If you're anything like me, you occasionally use Wikipedia to learn about things you want to know about but don't want to invest any real energy in. And you, too, have discovered the hellish joy of Wikipedia's attempts to explain the plots of various works of fiction.
Wikipedia is bad at explaining things. In its attempts to "neutrally" describe things, it cuts out most significance: since meaning is subjective, the most it can do is flatly list actions that transpire, with maybe the shallowest dollop of emotional-depth-as-explained-by-a-fourth-grade-book-report. When it delves into "deeper themes," its options are to either summarize books and papers—which it does just as flatly and meaninglessly—or to excerpt readily-available-online thought pieces, which are usually pretty terrible to begin with. The result is either infuriating or hilarious, depending on what kind of a mood you're in. And it will tell you nothing about the works you're trying to learn about, in ways that often make those works seem absolutely asinine.
The artist Wikipedia is best at describing is Dan Brown, who structures his chapters in terms of quick twists and one-dimensional emotional impulses. A Dan Brown novel is like a math equation: every symbol, every character, every event, serves a singular purpose, which is to advance the reader's interest just enough to take them to the next chapter, the next event, the next symbol. Any idea more complex than that is going to get mangled. Hence the now-decade-old meme that TvTropes is better at explaining art than Wikipedia—because it is! A legion of Joss Whedon-addled nerds are still better at comprehending Russian literature than Wikipedia's editors are.
Nevertheless, I somewhat-reliably find myself hate-reading a Wikipedia entry on some media phenomenon that I already begrudge, skimming through its plot description, and going: "Well, that sounds awful. I am correct in hating this thing."
The key to understanding social media is that we are all Wikipedia plot descriptions. Everything we say, everything we do, gets mangled and devalued, leaving behind only the most irritating iteration of a sentiment. When we use it casually, all the little nuances of humanity flee us, leaving behind only a monotonous drone that seems to go on and on and on. When we use it passionately, the things we love begin to seem stupid and insipid to people who don't already agree with us; the things we believe start feeling like a bad cliché. Even our hatred is drained of the richness of vitriol, the fury of personal investment, and the humors of our own biases. All that's left is the dullest part of hatred: the tedious fact of our own hate.
This tends to be paired with the other worst trait of Wikipedia: its reduction of "critical evaluation" to compiled excerpts from as many sources as possible, its over-reliance on ratings aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and MetaCritic, and its inability to separate quantification from bias, treating all numeric indicators of anything as proof of some deeper, and thoroughly neutral, significance. (If Wikipedia could assign moral quandaries a percentage score, it would not hesitate to tell us all that Catholicism has a 78% rating from MetaMorals, indicating "generally favorable reviews.")
Social media has this too, in the form of the ever-present numbers piling up all over the place, helping us "evaluate" the favorability of individuals or the things they say. Twitter, for instance, has the Ratio: if your tweet gets more comments than likes, it's proof that people hate what you've said. Facebook divides up its various reactions into half a dozen categories: does your comment get more angry-faces than thumbs-up? It's hard to parse exactly what any one weighing of reactions means, but we all know that the big number means More Attention, and from there we go on to divine conclusions of our own.
It's maddening in both places—not because we suspect it's meaningful, but because we know it's meaningless, and at the same time can't help but discern the pattern and act upon it as if it's true. It's a game, and moreover it's a stupid game... but we are hardwired to take the games we play very seriously. So we wind up getting pissed off at people's scores, even as we're pissed off at the fact of the scoring itself—and at the same time, we are optimizing our own responses to suit the social algorithm, working out the most "rewarding" ways of saying and doing anything, where "rewarding" is determined by the pointless points rather than by any real indicator of value. And all the while, we're still just putting out those mangled plot summaries, missing the point and presenting ourselves in the most irritable ways imaginable.
For the time being, social media is our dominant cultural mode. And that's a problem, because it means that social media is the way that many of us are exposed to new ideas—and its vast slurry, unifying all possible subjects into a single interface, reduces everything to a matter of "culture." Politics, current events, new media, vulnerability, sex and romance, loneliness and alienation, business, family, friendship, all turns into something we interact with identically to how we interact with everything.
On some level, that's fascinating—even the worst TV oversaturation, where 24/7 news met inane talk shows met way-too-many-sitcoms, never absorbed everything as much as social media can. On another level, though, I think we're all stuck in a place where we're just reading plot summaries of plot summaries—and where we've been trained to think of rhetoric itself as a matter of regurgitating hackneyed explanations and opinions, simultaneously too-colorful and too-banal. What's more, everything mixes together, which is helped along by the fact that nothing benefits from the stripping-away of meaning and nuance than the claim that everything, everything, is connected.
