The jungle book

Not many would expect a book that exposes the hidden and obvious dangers of Facebook to begin with a quote from The Brothers Karamazov . In a brilliant juxtaposition of literature and sociology, author Siva Vaidhyanathan begins Antisocial Media with a bland, alarming prophecy from the mammoth, 1880 novel by Russian realist Fyodor Dostoevsky, which reflect surprising similarity to the world social media is creating on the planet.

Book IV, Chapter 3 of the novel — ‘From Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima’ — says (let’s use a different, better English translation here): “We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united, is being formed into brotherly communion, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air.

“Alas, do not believe in such a union of people. Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking and self-display.”

If you have read the novel, you’d know this is where the elder Zosima, the moral centre of the narrative, talks about matters of life and beyond. Elder Zosima wasn’t talking about Facebook, of course. But Vaidhyanathan is. The conversation, naturally, forms the crux of Vaidhyanathan’s take on the world of social media, where, most ironically, a medium (Facebook) that is supposedly designed to connect the world, in order to make it a better place where people freely and fearlessly share ideas and emotions, eventually ends up becoming a Frankenstein monster that represents and manifests all that it is supposed to mean to the world.

Distorting machines

In seven chapters, sparing a crispy introduction and an extremely insightful conclusion, Vaidhyanathan, who teaches media studies at the University of Virginia in the US, tells us that the problem with Facebook or any social media of its ilk is that it’s very kernel is faulty. He explains that if you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energise hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, “you would make something a lot like Facebook.”

That’s a strong comment to make on an enterprise that is touted to be one of the most important and influential products of the technology revolution. But Vaidhyanathan, whose previous work — The Googlization of Everything: And Why We Should Worry — warned us that “to search for something on the Web using Google is not unlike confessing your desires to a mysterious power”, uses healthy scepticism to clinically analyse the protocols of Facebook to understand how and where it fails to do what it is supposed to do.

He finds several causes. One, for instance, is that Facebook’s leaders, mainly founder Mark Zuckerberg, have believed too firmly in their own omnipotence and benevolence. They (falsely) think they are committed to making the world a better place, while the reality is they are as profit-driven and undemocratic as any behemoth company could be.

Prone to manipulation

This reality is missing in most of their interactions and introspections. This has resulted in them creating a product that is simply ungovernable and yet easy to manipulate as the Cambridge Analytica big data scandal have proved. Despite such mishaps, the dominance of Facebook on our lives and minds, not just only on our screens, are only increasing. This has many dangerous aspects, Vaidhyanathan points out.

First, and most importantly, it helps spread fake news or false information. The second problem is Facebook “amplifies” content that elicits strong emotions. The social media platform is “explicitly engineered” to do that. So, it is quite “natural” that the Facebook algorithm would pick and promote hate speech or radical propaganda because it gets more eyeballs (Likes) and at the end of the day it means business.

The next problem, says Vaidhyanathan, is the “filter bubble”, an idea coined by author Eli Pariser in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You . This is the most dangerous of the all problems, even though most users don’t realise it sooner or later. Vaidhyanathan explains that Google and Facebook continuously respond to what users reveal to these data companies about themselves, and the search engines or time-line algorithms refine or re-synch the results based on this data. This is a non-stop process.

Simply put, if you are someone who likes right-wing ideas and engages with such ideas passionately, the algorithm understands this and tweaks your timeline accordingly. Most of the time you’d not notice these changes and will start responding to such content more and more, only to let the codes to filter further and further, leading to the development of a filter bubble.

This narrows your field of vision and in most cases makes you lose your objectivity in responding to issues and events because your exposure to plural views or ideas that are not quite in synch with your own are filtered out by the social media system. Many of us are living in these self-made, Facebook-backed echo chambers. And we don’t realise it. “In these ways Facebook makes it harder for diverse groups of people to gather and conduct calm, informed, productive conversations,” writes Vaidhyanathan.

Vaidhyanathan writes with conviction and a deep sense of history. His research is sharp and diverse and his long association with media studies and readings on the philosophy of modern technology is vividly reflected in his writing. Personally, it was a pleasure to know that Vaidhyanathan had worked with the New York University where legendary social commentator and a critic of technology, Neil Postman (a favourite of this reviewer), taught, and his anecdotes on Postman’s ideas are a social media student’s delight.

Vaidhyanathan analyses most of the salient features of the World Wide Web of social media, from how things go viral on social media (like the absurd ice-bucket challenge), and how targeted advertising works on Facebook, to how Zuckerberg and team have been trying to undermine the very basic tenets (such has the Net Neutrality) of the digital world, especially in digital-poor countries. He dexterously blends academic theories with anecdotal evidence to tells us that why this “Technopoly” should be contained as soon as possible. “Between Google and Facebook we have witnessed a global concentration of wealth and power not seen since the British and Dutch East India Companies ruled vast territories,” he observes.

So what’s to be done? One should go back to The Brothers Karamazov and the Elder Zosima, and to the next line of the quote which Vaidhyanathan has not taken as a prelude to the book. “To have dinners, horses, carriages, rank, and slaves to serve them is now considered such a necessity that for the sake of it, to satisfy it, they will sacrifice life, honour, the love of mankind, and will even kill themselves if they are unable to satisfy it.”

We are caught in a fulcrum of nefarious desires and there are no easy ways to get out of it, all thanks to technologies that we thought would emancipate us.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and the Director of the Centre for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He produces a local public-affairs television programme, podcasts, and directs the publication of Virginia Quarterly Review.

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