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Ask Me Anything (AMA) has been a Reddit staple that helped popularize the social media platform. It delivered some unique, personal, and, at times, fiery interviews between public figures and people who submitted questions. The Q&A format became so popular that many people host so-called AMAs these days, but the main subreddit has been r/IAmA, where the likes of then-US President Barack Obama and Bill Gates have sat in the virtual hot seat. But that subreddit, which has been called its own "juggernaut of a media brand," is about to look a lot different and likely less reputable.
On July 1, Reddit moved forward with changes to its API pricing that has infuriated a large and influential portion of its user base. High pricing and a 30-day adjustment period resulted in many third-party Reddit apps closing and others moving to paid-for models that developers are unsure are sustainable.
The latest casualty in the Reddit battle has a profound impact on one of the most famous forms of Reddit content and signals a potential trend in Reddit content changing for the worse.
This post is about philosophy, memes, and taking action. It’s a reflection on an experience I had this week which caused me to reflect on the paucity of ‘awareness raising’ as a tactic.
I studied Philosophy at university a couple of decades ago. One of the courses was on ethics and involved the trolley problem.
The trolley problem is a series of thought experiments in ethics and psychology, involving stylized ethical dilemmas of whether to sacrifice one person to save a larger number. The series usually begins with a scenario in which a runaway tram or trolley is on course to collide with and kill a number of people (traditionally five) down the track, but a driver or bystander can intervene and divert the vehicle to kill just one person on a different track. Then other variations of the runaway vehicle, and analogous life-and-death dilemmas (medical, judicial etc.) are posed, each containing the option to either do nothing, in which case several people will be killed, or intervene and sacrifice one initially “safe” person to save the others.
It’s a powerful tool to generate insights into your own ethical position on certain topics. These days, it’s rolled out to warn about outsourcing decision-making to the systems underpinning self-driving cars. And, of course, it’s now a recognisable meme.
In my experience, most of the trolley problem thought experiments lead towards an understanding of supererogation.
In ethics, an act is supererogatory if it is good but not morally required to be done. It refers to an act that is more than is necessary, when another course of action—involving less—would still be an acceptable action. It differs from a duty, which is an act wrong not to do, and from acts morally neutral. Supererogation may be considered as performing above and beyond a normative course of duty to further benefits and functionality.
Interestingly, in a recent episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast, Theron Pummer suggested a twist on this. Pummer, who is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, has published a book entitled The Rules of Rescue. I haven’t read it yet, but to quote the summary on his own web page about the book:
Pummer argues that we are often morally required to engage in effective altruism, directing altruistic efforts in ways that help the most. Even when the personal sacrifice involved makes it morally permissible not to help at all, he contends, it often remains wrong to provide less help rather than more.
I have issues with Effective Altruism, which I’ll not go into here, but I find Pummer’s framing fascinating. Basically, you don’t have to help others in certain situations; no-one would think it was immoral or illegal to go about your business. However, if you do decide to help, then there’s a minimum amount of help that could reasonably be required.
This week, I was at MozFest House. I had a good time. As with all MozFests I’ve been to, there are exhibits with which you can interact. One of them asked you to use a touch screen to fill in details of the kinds of services you use. It then printed out a long receipt on the type of data that is gathered on you when using them. I asked the PhD students who had come up with the machine what I was supposed to do with this data. They intimated that they were merely raising awareness and didn’t suggest a single thing I could do.
I was left in a worse position than I began. One could say that’s the point of awareness-raising, that it’s about making people feel discomfort so that they take action. But if you’re going to make an intervention I would agree with Theron Pummer’s stance that there’s a certain minimum level of guidance to give. A first step, at least.
Contrast this with another interactive exhibit in which you received tokens for free coffee if you answered a series of questions about yourself. I managed to get three by lying and not providing personal data. Which, of course, could be said to be the point of the exercise: be careful about the data you put out there, especially for scant reward.
Once you see people putting in the minimum effort of ‘awareness raising’ you start seeing it everywhere. It’s particularly prevalent on social media, where it takes a single tap to reshare news and make others aware of something you’ve just seen. As humans, though, we tend to have a bias towards avoiding harm so social media timelines become full of doom.
I’m on a bit of a mission to get some more positivity into my life. Not in a mindless way. Not in an avoiding-reality kind of way. But rather following people who have noticed a problem and are doing something about it. Seeking out those who can take a step back and look at the wider picture. And, of course, those who share some of the wonder of the world around us.
The post On the paucity of ‘raising awareness’ first appeared on Open Thinkering.On Chinese gay dating apps, “fake profiles” are a constant concern: photos might have been altered or biometrics might have been fabricated. Offline, the person might barely resemble their profile. The lived experiences of Chinese gay men, however, show us that the fake is not always antithetical to the real. The fake, under certain circumstances, could enact material realities of its own. Gay socialites (同志名媛, tongzhi mingyuan) in urban China’s gay community are cases in point.
One aspect of my research among gay socialites focuses on the in-between zone of “real” and “unreal,” and how exactly the transformation from unreal to real can be achieved in a specific socio-technological context—contemporary urban China—in the digital age. I argue that we need to go beyond a binary of “real” and “unreal” to understand a social world where human actors are using digital technologies to create intermediate zones that are neither squarely real nor completely unreal, with the purpose of fulfilling their desires. These blurry, intermediate zones are liminal (Turner 1969), existing in the form of fantasies, constructed personas and lifestyles, and intoxicated states. It is through concrete human actions, and sometimes their unintended consequences, that liminal realities become full realities.
