

At the risk of sounding like your grumpy grandfather, shaking his fist at the sky, let me give us all (yes, even me) a small piece of advice.

Put the phone down, idiot.