Testing Without Intermission
Life is hard but it's not all traumatic
What is a man’s life on earth if not a testing without intermission?
-The Confessions of St. Augustine, 10.26.37
There are few technological advances I find to be as universally destructive as that of social media.
While I concede that it can be used for good, the vast majority of accounts do not meet that threshold. Dancing for the camera and silly trends with interchangeable faces aside, once upon a time, you could curate your feed to protect yourself from the nonsense or damaging ideas, but the Algorithm (let’s just give it the respect its control deserves and use it like a proper noun) has decided what’s best for you and for me.
No longer satisfied with destroying our body images, habits, medical choices, and speech patterns, the Algorithm is coming after our relationships.
And why not? After all, we were created social creatures (as the very categorization of these sites acknowledges) and we seek out others. Those isolated from people in real life swarm to their screens to fill the void.
With illuminated faces and deadened expressions, we feed on the shovelfuls it spoons to our mouths in mindless, distracted moments, impotent to get away or avert our glazed eyes. Inundated with alternative approved views while we feed during gluttonous moments until so full of the ideas we become numb to them and, perhaps unwittingly, begin to make them our own. Not quite the same as before, desensitized, we slowly start to bring those fresh concepts into our lives and into our own content curation to infiltrate others’ minds.
Recently the rotting carcass of an idea Instagram keeps showing me in the suggested posts are accounts empowering women to “heal their generational trauma.” Niche accounts, that, otherwise, have nothing to do with mental health, are weaving the concept into their usual fare. Sticking to farming, gardening, and homesteading accounts apparently provides no shelter from these ideas. They are not professionals, nor aged women in the spirit of Titus with experience. Their healing isn't even admittedly past tense.
The social contagion of victimhood has convinced those of us who grew up in relatively happy, “normal” (whatever that means) homes that we, too, can join the Victim Club!