Fourteen years ago, in Coming of Age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff (2008) argued that virtual worlds are in and of themselves cultural worlds distinct from the physical world, and that it is not only possible but suitable to study the culture of a virtual world with ethnography. Contesting the “false opposition” that fails to recognize that “the myriad ways that the online is real” and mistakenly assumes that “everything physical is real” (Boellstorff 2016, 387), Boellstorff states that “[c]hallenging the derealization of the digital is of pressing importance” (2016, 397). There have been consistent efforts in anthropology and related social sciences that echo or take up Boellstorff’s intervention. Anthropologists caution that design features and affordances of apps are deeply shaped by socio-cultural contexts, and that these new technologies bring about not only new possibilities, but also new risks and hierarchies in users’ lived realities (Batiste 2013; McGuire 2016; Edelman 2016). They pose a collective challenge to the misconception that the virtual and the actual are separated (McGuire 2016; Hu 2015). These pioneer studies have, from various perspectives and with meticulously constructed ethnographic details, highlighted the fact that the virtual and the actual are not only increasingly integrated, but on many occasions the virtual is real in every sense of the word.
Speaking more broadly, Lisa Messeri (2021) cogently points out that what she calls the “anthropologies of the unreal” have continuously expanded what counts as real in anthropological worldview by demonstrating how the seemingly “unreal,” such as illusions, dreams, digital technologies, intoxicated states of mind, and so on, are real or made real in specific socio-technological contexts (Boellstorff 2008; Mittermaier 2010; Messeri 2021; Zigon 2019; Pearce 2009).
In this case study, I use the term “liminal realities” to better conceptualize these in-between realities that were neither absolutely real nor undeniably fake. I draw on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality (1969) to highlight not only the transitional nature of these realities but also their uncertainty, malleability, and fluidity. Indeed, a gay socialite in China is not born; he is made.
The lives of the Chinese gay men I met during fieldwork provide a fruitful lens to understand the in-betweenness of life as a liminality between “real” and “unreal,” when boundaries, or thresholds, are not always clear or absolute. In this blog post, I will show how my interlocutors—mostly rural-to-urban migrant gay men—use digital technologies to create “fake” personas; that is, personas whose lifestyle, socio-economic status, and overall social status were different from their offline ones. In these urban Chinese men’s cases, however, “fake” is not the opposite of “real.” It was precisely through meticulously constructed “fakeness” that these men accumulate attention from China’s gay community, build a large fan base, and increase their social status. Eventually, this “fakeness” materialized and turned into tangible economic gains and social recognition. In other words, the fake became something undeniably real.
A “gay socialite” was one of the multiple identity categories created by urban Chinese gay men that placed gay men into an always changing hierarchical system according to their upbringing, education, class status, sexual practices, and more. My interlocutors described a gay socialite as someone who was young, good-looking, muscular, financially well-off, and fashionable. Most importantly, however, being a gay socialite was about enacting a particular lifestyle. Indeed, without a Louis Vuitton bag, or comparable luxury brand-name products, a good-looking, muscular, young gay man was considered a “wild chick” (乡下野鸡, xiang xia ye ji) ridiculed for their assumed rural, financially tight, and unsophisticated “nature” (本性, ben xing) despite their good looks. In contrast, hard labor was considered a foreign concept to gay socialites. A socialite must not work yet still have the financial means to travel around the world, stay in luxury hotels, and post their experiences on social media for fans to admire and/or evaluate.
Image 1: A well-known gay socialite posting on social media an image from a luxurious high-rise hotel room. The caption reads: “This is what a vacation is supposed to look like.” (Image screenshot by the author)
Image 2: On a different day, the same socialite posted a picture of a fancy breakfast at a luxurious hotel in Hangzhou, China. The caption reads: “A beautiful day begins with two Americanos.” (Image screenshot by the author)
During my fieldwork, however, I found out that most gay socialites actually came from humble backgrounds and that their financial position was not exactly as their social media posts suggested. Their luxurious lifestyle was, in fact, performed. It was common for gay socialites to rent a hotel room together. They took turns taking individual photos in each corner of the room and planned to post their pictures on social media at different times. During my fieldwork, I also learned that these gay men often borrowed brand-name products from others—from either individual people or companies specializing in brand-name rentals—to enhance their upscale persona on social media.
What’s the point, one might ask? Many socialites are looking for “gold masters” to look after them. In the gay lexicon, a “gold master” (金主, jin zhu) referred to a wealthy and usually older gay man who took care of younger and less monied gay men. However, in this gay social hierarchy, gold masters were not just looking to take care of any physically appealing gay men. Due to the equally intense hierarchical thinking among gold masters, and a social environment that measured a person’s social worth partly through the identity of their intimate partners, gold masters were looking for “worthy” (配得上，pei de shang) gay men—a position well fit by gay socialites. If a gold master ended up with a “nobody” (谁也不是, shei ye bu shi, translated literally as “who is nobody”) the reputation or social worth of the gold master would deteriorate as well. After all, the number of wealthy people in China grew to such an extent that some felt the pressure to differentiate themselves even further, pursuing a form of distinction from the so-called “vulgar new rich” (暴发户, bao fa hu, translated literally as “people who got rich as quickly as an explosion”) (Osburg 2020). During my fieldwork, gold masters and gay socialites were common couples. While the former gained face by having an attractive intimate partner, the latter eventually lived a material life that used to exist only in the virtual sphere.
