Cognitive Dissonance and Social Media

I started writing this post last Sunday (the 13th). I'd just posted images from the protests in Madison the day before, and had planned on getting some real content out the next day. However, that proved significantly harder than I'd anticipated.

Every time I sat down to write something, the magnitude of the still unfolding tragedy in Japan brought me up short. On the games front I've had thoughts for a post about Alan Wake since I started playing it (I'm currently in the middle of Episode 4), and a hankering to post something about games and art (again) after reading the text of Brian Moriarty's apologia for Roger Ebert GDC talk. I've also been planning a series of posts introducing the different guilds I studied for my dissertation. All of these things seemed pretty trivial when taken next to the crisis which was (and still is) unfolding after the earthquake and tsunami.

On the education front I have another segment that needs writing on the Narratives of American Educational Systems series that I tried to start many months ago, as well as a bunch of smaller related thoughts I'd like to get out there. The education posts suffer in large part from a constantly shifting landscape of policy and reporting that's taking place in this country, but that's not the reason I wasn't able to start any of those posts on May 13th.

The truth is that next to the devastation wrought by tsunami and quake in Japan, even the deep problems with the politics of education in America (and the particular variant playing out in Wisconsin) just don't seem very immediate. As if Japan wasn't enough, the sudden uptick in conflict and bloodshed in Libya and Bahrain over that weekend served to further emphasize how small my normal concerns were on a global scale. Of course, natural disasters and war weren't the only thing happening in the world over the weekend of March 12th. The South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival was also taking place in Austin and PAX East was happening in Boston. The result of this strange confluence of events: my Twitter feed became extremely problematic. 

In order to explain why, let me back up just a little bit. Since events began to heat up here in Madison back in mid-February, my relationship with Twitter (and by extension many other social media tools) has changed. Prior to Walker's proposed "Budget Repair Bill", I'd used Twitter primarily as a professional tool. It allowed me to track on conferences I wasn't attending, I could follow many of my colleagues and get useful links from them, and I could follow various individuals who tend to provide useful information about the different aspects of geekery that impact both my personal and professional lives.

When the clash over union rights started in Wisconsin, my primary Twitter use shifted dramatically. It became almost entirely politicized, and this process was greatly aided by the handful of friends and colleagues I have in Wisconsin who began using Twitter to help coordinate political actions. This allowed me to freely retweet both informative and action oriented tweets without having to subscribe to any new feeds. Because I have Twitter linked to Facebook, this also meant I was blasting my friends and relatives on FB with a combination of links for articles and blogs about Wisconsin politics, and incoherent sequences of hashtags. Furthermore, when I was both inside and outside of Wisconsin, Twitter became my primary aggregator for news, in large part because the reporting I was able to access through Twitter was way more thorough than anything being presented by any of the mainstream American media outlets.

In general, once I started using Twitter for news and politics my outlook on the tweets emanating from geekier domains was largely unaffected. Jane McGonigal's tweets did begin to annoy me a bit due to incongruity between her talk about how we can overcome real social issues with games, and the total lack of engagement with any current social issues in the content of her tweets. But otherwise I was largely able to reconcile my politicized digital reality with the very non-political nature of the vast majority of geek tweets in my feed. After all, things in Wisconsin will cool down eventually, and I'm fairly confident that I'll still want to follow developments in geekery once we have this whole democracy thing settled.

Japan was a different issue. The stark contrast between the tweets coming from the two geek fests over the course of the weekend of the 12th and the stream of information about the tragedy unfolding in Japan was too much too take. My normal response to tweets from conferences I'm not attending is a pleasant surge of jealousy. I find it kind of reassuring to know that awesome fun events are happening even if I can't attend them. By contrast over that weekend, each tweet from SXSW and PAX East made me just a little angry. Thousands of people were dead or missing, and hundreds of thousands had been displaced from their homes. Additionally, one of the biggest nuclear power disasters in history was still playing out, and meanwhile military personnel were firing on crowds of unarmed citizens in Bahrain. Each tweet from the great geek parties filled me with (what I knew was unjustified) anger and annoyance.

