In engineering we spend lots of time modeling systems (systems like electrical circuits). We try to describe them just enough so that we can predict their behavior. In the best cases, we can explain why they behave the way they do. In the worst cases, we can’t tell why things are, but we can make good predictions about what will happen next.
One thing that puzzles me about the political system [in the USA] is what role social media actually plays. It seems to me that we don’t know how or why social media behaves the way it does. The result, as we often see, is that we can’t predict it.
How can we understand something that is so new in the human timeline? Social media (and the internet, in general) has changed everything we knew about sharing information. We have instant access to more information now than any past generation. Have our brains and societies really adapted to this change so quickly?
But one point I want to emphasize is how much disconnect there is between social media and reality. In engineering, this might be like observing changes in the state of a system seemingly without any real inputs causing those changes.
If you spend time on any social media platform, you’ll quickly find trending topics that appear to affect large parts of the population. In politics, these topics might include scandals, election results, proposed legislation, or heated interviews. But when you log off and interact with the [very real] people around you, you often find that almost no one is even aware of the things you’ve seen on the internet. It’s a huge disconnect.
There is an illusion of importance and urgency that social media platforms create, and our brains easily fall for it even if the urgency does not exist in real life. After some time, the kinds of ideas that occupy our minds are dictated less by the things that actually affect us and more by the social media that we spend our time on.
There are still lots of people who don’t rely on social media in any real way, but that group of is quickly shrinking, it seems.
Politicians and foreign actors are increasing their grasp on social-media tools in order to shape public opinion. If they input enough energy into the system, the system will eventually react because the energy has to go somewhere. Then, it’s just a matter of time before they learn how to get the results they want.
Ivan Cortes 