There was more than one way the “fakeness” on social media could turn into material and financial realities. Not every gay socialite could find a gold master. Some took advantage of China’s vast “sunken market,” referring to the vast number of consumers who purchased cheaper products with their more meager incomes. Numbering in the billions, these individuals form the biggest market with the strongest potential one could hope for. By creating a fake persona, gay socialites accumulated a large number of followers from this market, many of whom could never keep a socialite like a gold master could or afford the socialite’s lifestyle for themselves. This is beside the point, however: most fans knew that the social media gay socialite life was often staged. Rather, these virtually mediated personas and lifestyles served not as truthful representation of another person’s reality, but snapshots of the fantasy of a good life, of an otherwise, of an alternative of a life (hopefully) yet to come. The power of fantasy was strong, leading to loyal fanfare, who would click the link and purchase whatever their idols recommend to them.
Brian, for example, was one of the most well-known gay socialites in China. Brian started his entrepreneurship and accumulated his fortune by selling affordable protein power on his social media accounts back in 2010s. When I returned to China for my dissertation fieldwork in 2019, Brian already owned a couple companies, multiple properties in China and Thailand, and was a major sponsor for one of Asia’s biggest dance parties in Bangkok. Even though Brian is still ridiculed by other gays for his highly photoshopped, “fake” pictures on social media, it would be hard to deny that the real and tangible changes in his life originated from purposefully constructed fakeness.
Indeed, the persona and lifestyle put on social media by these socialites might be “fake.” But “fakeness” is not always the opposite of realness. Mediated by virtuality, fakeness—understood in this context as a form of purposefully constructed liminal reality with the intention to craft a better life—is generative, productive, and performative; it brings new realities into existence. For Chinese gay socialites, many of whom migrated from rural China or lower-tier cities to the metropolis such as Shanghai, virtually mediated fakeness was their attempt—sometimes a very convenient and efficient one—to “make it” in China’s urban centers. In their cases, the fake, instead of standing in sharp opposition to the real, stood right beside the real. Here, the differences between the fake and the real were not quite ontological but temporal and conditional. The fake, in this sense, bears the potential to transition and transform into tangible and material realities that are no longer constrained in the virtual world. The fake, then, can be seen as a specific kind of real—the liminal real.
Batiste, Dominique Pierre. 2013. “‘0 Feet Away’: The Queer Cartography of French Gay Men’s Geo-Social Media Use.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22 (2): 111–32.Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.———. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57 (4): 387–407.Edelman, Elijah Adiv. 2016. “‘This Is Where You Fall off My Map’: Trans-Spectrum Spatialities in Washington, DC, Safety, and the Refusal to Submit to Somatic Erasure.” Journal of Homosexuality 63 (3): 394–404.Horst, Heather A. 2013. “The Infrastructures of Mobile Media: Towards a Future Reseach Agenda.” Mobile Media and Communication 1 (1): 147–52.Hu, Tung-Hui. 2015. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.Ito, Mizuko. 2010. “Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media Mixes.” In Mashup Cultures, edited by S. Sonvilla-Weiss, 79–97. New York: Springer.McGuire, M. L. 2016. “The Problem of Technological Integration and Geosocial Cruising in Seoul.” New Media & Society, 1–15.Messeri, Lisa. 2021. “Realities of Illusion: Tracing an Anthropology of the Unreal from Torres Strait to Virtual Reality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (2): 340–59.Mittermaier, Amira. 2010. Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.Nibbs, Faith. 2016. “Hmong Women on the Web: Transforming Power through Social Networking.” In Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women, edited by Chia Youyee Vang, Faith Nibbs, and Ma Vang, 169–94. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Okabe, Daisuke, and Mizuko Ito. 2006. “Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use: Steps toward Techno-Social Ethnographic Frameworks.” In Mobile Communication in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Views, Observations and Reflections, edited by Joachim R. Hoflich and Maren Hartmann, 79–102. Berlin: Frank and Timme.Osburg, John. 2020. “Consuming Belief: Luxury, Authenticity, and Chinese Patronage of Tibetan Buddhism in Contemporary China.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (1): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1086/708547.Pearce, Celia. 2009. Communities of Play Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.Wallis, Cara. 2011. “Mobile Phones without Guarantees: The Promises of Technology and the Contingencies of Culture.” New Media & Society 13 (3): 471–85.———. 2013. Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones. New York and London: New York University Press.Zigon, Jarrett. 2019. A War on People: Drug Users Politics and A New Ethics of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Recent philosophy-related news*, and a request…
1. Stephen Kershnar (SUNY Fredonia), whose February 2022 discussion of adult-child sex on the Brain in a Vat podcast sparked viral outrage and led to his removal from campus, has “filed a lawsuit this week in U.S. District Court in Buffalo asking the court to declare that Fredonia’s administrators violated his First Amendment rights by removing him from the classroom after the comments he made on a podcast kicked off a social-media firestorm,” according to the Buffalo News. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has filed the lawsuit on his behalf, Kershnar says.
UPDATE: Here is the lawsuit and the motion for injunction (via Stephen Kershnar).
2. The editors of Philosophy, the flagship journal of The Royal Institute of Philosophy, have announced the winners of their 2022 Essay Prize, which was on the topic of emotions. They are: Renee Rushing (Florida State) for her “Fitting Diminishment of Anger: A Permissivist Account” and Michael Cholbi for his “Empathy and Psychopaths’ Inability to Grieve.” Mica Rapstine (Michigan) was named the runner-up for his “Political Rage and the Value of Valuing.” The prize of £2500 will be shared between the winners, and all three essays will be published in the October 2023 issue of the journal.
3. Some philosophers are on the new Twitter alternative, Bluesky. Kelly Truelove has a list of those with over 50 followers here. And yes, you can find me (and Daily Nous) on it.
