One problem is that it puts people into bubbles that they don’t even realize that they’re in. These bubbles are sometimes called echo chambers, and they lead people to incorrect beliefs about the world.
For example, I was recently having a discussion with my oldest daughter. She’s 21 and in college and sometimes we have these deep parent-to-young-adult-child discussions, particularly when I’m driving her somewhere. We were discussing politics, as we sometimes do, and I was probably saying something really cynical, as I often do, and she went off on a tangent about how last summer’s BLM protests were a world-changing event and marked a major positive shift in race relations in the United States and the world and had a positive impact on policing in the United States. She put them on the same pedestal as anti-Vietnam, Civil Rights, or women’s suffrage protests of the 1900s.
She believed that, because that’s the social media bubble she’s in. I imagine that the majority of people in her social media circle… mostly college-aged people… were either supportive of, or directly involved in, those protests, posted about them on social media, and were absolutely convinced that everyone else was, too. In her social media bubble, everyone had a strong opinion on the matter, and those opinions were either supportive, or suspiciously silent. But not having a strong opinion wasn’t really an option.
Meanwhile, in my social media bubble… mostly people over the age of 25… the only mentions of the protests came from our news feeds and a handful of people who posted vaguely supportive things about them, and an even smaller number of people who participated in the protests when there was one close to their neighborhood at a convenient time for them, like on a Saturday afternoon between soccer practice and dinner. But, for the most part, it was a small wave of stories that came and went and didn’t have much of an impact on anything.
What seemed like a societal tidal wave to one social media bubble was a just a ripple to people in other social media bubbles. In my bubble, the main impact of the protests was a bunch of early retirements of police officers, trouble for cities trying to recruit new police officers, and the protests provided cover for people who wanted to do some looting. But that’s not how she saw it at all.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. The protests were more important than you’d think from my social media circle, but not as important as you’d think from her social media circle. Not a ripple, not a tidal wave… maybe like the wake of a medium-sized ship passing by.
But it takes effort to step out of your social media bubble and see what’s happening in other people’s bubbles. A lot of people don’t know that they need to do that to be well informed, or don’t have any desire to do it. And that’s one of the major problems with social media: it makes it very, very easy to live in an information bubble.
