Social Media, Anxiety, and the Common World

 

Roger Berkowitz

What is it about human beings that makes us so susceptible to the “like” button on social media, to doom scrolling, and to algorithms that feed our tribal anger? Why is it that soldiers and civilians both, in the aftermath of wars and catastrophes, can equally celebrate the end of the crisis and miss the connection and common purpose that comes with joining together with others in the common purpose to survive? Benjamin Franklin marveled at the fact that Native Americans who came to live with European settlers wanted to return to their tribes while European colonists who interacted with tribal societies nearly universally preferred to stay with the tribal lifestyles. In bomb shelters, amidst the danger and hardship, mental illness and anxiety generally disappear, while young people living in historically unprecedented ease and plenty are experiencing and epidemic of loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Amidst the great beauty and openness and colorful plurality of liberal cosmopolitanism, there is clearly a sense of unease that many feel amidst the lack of deep emotional and tribal commitments. This tension between tribalism and cosmopolitanism is at the heart of the 2024 Arendt Center Conference Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism. 

In a review of Jonathan Haidt’s book Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Michael Toscano argues that social media is “designed to provide artificial imitations of what human animals require and fool them into believing they are receiving the real thing." Silicon Valley, for instance, provides “connections” while stripping humans of sociality, and proffers “facetime” while diminishing eye-to-eye contact.” From infancy to adulthood, human beings need and thrive on connection, especially physical face-to-face connection—what Haidt calls an “animal need for embodiment.” Living in virtual communities, there is a loss of rootedness and a rise in anxiety. Haidt writes: “[Children today] are less able than any generation in history to put down roots in real-world communities populated by known individuals who will still be there a year later. . . . Children who grew up after the Great Rewiring skip through multiple networks whose nodes are a mix of known and unknown people, some using aliases and avatars, many of whom will have vanished by next year, or perhaps tomorrow. . . . They have no roots to anchor them or nourish them.”

For Toscano, Haidt’s analysis raises fundamental questions about the possibility of a common world most fully articulated by Hannah Arendt. What is lost amidst the rise of anxiety and the loss of embodied connection to what Arendt called the public or the shared or the common world? “Because social media is disembodied, it can never be a true public. “On social media, which is highly tailored and individualized, there is no shared view, only millions of commodified private views being nudged together by algorithms.”  The common world, as Arendt understands it, is not common in the sense that it is what most people believe in. It is common in that it emerges through public engagement and public interaction, through speaking and acting together in public. Insofar as we talk and act in public, we encounter a plurality of people, including those whose perspectives differ from our own. To engage in public means to test our views against those of others, to learn where we disagree and also where we agree, and to build upon that agreement the contours of a common world. But this activity of building a common world is what the rise of a virtual world endangers. Toscano writes: 

A genuine public life cannot stand atop such ephemerality. The foundation of a true public is a fabricated man-made world that is concretely and commonly available to the sense perceptions of all. Hannah Arendt made the point in several places that the collective power of the senses, trained upon the same sets of objects, forms the cornerstone of community. Think of the traditional public square, which presents itself to everyone’s eyes and, thereby, grounds collective games, commerce, festivity, debate, politics, and much else. Arendt explains:

"The experience of the materially and sensually given world depends upon my being in contact with other men, upon our common sense which regulates and controls all other senses and without which each of us would be enclosed in his own particularity of sense data which in themselves are unreliable and treach­erous. Only because we have common sense, that is only because not one man, but men in the plural inhabit the earth can we trust our immediate sensual experience."

We no longer have such common sense. With screens perpetually eclipsing our views of the man-made world and algorithms driving us down individualized rabbit holes, the public—both as a place and as a people—no longer exists. There can be no public and, therefore, no politics, no acting as a group for common goods, without a “consensus reality,” as Jon Askonas has called it, that is seen and heard collectively. Arendt puts it this way in The Human Condition: to “be deprived of the reality that comes with being seen and heard by others” is to be cast into “worldlessness.”

To be worldless is to be in the objective state of isolation that Arendt famously described as a powerlessness that preconditions one for ideological manipulation. She says the following in the concluding pages of The Origins of Totalitarianism, her monumental study of the rise of Stalinism and National Socialism:

"Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together . . . isolated men are powerless by definition."

Though radicalism and totalitarianism are different things, Haidt shares an analogous concern that the isolation bred by social media makes individuals vulnerable to ideology and “radical political movements.”

To catch a small glimpse of how manipulable people are when isolated, see how they flock to the social media trends—which are no more than a list of terms with high-frequency use—and polarize imme­diately, thoughtlessly adopting the “takes” of large accounts that are positioned in conflict with one another. Without common grounds on which to solidly stand, individuals are swept to and fro, and lacking any interiority with which to block the passage of messages, they act as mere conduits for their profusion.