4. One philosopher is among the new members of The American Philosophical Society, a learned society that aims to “honor and engage leading scholars, scientists, and professionals through elected membership and opportunities for interdisciplinary, intellectual fellowship.” It is John Dupré of the University of Exeter, who specializes in philosophy of science. The complete list of new members is here. Professor Dupré joins just 21 other philosophers that have been elected into the society since 1957 (the society was founded in 1743).
5. I’ve decided that some news items I had been planning to include in these summary posts over the summer should instead get their own posts. These are posts about philosophers’ deaths and faculty moves. Regarding the former, it would be wonderful if individuals volunteered to write up memorial notices for philosophers they knew, or whose work they are familiar with, including at least the kinds of information I tend to include in these posts (see here). Recently, philosophers Henry Allison, Richard W. Miller, and Donald Munro have died. If you are interested in writing up a memorial notice for one of them, please email me. Generally, over the summer, these posts and faculty move notices may take longer to appear than usual.
* Over the summer, many news items will be consolidated in posts like this.
The post Philosophy News Summary (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Eight years ago, I wrote about a dominant and pernicious ideology that features two components:
Component one: that we are living in a administrative regime built on technocratic rationality whose Prime Directive is, unlike the one in the Star Trek universe, one of empowerment rather than restraint. I call it the Oppenheimer Principle, because when the physicist Robert Oppenheimer was having his security clearance re-examined during the McCarthy era, he commented, in response to a question about his motives, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
The topic of that essay was the prosthetic reconstruction of bodies and certain incoherent justifications thereof, so I went on: “We change bodies and restructure child-rearing practices not because all such phenomena are socially constructed but because we can — because it’s ‘technically sweet.’” Then:
My use of the word “we” in that last sentence leads to component two of the ideology under scrutiny here: Those who look forward to a future of increasing technological manipulation of human beings, and of other biological organisms, always imagine themselves as the Controllers, not the controlled; they always identify with the position of power. And so they forget evolutionary history, they forget biology, they forget the disasters that can come from following the Oppenheimer Principle — they forget everything that might serve to remind them of constraints on the power they have … or fondly imagine they have.
In light of current debates about the development of AI – debates that have become more heated in the wake of an open letter pleading with AI researchers to pause their experiments and take some time to think about the implications – the power of the Oppenheimer Principle has become more evident than ever. And it’s important, I think, to understand what in this context is making it so powerful.
Before I go any further, let me note that the term Artificial Intelligence may cover a very broad range of endeavors. Here I am discussing a recently emergent wing of the overall AI enterprise, the wing devoted to imitating or counterfeiting actions that most human beings think of as distinctively human: conversation, image-making (through drawing, painting, or photography), and music-making.
I think what’s happening in the development of these counterfeits – and in the resistance to asking hard questions about them – is the Silicon Valley version of what the great economist Thorstein Veblen called “trained incapacity.” As Robert K. Merton explains in a famous essay on “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Veblen’s phrase describes a phenomenon identified also by John Dewey – though Dewey called it “occupational psychosis” – and by Daniel Warnotte – though Warnotte called it “Déformation professionnelle.” It is curious that this same phenomenon gets described repeatedly by our major social scientists; that suggests that it is a powerful and widespread phenomenon indeed.
Peggy Noonan recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal of the leaders of the major Silicon Valley companies,
I am sure that as individuals they have their own private ethical commitments, their own faiths perhaps. Surely as human beings they have consciences, but consciences have to be formed by something, shaped and made mature. It’s never been clear to me from their actions what shaped theirs. I have come to see them the past 40 years as, speaking generally, morally and ethically shallow—uniquely self-seeking and not at all preoccupied with potential harms done to others through their decisions. Also some are sociopaths.
I want to make a stronger argument: that the distinctive “occupational psychosis” of Silicon Valley is sociopathy – the kind of sociopathy embedded in the Oppenheimer Principle. The people in charge at Google and Meta and (outside Silicon Valley) Microsoft, and at the less well-known companies that are being used by the mega-companies, have been deformed by their profession in ways that prevent them from perceiving, acknowledging, and acting responsibly in relation to the consequences of their research. They have a trained incapacity to think morally. They are by virtue of their narrowly technical education and the strong incentives of their profession moral idiots.
The ignorance of the technocratic moral idiot is exemplified by Sam Altman of OpenAI – an increasingly typical Silicon Valley type, with a thin veneer of moral self-congratulation imperfectly obscuring a thick layer of obedience to perverse incentives. “If you’re making AI, it is potentially very good, potentially very terrible,” but “The way to get it right is to have people engage with it, explore these systems, study them, to learn how to make them safe.” He can’t even imagine that “the way to get it right” might be not to do it at all. (See Scott Alexander on the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy: We have absolutely no idea what will result from this technological development, therefore everything will be fine.) The Oppenheimer Principle trumps all.
These people aren’t going to fix themselves. As Jonathan Haidt (among others) has often pointed out – e.g. here – the big social media companies know just how much damage their platforms are doing, especially to teenage girls, but they do not care. As Justin E. H. Smith has noted, social media platforms are “inhuman by design,” and some of the big companies are tearing off the fig leaf by dissolving their ethics teams. Deepfakes featuring Donald Trump or the Pope are totally cool, but Chairman Xi gets a free pass, because … well, just follow the money.
Decisions about these matters have to be taken out of the hands of avaricious professionally-deformed sociopaths. And that’s why lawsuits like this one matter.
Last week I gave you David Hume’s Guide to Social Media; today I give you David Hume’s Guide to Today’s Politics. He’s a very useful guy, Mr. Hume.