While global events continue to occupy a great deal of my attention, my regard for more trivial tweets has turned less judgmental. Various crises persist, but the rate of information about them has diminished somewhat. I am nonetheless still reflecting on the experience I had with Twitter over that weekend, and the more subtle ways in which my relationship to the medium has shifted as a result. In large part, I believe the incredible cognitive dissonance I experienced that weekend involves our collective lack of definition about what exactly appropriate content is for social media. At other times I think that maybe there's more than one collective understanding, and that they aren't exactly in accord.

Ultimately, this post isn't about trying to provide answers. We do in fact live in incredibly unstable times both technologically and ecologically, and ultimately each of us has to make some kind of sense of the changes taking place in our world individually and with each other. For me, part of that sense making process is use of this blog to articulate not only how I see digital media working in the world, but also how it makes me feel and act. 

At any rate, there's still a lot of work to be done in Japan so I'll end this post by asking anyone reading this to make that extra donation to help the relief effort out there. If you want to provide meaningful support in a geeky way check out Tokyo Hacker Space. Otherwise, I encourage you to donate to the relief organization of your choice.

Comments

[Eric Ellis]

I'm glad that my own experience with the multiple spheres of social connections has been shared by someone else, Moses. I'm still not much for Twitter, but I've grown increasingly reliant upon Facebook for keeping up with folks I know and love. I'm a bad contributor, as far as reciprocity, but I'm appreciative of the linkages.

But I'll agree that Japan seems to dwarf the importance of my other circles. Partially, it's because of having been an exchange student to Japan in 1986, and partially because the disaster was so damn well documented - the affluence of the society meant that everyone involved had a camera, and the timing of the event (daytime) seems to have ensured we had the most heartbreaking and immediate images delivered in near-realtime speed. I've found it particularly hard to avoid watching some of the footage, but equally hard not to be deeply disturbed.

I know I've grappled over the past decade with the increasing pervasive role that ubiquitous media has had on my mental focus. I know that I'm less able to concentrate on one topic for long stretches of time than I used to be - the Internet both facilitates and encourages the mental "chasing of squirrels" that seems to undercut my concentration (this post would have to serve as an exhibit). Add to that tendency such a disaster of simultaneously personal and mind-boggling extent, and it's more than a little disruptive.

I'm not sure how to think we'll deal with this reality in the future. I'm already feeling a bit guilty about the disparity between my reaction to the Japanese tsunami and the earlier disasters in Indonesia, Haiti, Chile and New Zealand. Just as it seems nearly impossible to keep two or three thoughts in coherence in my mind, I fear that our new world of immediate information will mean we're only able to really appreciate the latest disaster. Add to that perhaps some unintentional, or unquestioned, "Developed/Developing World" biases, and I'm not sure it bodes well for some folks already struggling. It's not a pretty thing to think about oneself.

But I appreciate that life goes on - games are still played, culture is still explored and developed, people still laugh and cry and all the rest, and other meaningful wrongs (like the WI political machinations) still need good people to speak up. Like you, I guess I'm seeing my impressions of the social media tools shift - yeah, the medium seems to encourage some communication that's dedicated to the more trivial or banal, but it also can reflect the deeper shifts of soul and society. I don't know that I'd want to make a crusade of eradicating the mundane from Twitter or Facebook, but I've come to appreciate more when folks use those tools for deeper purposes. Kinda gives me hope, ya know?

[Moses]

I definitely hear you on the hope part Eric. One thing about where we are right now is that it truly does feel like the tools and the language for talking about and using them is still in the midst of development. We're going through an extremely bumpy period in terms of human existence, and it is all bound up together. That is, the availability of these tools and the often destructive geopolitics that has given us a society in which we have them, as well as the transitive effects they seem to exert on us individually and as a whole, are all very deeply interrelated phenomena. My own optimism primarily stems from the potential we're starting to see as we get smarter as users, and as the tools themselves get smarter.

Also, yeah, it's good to have the banal stuff too. Sometimes those are exactly the things that make the fight worth it at the end of the day.