It used to be understood that asinine Theories of Everything, purporting to make everything fit with everything else, were childish and delusional, adolescent fantasies at best. It further was understood that insanity was defined as seeing connections where connections don't exist: not an inability to see logic, but a problem with seeing too much logic, too many explanations, until the entire world felt like one gigantic conspiracy machine, and the radio waves in your teeth were whispering secrets to you about the crimes of all your friends.
Nowadays, it's the only way we work. Everything is political; everything is personal; everything is sexual; everything is economic; everything is media; everything is culture; everything is breaking news, urgently important, all at once. We hate so many things, and we are hated by so many people, and our interpretation of the world makes perfect sense, and their interpretation of the world is for evil idiots, and too many bad people are getting way too many points.
What's more, we are encouraged to define "us" as narrowly as possible, and "them" as broadly as we possibly can. Our should-be allies become our mortal enemies. Everyone is perverse. Everyone is fucking up the world. It's that old Emo Philips joke, where a man who tries to stop someone from committing suicide finds out that he belongs to the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912 and not the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, and winds up pushing him off the cliff himself.
Here's where, I suspect, virtually every person reading this wants to nod their head and go, "Yeah, exactly! That's precisely what's wrong with that group of people over there who I hate. They're literally destroying the world." And while I do have opinions on which groups of people are destroying the world more than others, I'd like to stress that this is not a group-specific phenomenon. This is a process that affects everybody, even the people I like the most on whichever platforms I most use. This is a process that affects me. It's a process that I know full well ensnares each and every one of my closest friends, who are also the smartest and sanest and most self-aware people that I know. You can recognize the game, you can hate the game, but we're all still playing it. And the more we originate from this game, the more our thoughts and ideas and opinions and worldviews came directly out of things we encountered on social media itself, the more difficult it is for us to recognize what's happening and pull away, because the more it just seems like the way things are.
Oversimplification leads to polarization. Misinterpretation leads to polarization. Intolerance leads to polarization—and when "intolerance" is based on a person's ability to perfectly articulate the "right" position on nuanced ideas in a medium designed to annihilate articulation and nuance, a medium that lets literally anyone declare what "right" is and push for excommunication of all others, you are guaranteeing an intense and horrifying alienation, not just from other people, but from our belief that communication is possible at all.
I think a lot about the evolution of dating sites: from the early ones that worked basically like MySpace, and gave everyone a profile, and then folks just mingled, to OkCupid's attempt to algorithmically define "perfect matches" and make a game out of who you decide to talk to, to Tinder's (well, Grindr's) distillation of the concept to a Yes and a No pile, where Yes didn't mean connection, it meant a second round of auditions that could lead to an instant No. Every step of that evolution was sensible, even insightful in a way. But it led to an environment where personal expression became borderline impossible: the only thing you could possibly express was some kind of ingenious manipulation of the rules of the game, some use of app mechanics to do something startling or compelling or original that would differentiate yourself from the crowd. At which point, you're not saying something about yourself at all—you're literally defining yourself by the rules of the app itself.
This recursive process takes place on every social network, though. At some point, we don't express ourselves through a site's medium: we become heralds for the medium itself. But we don't recognize that, even when we recognize it. We're still convinced that something of our original expression, our original intent, remains. Just as we can be fully aware of just how stupid and dumb all the shit we're reading is and still, bit by bit, persuade ourselves that there's a "deeper truth" there which we, the passive consumers, have managed to tease out. Even though we know it doesn't work like that. You can read every Dostoyevsky summary and analysis on Wikipedia, and you'll still be blown away by any random passage from Dostoyevsky's minorest work. You can read about what characters do what in The Philadelphia Story without catching a hint of why people watch it do this day. Hell, you can read episode summaries of Friends and still come away with less a sense of deeper meaning than you'd get if you just watched an episode or two of Friends. And Friends is not exactly setting the bar high! (Sorry, fans of Friends.)
The thing is, this is a hard thing to talk about on social media itself. It is all-but-impossible to have a conversation about it on social media. For years and years and years, my pinned tweet on Twitter has been the following passage from T. H. White's The Once and Future King, for good reason:
Wikipedia is bad at explaining things. In its attempts to "neutrally" describe things, it cuts out most significance: since meaning is subjective, the most it can do is flatly list actions that transpire, with maybe the shallowest dollop of emotional-depth-as-explained-by-a-fourth-grade-book-report. When it delves into "deeper themes," its options are to either summarize books and papers—which it does just as flatly and meaninglessly—or to excerpt readily-available-online thought pieces, which are usually pretty terrible to begin with. The result is either infuriating or hilarious, depending on what kind of a mood you're in. And it will tell you nothing about the works you're trying to learn about, in ways that often make those works seem absolutely asinine.