In this post, we unpack the meaning and many works of creating and maintaining digital multiples, a term we coined in our recent ethnography, A Filtered Life, to explore the multiple, dynamic expressions of self across online contexts (Nichter and Taylor 2022). This concept emerged from our ethnographic research with more than 100 college students exploring sociality, emotional expression, and online identity work. Our methods for this study included in-depth interviews, focus groups, writing prompts, and long-term participant observation in students’ social media sites.
Colette, a college junior studying marketing at a large public university, prides herself in curating clever posts across her social media. After a difficult day, her Instagram post would feature an artsy photo of a glass of wine, using her signature colors as background. On Twitter, she would post a funny meme about getting drunk. Snapchat would show a video of her drinking the wine (since the post would disappear quickly). Colette’s Facebook post would include a short narrative about why her day was hard without any mention of wine (since her parents might see it).
Posts from one weekend include a filtered close up photo on Instagram of Colette dressed in fitted jeans and a tank top taken from a flattering birds-eye angle with the caption, “Getting ready for fun with my girls (heart emoji).” On Snapchat, her photo was a blurry image of a half-empty pizza box and several crumpled tissues on her cluttered bedside table with the caption, “Had better days.” Facebook featured a candid selfie of Colette snuggling with her golden lab on the couch with the caption, “Just a quiet night at home.”
One Thursday night, Colette posted a curated photo of herself laughing with friends in front of an iconic graffiti wall in Austin that reads, “I love you so much.” Snapchat featured her bare legs in bed with a bandage and scratch marks along with the caption, “I’m a fucking mess.” On Twitter, she retweeted a popular cartoon meme of a woman falling down stairs.
These examples from Collette’s social media illustrate the strategic presentation of self across social media contexts, a process guided by site-specific affordances, social norms, and perceived audience expectations. The term “polymedia” refers to a dynamic model which incorporates the proliferation of new social media that “each acquires its own niche in people’s communicative repertoires” (Madianou 2015, 1; see also Madianou and Miller 2013). The concept of polymedia underscores that today’s users rely on an assemblage of media to accomplish their online goals.
If we consider the multiple contexts that college students traverse without factoring in social media, impression management is complicated enough. We can imagine that a typical day for college students might include interacting with peers, co-workers and supervisors, and professors in a variety of contexts such as home, campus, parties and bars, and workplaces. Once we layer in social media contexts that overlap and integrate with those offline realms, the idea of managing one’s impression, performing appropriately for the particular platform, and segregating audiences becomes infinitely more complex. Additionally, the digital multiples that one presents on various online platforms reach diverse audiences, a factor requiring consideration in the creation of a post.
Cover of A Filtered Life, by Nicole Taylor and Mimi Nichter
Engagement with multiple online contexts is not a new area of study. Tom Boellstorff has highlighted the interconnected nature of interactional contexts, arguing that digital worlds are as real as offline worlds (Boellstorff 2016). He illustrates that what we do online affects life offline, challenging a pervasive assumption in research on technology and sociality that understands “digital” and “real” as binary opposites. We found that digital multiples necessitated fluid identities—that is, being flexible in one’s presentation of self in relation to specific contexts and social spaces. Yet, the mandate to remain consistent with online and offline presentations of self further complicated the creation of digital multiples.
Here we explore the many works involved in creating and maintaining digital multiples alongside the impossible imperative of authenticity. Maintaining digital multiples required intensive labor as college students competed for likes amidst an attention economy where the half-life of a single post was short. On the one hand, site affordances, social norms, and perceived audience expectations constrained self-presentation; on the other hand, engaging across multiple sites, each with its own unique set of cultural mandates, provided an opportunity to cultivate digital multiples.
Daniel Miller and colleagues point out that since most people now engage across multiple sites, social media has become an ecology that offers many choices for sociality, ranging from small, private exchanges to public broadcasts (Miller et al. 2016). Miller and his colleagues refer to this as scalable sociality, a term they coin to describe the interconnected nature of social media, where individuals have a range of platform choices, degrees of privacy and size of audience that they want to reach. Interactive dynamics between social media users and their audience are key for understanding digital multiples.
Sociologist Erving Goffman described social life as a theater with interactions representing the interplay between actors and their audience (Goffman 1959). Goffman contends that we are always performing to create an impression for an audience. We need an audience to see our performance and a backstage area where we can both relax and do much of the work necessary to keep up appearances (Hogan 2010). Importantly, the self is not “a fixed, organic thing but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance” (Tolentino 2019, 14). In our study, we observed that students portrayed themselves differently across social media platforms, depending on site affordances, audience expectations, and aspects of their identity they wanted to highlight.
We found that the process of constructing and maintaining digital multiples not only requires strategic tailoring by site, but also needs to be sufficiently aligned with one’s offline self and appearance to maintain an “authentic” identity. The concept of “authenticity”—revealing one’s true self—emerged as an important theme in our study. Students emphasized the importance of “being real” online as a marker of honesty, trustworthiness, and integrity. They scrutinized social media posts for signs of over-editing, a faux pau that signaled inauthenticity and elicited derision.
Among young women, authentic expression online translated into beauty practices that highlight physical appearance. The name of the game was to present both an authentic and an edited self that appeared effortlessly attractive. Successfully navigating this contradictory imperative required great skill, attention to detail, and vigilant monitoring of editing norms and feedback on posts. Men felt less pressure to post a flawlessly edited image, making it easier to achieve an appearance of authenticity. However, some still struggled with their online image and sense of self.
Both women and men were cognizant of the superficial nature of their editing practices. Students who did not edit risked critique for visible flaws and imperfections; those who did edit risked critique for being inauthentic. Successfully striking a balance between real and fake in social media was a highly valued skill and getting it right was important. This pressure underscores the importance of impressing an imagined audience, one that appears to value both perfection and authenticity, an impossible contradictory imperative.
