Flow: Social Media in American Politics

In this day and age, social media sites, such as Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and Snapchat, attract the public and consume our lives. They are addictive: each video we click links to an endless series of other videos. We often spend a bulk of our time scrolling through every Instagram or Facebook post or Tweet and read through a long list of comments. We are enticed by the Snapchat stories from our friends. We become trapped inside a recursive loop with no end. Sometimes, posts or videos on social media sites like these can even influence our political opinions to some extent, fuel our outrage against others who disagree with us, strike fear into us, or cause us to do the worst. 

Jay David Bolter’s book, The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise Media, describes such responses to media as flow and its tendencies to keep their business going and exposes us to seemingly endless information. Hungarian American psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi coined the word flow to describe such engagement in tasks. According to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of Americans receive their news partly from social media, and politicians and extremists alike have used it to spread information and ideology (Bolter).

Anonymous figures like QAnon propagate falsehoods on 8chan, manufacturing “Pizzagate,” the preposterous claim that Hillary Clinton and notable Democrats were “running an international child-sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington” or that “Robert Mueller is actually working with Trump to expose the Democrats; Angela Merkel is the granddaughter of Adolf Hitler; and the Queen of England is part of the cabal.” On social media, conspiracies like this spread quickly since it is easy to tweet, repost, and upload (Bolter).

Politicians like Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has also utilized this strategy to spread his messages. Trump has “[tweeting] more than 600 times about Russia and Collusion,” “more than 400 times lamenting fake news,” and “more than 200 times each about Clinton and Obama” (Bolter). The use of flow is strategic in that it too fast to keep up with and fact check, inhibiting debate and garnering support or agreement with the posters’ perspectives (Bolter). Similarly, AOC has used flow in her rise as well, though producing an even more coherent argument in her posts, complementing her policies and ideals for her users. On Twitter, it didn’t matter the promises were kept and were in contradiction with each other, like most notably in Trump’s, but the promises or responses were satisfying and relatable, a reaction which helped Trump and AOC garner support and energize their base.

Increasingly, unlike under Obama’s presidency, television and print news media have posted and broadcast politicians tweet or social media posts. Although flow has been used to retain our attention to certain video games, websites, and other media, it has also exposed us to political ideas and entered us into political discourse online, regardless of our political affiliation. Therefore, it must be said that users should be careful of what they see online and not just rely on social media sources from mostly celebrities and at time conspiracy theorists but also cross-check and corroborate their findings against more established sources as to avoid being misinformed. With social media, we have truly entered a new age in politics.

Source:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/05/why-social-media-ruining-political-discourse/589108/