Social Media: the Anger Engine
For reasons I still do not entirely understand, I spent a good portion of 2016 and possibly 2017 tweeting semi-regularly at disgraced, twice-impeached former President Trump and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
I was angry, of course, and social media gives us the seductive if ultimately utterly fictional illusion that we can genuinely engage with the most powerful and popular and beloved people in the world, that through the democratizing power of the internet it has evened the playing fields and allowed commoner a forum to communicate with kings.
Yet even as I raged against the evil, cynical machinations of Trump and Ryan on social media I knew damn well that there was no chance whatsoever that my words of stormy, verbose condemnation would ever even be read by them, let alone trigger a crisis of conscience that would lead to a moral reckoning and ultimately a change in views and political affiliation.
No leftist, no matter how foolishly confident and optimistic, could ever hope to write a 280 character or less missive that would reach Donald Trump where everything else had not, like the pithy social media equivalent of the Force-assisted hit that blew up the Death Star.
Yet hollering at Donald Trump and the former Speaker of the House on Twitter gave me an empty rush, a jolt of adrenaline that quickly morphed into shame and embarrassment for thinking that tweeting at the President of the United States could ever accomplish anything, no matter how miniscule.
It allowed me to feel, for the briefest of moments, like I could stand up for basic human decency on Trump’s medium of choice and speak truth to power 140 and then 280 characters at a time.
I knew there was no chance that Trump would read and be moved by my tweets but he wasn’t really my audience. I was writing to amuse my fellow Leftists and to impress followers with my wit and insight in a way that would hopefully get them to check out my books, podcast and website.
And I was tweeting so that I could feel like I was doing SOMETHING, anything, to fight the scourge of Trump and Trumpism.
But looking back it all seems so goddamn pointless and counter-productive, and not just because all those indignant retorts to the words and odious sentiments of the 45th president are now permanently tethered to a dead account rightly, if tardily, killed by Twitter.
In the moment I deluded myself into thinking that my Resistance tweets were righteous when they were really just self-righteous, a way of continually establishing, for the historical record as well as the present, that I was appropriately appalled that the worst person in the world was also somehow the most powerful as well.
Twitter encourages such performative expressions of rage. Social media is an anger engine that super-charges our free-floating rage to its own cynical, divisive ends. It promises to bring us together while driving us further and further apart.
Facebook similarly thrives on such heated emotions, but it has a much broader palette. Scrolling through Facebook I feel blinding rage but I also feel envy when I see a contemporary has sold a book or got a plum gig or published an article in The New Yorker.
On Facebook we’re overwhelmed with the crazy abundance and abundant craziness of life: someone is always dying or getting divorced or coping with the death of a parent or becoming sober or otherwise undergoing some major life change.
In order to even begin to process it all, we resort to the laziest of token gestures. It’s crazy to think that we live in a society (not to sound too much like the Joker or anything) where a common response to learning that a friend or pet or partner of an online associate has just died involves pressing a button on a computer to indicate a crying or heart emoji.
That’s not a good response to news involving death, of course. In fact it’s woefully inadequate but then social media makes it easy to react to big news in poignantly small, insignificant ways while simultaneously making it hard to give anything important and substantive the attention and care it deserves.
I sometimes feel stupid and gullible for being so easily manipulated by social media, for letting it make me feel angry and jealous and sad and overwhelmed and any number of less than pleasant emotions. But I am only human, and social media understands and exploits that great weakness in ways that border on sadistic.
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