Using social media. Image via Pexels.
Throughout A Filtered Life, we highlight the many works involved in creating and maintaining digital multiples, which include the following: editing work, the work of identity and gender performance, beauty work, emotional work, the work of remaining visible, and the work of managing social relationships. This is mostly invisible labor. Editing work, for example, is an intricate process for perfecting social media content, involving taking multiple photos, attending to angles, lighting, posture, spacing, and background, as well as editing out perceived flaws and strategically posting during peak times to attract maximum attention.
Another important work is that of identity and gender performance, shedding light on cultural prescriptions for self-presentation, which remain equally robust online as they do offline. Physical appearance, emotional expression, and lifestyle must be carefully surveilled and curated differently across contexts, yet it is important for a unifying thread of authenticity to remain intact. Under the constant surveillance of multiple imagined audiences, some were able to maintain the appearance of a seemingly “natural” aesthetic despite the tremendous effort required to produce content so that the “look” of their posts was eye-catching.
Beauty work describes the imperative to post your most attractive self and the production process required to achieve such perfection, including the work of micro-targeting each body part to discover and then conceal one’s flaws. In this process, social media practices are shaped by viewer expectations and site-specific conventions, as they converge with an online social milieu that values maximum visibility, adherence to cultural and gendered beauty norms, and promotion of the self as a recognizable brand image.
Students engaged in the emotional work of anticipating audience desires and developing tailored content across sites designed to get as many likes and positive comments as possible, vigilantly monitoring feedback on posts, and the emotional vicissitudes of counting likes and reading comments. Emotional work also included the imperative to always portray a happy, upbeat self and package one’s sad or angry emotions in socially acceptable ways, which differed by site. In this way, students needed to carefully produce and manage their emotional state.
The work of remaining visible by posting regularly was also important. Posting infrequently suggested a lack of social life. Students worried that if they did not post frequently friends would forget them. Being online constantly and seeing other people’s posts of how they were living their best life often resulted in frustration and jealousy, especially when comparing your own life to that of people in your friend network who seemed to “have it all.”
Finally, the work of managing social relationships involved scrolling through sites and liking others’ posts. Students said it was especially important to like the posts of friends who regularly liked their posts. It was common for a student to call out their closest friends for failing to reciprocate in this way. The timing of a like was important as well. Being the first to like a post signaled a sense of desperation; conversely, students said it was strange to get a like on an old post, explaining that it could signal a sudden and intense focus on them. Through the lens of these various works, we can see how the creation and maintenance of digital multiples becomes infinitely more complex and labor intensive.
The title of our ethnography, A Filtered Life, is multi-layered in meaning. On the most obvious level, it refers to the use of filters available on many platforms to alter and enhance one’s physical appearance and the background of an image. Beyond this interpretation, filters are a metaphor for strategically repackaging the self on different sites. Filtering the self is about every aspect of self-presentation, from the aesthetic of a person’s feed and their physical appearance to the personality characteristics and lifestyle they want to convey. Yet, all of this is bounded by a generational desire to remain authentic, meaning that there are limits to strategic self-expression online. Collette, like others in our study, carefully walked the fine line of achieving the impossible imperative of maintaining both filtered and authentic digital multiples.
The maintenance of digital multiples across online spaces—each with their own set of rules, editorial mandates, and audience expectations—intensified identity work. Everyone knew images they saw online were heavily cultivated, yet many students worked hard to perfect the ability to mask their editorial efforts in an image that appeared natural and effortless. While this editorial tight rope was stressful to navigate, students took pride in cultivating their skills and enjoyed the positive feedback from others when they got it right.
On the one hand, students expressed cynicism and frustration with social media—they struggled with the seeming inauthenticity of editing and self-presentation imperatives. On the other hand, students enjoyed the creative freedom to play with their identities, from the more superficial elements of fashion and physical appearance to deeper aspects of emotional expression and authentic self-presentation. As we look toward the future, it will be important for research to explore how the production of digital multiples shifts after college as young adults take on different roles and responsibilities.
Boellstorff, Tom. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57(4): 387-407.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Hogan, Bernie. 2010. “The presentation of self in the age of social media: Distinguishing performances and exhibitions online.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30(6): 377-386.
Madianou, Mirca. 2015. “Polymedia and Ethnography: Understanding the Social in Social Media.” Social Media + Society, (April – June): 1-3.
Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller. 2013. “Polymedia: Towards a New Theory of Digital Media in Interpersonal Communication.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(2): 169-187.
Miller, Daniel, Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman, and Xinyuan Wang. 2016. How the World Changed Social Media. Vol. 1. London: UCL Press.
Taylor, Nicole and Mimi Nichter. 2022. A Filtered Life: Social Media on a College Campus. New York: Routledge.
Tolentino, Jia. 2019. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. New York: Random House.
This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student Trenton Andrew Sewell
Social Media Companies (SMCs) should use artificial intelligence (‘AI’) to automate content moderation (‘CM’) presuming they meet two kinds of conditions. Firstly, ‘End Conditions’ (‘ECs’) which restrict what content is moderated. Secondly, ‘Means Conditions’ (‘MCs’) which restrict how moderation occurs.
This essay focuses on MCs. Assuming some form of moderation is permissible, I will discuss how/whether SMCs should use AI to moderate. To this end, I outline CM AI should respect users ‘moral agency’ (‘MA’) through transparency, clarity, and providing an option to appeal the AI’s judgment. I then address whether AI failing to respect MA proscribes its use. It does not. SMCs are permitted[1] to use AI, despite procedural failures, to discharge substantive obligations to users and owners.
