Note: Rob Hansen, the host of the original conversation below (but not the person making the objection, posted a thoughtful response to this on his blog.
Over on Facebook, someone objected to the idea that social media twists people into something they’re not.
At one level, the answer is simple: it doesn’t. But on another level, it twists us profoundly.
The statement is true is so far as social media cannot really make us into something we are not.
What is can do, however, is amplify that which is already inside of us. And by our very human nature we have within us the capacity to do great harm to each other.
People are responsible for who they are, but people are also deeply sensitive to incentive structures. The ethically questionable Stanford prison experiment is the canonical example of how social incentives can easy bring out the darkness that is inside of us. Alternately, the person who is nice in private but willing to laugh at you in public with the pressure of peer opinion is a trope of high school life, both real and fictional.
What we have in most social media is an environment which incentivizes the worst of everyone. While many may avoid actually becoming distorted they will still be influenced by their environment. To use another metaphor, you can hangout with drug using, alcoholic, violent criminals without becoming one yourself but you’ll be a much better version of yourself in a more gracious environment.
If you want a really long answer to how social media actually modifies our behavior, I recommend reading Status as a Service by Eugene Wei. The gist of it is that linking status to a certain type of action (which varies by service) encourages people to engage in more and more of that type of action. On many social networks, what earns status is anger, hyperbole, and lack of empathy. It’s better to cleverly own your opponents for a quick jolt of emotion than it is to learn something from someone you don’t understand.
And thus the downward spiral feeds on itself.