We Are All Digitally Divided

A PSA comparing social media algorithms to addictive drugs. Image taken from Hot In Social Media Tips & Tricks

Much has been made of the term “digital divide” in academia. It’s been well-documented, after all, that countries in the Global South tend to have less access to digital technologies such as the Internet. Given the ubiquity of the Internet today, inability to enter the superhighway of information we know as the World Wide Web has become pretty much a deal-breaker if you wish to participate in the global economy.

With the advent of social media, anyone can have their 15 minutes of fame. You can be famous for writing book reviews, famous for playing video games, or even just famous for being famous. If you don’t believe me, this 2024 CNBC poll suggested that over half of Gen Z-ers wanted to be influencers.

You can show off your personal life to anyone who wants to see it. You can live-stream for hours every day, regardless of whether anybody else is watching. In many ways, this world is more connected than ever before…or is it?

I’ll offer a paradoxical thesis: Despite the popularity of social media, human beings are more alone than they have ever been.

Here’s an example. I’m not going to romanticize the age of cable TV - it was all too easy for the TV companies to screw you over with high prices. Of course, it’s the same way with streaming services where you can pick what you want to have access to. But still, in the cable TV era, it was common knowledge what shows were on at what time. Like so many other things in life, you don’t fully understand what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Kids had their Saturday morning cartoons, during which they’d get up at the ass-crack of dawn and bound down the stairs to binge-watch their shows while binge-eating endless bowls of sugary cereal. Adults had their soap operas in the evening that they might watch with their romantic partner. Finally, anyone who couldn’t sleep (possibly including the aforementioned children who lived on Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs) would have infomercials at 3 AM.

Calvin telling us how amazing Saturdays are. Taken from Reddit.

I probably sound like a boomer saying this, but I remember when the Boston Globe published TV guides in all of its papers, telling you when your favorite shows would be on. Chances were good that at least some of your neighbors would watch the same things, and you’d bond further with these people over what insane plot twist had just been unveiled or who’d won Wipeout last night.

That’s not the case these days. If I’m at a party with a neighbor, and they recommend a TV show for me to watch, I first have to check to ensure it’s on one of the streaming platforms I pay monthly to remain subscribed to. In all probability, I’ll forget about their recommendation, simply because I’m not interested in the show and it’s not on a channel I prefer. Gone are the days when we bond over shared television series. We’ll never again have a show with as much cultural relevance as Seinfeld or whatever else was popular in the 1990s.

Now let’s talk about the news. Obviously, “the news” has varied from time to time, and it’s very often depressing these days if you’re at all sane. Overindulgence in the media can be harmful to your mental health - that is no secret. But think about this for a moment: When was the last time you saw anyone under age 60 reading a newspaper?

A slide from a presentation I gave a few months ago about how the news used to be, versus how it is now.

I’m not talking about the digital editions of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, or whatever local news outlet is still limping along and breathing like Steve from Amazing Race (if you know, you know). I’m talking about the physical newspaper. The kind that got delivered to your door every day for a small fee.

Now, my mother still gets the Globe, but guess what? She’s 60 years old, and even among people her age, she’s in the minority. My grandmothers also get the physical paper, but they’re obviously much older than sixty. Most people I interact with on a day-to-day basis outside my family get their news from social media. And that’s a problem.

As I write this post, it’s been one week since Donald Trump became President again. Despite being convicted of 34 felony counts, despite having promised to implement tariffs on other countries and tank the economy, and despite Sleepy Joe Biden having dropped out and been replaced by a far more energetic candidate, he still won. In my mind, David Pakman said it best: “Lots of people in this country have no idea what the hell is going on.”

Think about that for a moment. Google searches for terms like “did Joe Biden drop out” reportedly spiked on the day of the election. I don’t know about you, but it was a pretty big news story in my (admittedly liberal) circles. I remember lying on the front porch with COVID, enduring endless coughing fits, when I received the Discord ping that President Biden had withdrawn from the race. 

Once I was no longer testing positive, I joined my family inside to watch Biden’s primetime address from the Oval Office. It was an important occasion, but apparently not for much of the country. That’s because 8 PM is no longer “primetime” for so many people. Instead it’s just another time when you might be watching TV, or, more likely, aimlessly scrolling through social media. 

Many people in the United States are just prisoners of the algorithm. The right-wing echo chambers kept attacking Joe Biden, making the red-hatted Trump supporters think their opponent was the 81-year-old Biden instead of the then 59-year-old Kamala Harris. They were blindsided by their ballots when they discovered their options, because they never learned that Harris had replaced Biden more than three months prior. 

The last thing I’ll address here is the bookstore. Now, even if I’ve been reading a lot lately, I’m well aware that this hobby is falling out of favor among the Generation Alpha crowd. They’d rather play Fortnite for hours on end and watch Skibidi Toilet videos in class.

One reason I prefer to purchase my books from the local bookstore is because I want to support small businesses as opposed to Amazon whenever it’s realistically possible. And yes, I like the human element of entering the building and asking for recommendations from the staff. But there’s an underrated reason why I prefer the physical store.

There’s no algorithm.

If I look up a book on Amazon, there’s always a section on the buy page saying people who bought X also searched for Y, or something to that effect. In the long term, I’ll end up reading largely books of the same genre and similar themes, rather than getting a well-rounded array of titles like I might at the bookstore. Ultimately, if I’m going to keep doing these book reviews in the long term, I want to read a wide variety of novels.

I know this analysis largely comes from an American perspective. Some of the problems I’ve talked about on this blog, such as expensive health care and gun violence, are unique to the United States. And some of the loneliness is brought upon us by car-dependent infrastructure, which is not as pervasive in, say, Western Europe. 

That being said, the U.S. is not the only country where social media algorithms have been deployed. And I’m not even going to say that the algorithms are all bad; there are too many videos on YouTube to know what the average user might like without any data.

However, anyone who values personal interaction should be wary of these algorithms. After all, technology is not neutral, no matter how much we’d like to think it is.