This essay will demonstrate that:
1) Respect for user’s MA entails SMCs should use AI in a:
a. Transparent, reason-giving way,
b. Based on clear rules and,
c. With an option for appeal.
2) But failing to meet these standards does not proscribe using AI. It is a necessary means of discharging important obligations.
Ideal CM AI
People have rights we should respect. This cred is the basis of this essay. However, rights include substantive rights such as to expression. Here, I am presuming that any moderated content is a legitimate target. Hence, moderating this content simpliciter does not violate users’ rights because SMCs could permissibly moderate the post/user.
The question that remains is what ‘procedural-rights’ users possess. How should SMCs respect users whilst moderating? Here, I address the procedural-rights users have because of their ‘moral agency’ (‘MA’).
MA is the capacity of an agent to understand moral reasons. Respecting the dignity of a person involves treating them as a moral-agent[2]. This requires engagement in moral reasoning[3]. Moral reasoning is the process of giving reasons concerning the justification of an act. Engagement in moral reasoning acknowledges one’s MA and dignity – a basic Kantian requirement[4].
Applying MA to Moderation
Moderation is akin to punishment. H.L.A Hart defined punishment “in terms of five elements:
1. …consequences…considered unpleasant.
2. …for an offence against…rules.
3. …of an…offender for his offence.
4. …intentionally administered by [another] and
5. …administered by an authority constituted by the…system.”[5]
Moderation removes posts and restricts access to platform features which is unpleasant. It occurs to ‘offenders’ for breaching the community guidelines. It is intentionally administered by SMCs which created authorities who impose moderation. It satisfies Hart’s 5 elements.
If moderation is punishment, then respecting MA in the process of moderation will be similar to respecting MA in the process of criminal punishment. That involves giving reasons why the act/offence was wrongful, and why the response to the act/offence was just.[6]
Hence, SMCs respect users’ MA whilst moderating if they:
1) Provide moral reasons to users why they ought not post certain content and;
2) Provide moral reasons to users why they are moderating[7]
SMCs should give users reasons why the guidelines were violated, and why moderation was the right response. CM AI must be, in other words, transparent[8].
Respect for MA requires more than granting reasons. It requires the option of appealing an AI’s judgement to a human moderator.
“Penalizing someone for violating the rules…reasserts our shared values…calling something hate speech…is a….performative assertion that something should be treated as hate speech and…undoubtedly, it will be disagreed with” [9].
Users should be free to question whether such an assertion is an accurate representation of the guidelines. A moral-agent is also a giver, not merely a receiver, of reasons. To engage in the moral reasoning which respects one’s MA, SMCs should give users the option to justify their post.
Furthermore, to respect users, AI should use rules which are prospectively clear. Respecting people as moral-agents is to regard them as able to follow rules they are aware of[10]. Part of what legitimizes punishment is that the user could have complied with the rule.
To respect users as moral-agents, AI should facilitate users’ compliance with rules. CM AI should be:
i) Based on rules;
ii) Which are published;
iii) Prospective,
iv) Intelligible;
v) Free from contradiction;
vi) Possible to follow;
vii) Not constantly changing and;
viii) With congruence between the rule and official actions.[11]
If CM AI satisfies these eight principles, then it respects users by recognizing their MA and furthermore, providing rational freedom.
Moral-agents should not face ‘bolts-from-the-blue’. Their freedom should not be dependant on an AI’s whims. The guidelines that the AI follows should allow users to know whether they are in, and avoid, non-compliance.
This prospective clarity enhances the morality of CM AI by providing ‘freedom from domination’:
“[freedom] is not…the availability of…choices. It is conceivable that a free man might have fewer options…than a slave…[But] we think of slavery as the…embodiment of unfreedom…because…the conditions under which he enjoys…options…are…dependant upon the will of the master.”[12]
Clear rules liberate one from dependence/domination. A user’s freedom is not dependant on the SMC but rather, on the rules which equally constrain moderators.
But why accept that ‘punishment’ by SMCs should respect moral agency? State punishment of crimes might need to – but why content moderation?
Because all should respect each other as moral agents. To do otherwise is to disrespect our dignity. Insofar as moral agency is only consistent with certain procedures of punishment by the state, I see no reason why (as an ideal matter) it would impose fundamentally different requires on punishment by family, friends, strangers, or crucially here – SMCs.
In summary:
Moderation is punishment. To respect MA whilst punishing, SMCs must use transparent AI which gives users reasons to justify SMCs’ response. Furthermore, respecting MA requires that AI decisions are appealable to a human moderator. This provides the opportunity for moral discourse which further respects MA. Lastly, respecting MA requires that the AI’s decisions allow the user to prospectively avoid non-compliance.
Unideal AI?
Whilst the prior section explored how a CM AI can respect user’s MA, it neglected two questions. Does CM AI currently respect MA? If it does not, should SMCs continue to use AI which violates procedural rights?
The answer to the first question is no. “A common critique of automated decision making is the…lack of transparency…[It is]…difficult to decipher…the specific criteria by which…decisions were made”[13]. Furthermore, systems of appeal, such as Facebook’s “Supreme Court”, are available to very few users[14]. Finally, users report not knowing when they will be moderated, leading to confusion, and anger[15].
The answer to the second question – should SMCs use unideal AI – is complicated.
One could answer: if MA should be respected, then SMCs are not at liberty to use CM AI unless it respects user’s MA. In short, if CM AI is not transparent, appealable, and prospectively clear, it should not be used.