The artist Wikipedia is best at describing is Dan Brown, who structures his chapters in terms of quick twists and one-dimensional emotional impulses. A Dan Brown novel is like a math equation: every symbol, every character, every event, serves a singular purpose, which is to advance the reader's interest just enough to take them to the next chapter, the next event, the next symbol. Any idea more complex than that is going to get mangled. Hence the now-decade-old meme that TvTropes is better at explaining art than Wikipedia—because it is! A legion of Joss Whedon-addled nerds are still better at comprehending Russian literature than Wikipedia's editors are.
Nevertheless, I somewhat-reliably find myself hate-reading a Wikipedia entry on some media phenomenon that I already begrudge, skimming through its plot description, and going: "Well, that sounds awful. I am correct in hating this thing."
The key to understanding social media is that we are all Wikipedia plot descriptions. Everything we say, everything we do, gets mangled and devalued, leaving behind only the most irritating iteration of a sentiment. When we use it casually, all the little nuances of humanity flee us, leaving behind only a monotonous drone that seems to go on and on and on. When we use it passionately, the things we love begin to seem stupid and insipid to people who don't already agree with us; the things we believe start feeling like a bad cliché. Even our hatred is drained of the richness of vitriol, the fury of personal investment, and the humors of our own biases. All that's left is the dullest part of hatred: the tedious fact of our own hate.
This tends to be paired with the other worst trait of Wikipedia: its reduction of "critical evaluation" to compiled excerpts from as many sources as possible, its over-reliance on ratings aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and MetaCritic, and its inability to separate quantification from bias, treating all numeric indicators of anything as proof of some deeper, and thoroughly neutral, significance. (If Wikipedia could assign moral quandaries a percentage score, it would not hesitate to tell us all that Catholicism has a 78% rating from MetaMorals, indicating "generally favorable reviews.")
Social media has this too, in the form of the ever-present numbers piling up all over the place, helping us "evaluate" the favorability of individuals or the things they say. Twitter, for instance, has the Ratio: if your tweet gets more comments than likes, it's proof that people hate what you've said. Facebook divides up its various reactions into half a dozen categories: does your comment get more angry-faces than thumbs-up? It's hard to parse exactly what any one weighing of reactions means, but we all know that the big number means More Attention, and from there we go on to divine conclusions of our own.
It's maddening in both places—not because we suspect it's meaningful, but because we know it's meaningless, and at the same time can't help but discern the pattern and act upon it as if it's true. It's a game, and moreover it's a stupid game... but we are hardwired to take the games we play very seriously. So we wind up getting pissed off at people's scores, even as we're pissed off at the fact of the scoring itself—and at the same time, we are optimizing our own responses to suit the social algorithm, working out the most "rewarding" ways of saying and doing anything, where "rewarding" is determined by the pointless points rather than by any real indicator of value. And all the while, we're still just putting out those mangled plot summaries, missing the point and presenting ourselves in the most irritable ways imaginable.
For the time being, social media is our dominant cultural mode. And that's a problem, because it means that social media is the way that many of us are exposed to new ideas—and its vast slurry, unifying all possible subjects into a single interface, reduces everything to a matter of "culture." Politics, current events, new media, vulnerability, sex and romance, loneliness and alienation, business, family, friendship, all turns into something we interact with identically to how we interact with everything.
On some level, that's fascinating—even the worst TV oversaturation, where 24/7 news met inane talk shows met way-too-many-sitcoms, never absorbed everything as much as social media can. On another level, though, I think we're all stuck in a place where we're just reading plot summaries of plot summaries—and where we've been trained to think of rhetoric itself as a matter of regurgitating hackneyed explanations and opinions, simultaneously too-colorful and too-banal. What's more, everything mixes together, which is helped along by the fact that nothing benefits from the stripping-away of meaning and nuance than the claim that everything, everything, is connected.
It used to be understood that asinine Theories of Everything, purporting to make everything fit with everything else, were childish and delusional, adolescent fantasies at best. It further was understood that insanity was defined as seeing connections where connections don't exist: not an inability to see logic, but a problem with seeing too much logic, too many explanations, until the entire world felt like one gigantic conspiracy machine, and the radio waves in your teeth were whispering secrets to you about the crimes of all your friends.
Nowadays, it's the only way we work. Everything is political; everything is personal; everything is sexual; everything is economic; everything is media; everything is culture; everything is breaking news, urgently important, all at once. We hate so many things, and we are hated by so many people, and our interpretation of the world makes perfect sense, and their interpretation of the world is for evil idiots, and too many bad people are getting way too many points.
What's more, we are encouraged to define "us" as narrowly as possible, and "them" as broadly as we possibly can. Our should-be allies become our mortal enemies. Everyone is perverse. Everyone is fucking up the world. It's that old Emo Philips joke, where a man who tries to stop someone from committing suicide finds out that he belongs to the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912 and not the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, and winds up pushing him off the cliff himself.
Here's where, I suspect, virtually every person reading this wants to nod their head and go, "Yeah, exactly! That's precisely what's wrong with that group of people over there who I hate. They're literally destroying the world." And while I do have opinions on which groups of people are destroying the world more than others, I'd like to stress that this is not a group-specific phenomenon. This is a process that affects everybody, even the people I like the most on whichever platforms I most use. This is a process that affects me. It's a process that I know full well ensnares each and every one of my closest friends, who are also the smartest and sanest and most self-aware people that I know. You can recognize the game, you can hate the game, but we're all still playing it. And the more we originate from this game, the more our thoughts and ideas and opinions and worldviews came directly out of things we encountered on social media itself, the more difficult it is for us to recognize what's happening and pull away, because the more it just seems like the way things are.
Oversimplification leads to polarization. Misinterpretation leads to polarization. Intolerance leads to polarization—and when "intolerance" is based on a person's ability to perfectly articulate the "right" position on nuanced ideas in a medium designed to annihilate articulation and nuance, a medium that lets literally anyone declare what "right" is and push for excommunication of all others, you are guaranteeing an intense and horrifying alienation, not just from other people, but from our belief that communication is possible at all.
I think a lot about the evolution of dating sites: from the early ones that worked basically like MySpace, and gave everyone a profile, and then folks just mingled, to OkCupid's attempt to algorithmically define "perfect matches" and make a game out of who you decide to talk to, to Tinder's (well, Grindr's) distillation of the concept to a Yes and a No pile, where Yes didn't mean connection, it meant a second round of auditions that could lead to an instant No. Every step of that evolution was sensible, even insightful in a way. But it led to an environment where personal expression became borderline impossible: the only thing you could possibly express was some kind of ingenious manipulation of the rules of the game, some use of app mechanics to do something startling or compelling or original that would differentiate yourself from the crowd. At which point, you're not saying something about yourself at all—you're literally defining yourself by the rules of the app itself.
This recursive process takes place on every social network, though. At some point, we don't express ourselves through a site's medium: we become heralds for the medium itself. But we don't recognize that, even when we recognize it. We're still convinced that something of our original expression, our original intent, remains. Just as we can be fully aware of just how stupid and dumb all the shit we're reading is and still, bit by bit, persuade ourselves that there's a "deeper truth" there which we, the passive consumers, have managed to tease out. Even though we know it doesn't work like that. You can read every Dostoyevsky summary and analysis on Wikipedia, and you'll still be blown away by any random passage from Dostoyevsky's minorest work. You can read about what characters do what in The Philadelphia Story without catching a hint of why people watch it do this day. Hell, you can read episode summaries of Friends and still come away with less a sense of deeper meaning than you'd get if you just watched an episode or two of Friends. And Friends is not exactly setting the bar high! (Sorry, fans of Friends.)
The thing is, this is a hard thing to talk about on social media itself. It is all-but-impossible to have a conversation about it on social media. For years and years and years, my pinned tweet on Twitter has been the following passage from T. H. White's The Once and Future King, for good reason:
The Wart loved hay-making, and was good at it. Kay, who was two years older, generally stood on the edge of the bundle which he was trying to pick up, with the result that he worked twice as hard as the Wart for only half the result. But he hated to be beaten at anything, and used to fight away with the wretched hay—which he loathed like poison—until he was quite sick.
That's us, complaining on social media about social media. It's why, generally speaking, I think the healthiest people on social media all but refuse to take it seriously, except for the very rare occasion when they personally can use it to make an impact. (Jon Bois, who generally serves as my role model for all things digital, uses Twitter in the breeziest and folksiest of ways, rarely lowering himself even to make a joke criticizing a bad thing... and then, every so often, advocates for workplace unionizing, gently and briskly, before going right back to being a fun little guy who loves his Steely Dan.)
"But he hated to be beaten at anything." That's us, too: we're so mad at social media, we're so annoyed at it for being so bad, that we're just gonna go on using it until it gets better. And we're gonna use it like we've always used it: to berate and complain and harass anyone who gets points on it for the wrong reason, and to offer up our opinions in the loudest, worst ways possible, and to wonder how on earth we ever let things get this bad.