This view is flawed because SMCs do not only have process obligations. They have substantive obligations to their users and owners.
For its users, SMCs could be obligated to prevent the spread of toxic content, terrorist propaganda or child exploitation. To do otherwise is to become complicit. Christopher Bennet explained this complicity, and its corollary obligations, as resulting from ‘normative control’: “control over whether the…act is done with permission or not”[16]. The wrong done by “a car owner who permits another to engage in reckless… [driving]…[is]…that the owner could and should have…withdrawn his consent”[17]. SMCs can – through moderation – to determine whether an act is ‘permissible or impermissible’. “[W]herever [SMCs] [do] not mark some act as impermissible, it regards it as permissible…It can be complicit in allowing…acts to be permissible where it should have made them impermissible…complicity…comes about through a failure to [moderate]”[18]. SMCs have an obligation to its users to moderate content (the scope of which is a matter for later investigation).
Furthermore, SMCs have shareholders/investors. “A corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make…money”[19]. When an agent is managing money belonging to another, we traditionally accept she is obliged to act with regard for the principal’s interests. Those same obligations bind all SMCs baring those which are owner operated[20].
These substantive obligations answer whether SMCs should use imperfect AI, because using CM AI is crucial for discharging of these duties. Even if AI is imperfect, SMCs are obliged to use it for CM; CM AI is needed to SMC’s obligations to different stakeholders.
Given SMCs’ size general size, CM requires AI. Yan LeCunn – Facebook’s chief AI scientist – has stated that: “Without AI there would not be any possibility of…speech filtering, detecting harassment, child exploitation, or terrorist propaganda”[21]. To adequately meet SMCs’ substantive obligations to not be complicit in certain harmful conduct, SMCs needs to use AI.
A potential response is that it is “size…that makes automation seem necessary… [and]…size can be changed”[22]. Specifically, “if moderation is…overwhelming at…scale, it should be understood as a limiting factor on…growth”[23]. SMCs should accept making less profit to reduce the need for CM AI.
However, this neglects their obligations to owners. Even if SMC could make moderation respect users MA by setting growth aside, they would breach their fiduciary obligations to owners. Furthermore, SMCs are under pressure to moderate from the public. Not moderating could result in a harm to their brand, ability to recruit talent etc. Moderation is likely in owner’s interests.
Not using CM AI would result in SMCs failing their substantive obligations to either its users, its owners, or more likely both. Yet, one could say that if a ‘right’ to be recognized as moral-agent exists, SMCs should not violate it. Procedural-rights are side-constraints which requires not using imperfect AI. What this neglects is that X being a right does not mean it is of equal importance to right Y. If all obligations cannot be simultaneous met, then choices must be made about which obligations should be unfulfilled.
I would contend that procedural-rights in CM are some of SMCs’ least important obligations. Users who have posted content eligible to moderation are the reason a trade-off of rights is necessary. If they had not done wrong, then the SMC would not need to decide whether to respect their procedural-rights or the substantive rights of its users or owners. If a set amount of cost must be imposed, then it seems appropriate to apply that cost upon the individual most responsible – the user being moderated[24]. Since not using CM AI would result in SMCs failing their substantive obligations, and these obligations are more important, procedural obligations cease to really matter. Human moderation is not feasible, and imperfect CM AI is preferable to no moderation at all. SMCs should use AI because it discharges their more important duties. Nevertheless, insofar as SMCs can improve their CM AI to bring it closer to the ideal, they are obliged to do so. It should work towards the ideal but not let it be the enemy of the good or necessary.
Conclusion
Social Media Companies should use artificial intelligence to automate content moderation. The use of this technology is needed to meet SMCs’ substantive obligations to their users and owners. That means that the conditions under which it should be used are broad. Even if, AI moderation does not respect user’s moral agency, it should still be used. Nevertheless, where possible, SMCs should work to bring its AI moderation more in line with an ideal of respect. This Ideal AI Content Moderation would be transparent (capable of giving users the reasons which underpin the moderation decision) with an option to appeal to a human moderator (as a recognition of the two-sided nature of moral reasoning). Furthermore, the AI should operate on clear, prospective, and reasonably predictable rules such that users are given a freedom from domination and are spared from moderation happening like a ‘bolt-from-the-blue’.
AI moderation is a necessity for SMCs.
They should use AI moderation to meet their substantive obligations whilst striving for the procedural ideal.
Notes:
[1] Perhaps obliged.
[2] (Strawson, 1962).
[3] (Hirsch, 1993).
[4] (Jacobs, 2019, p. 29) (Seelmann, 2014).
[5] (Hart, 2008, pp. 5-6).
[6] (Edwards & Simester, 2014) (von Hirsch A. , 1992).
[7] (Edwards & Simester, 2014, p. 64).
[8] (Suzor & Etal, 2019).
[9] (Gillespie, 2020, p. 3).
[10] (von Hirsch & Hörnle, 1995).
[11] (Fuller, 1969, p. 39) (Simmonds, 2007, p. 64).
[12] (Simmonds, 2007, p. 101).
[13] (Gorwa & et.al, 2020, p. 11) (Burrell, 2016).
[14] (Kelion, 2020).
[15] (West, 2018).
[16] (Bennett, 2019, pp. 78-81).
[17] Ibid (p. 81).
[18] Ibid.
[19] (Friedman, 1970).
[20] There is thus an interesting question about how these obligations could apply to Twitter post Elon’s takeover.
[21] (LeCunn, 2020).
[22] (Gillespie, 2020, p. 4).
[23] Ibid.
[24] (McMahan, 2005) (Øverland, 2014).
Works Cited
Bennett, C. (2019). How Should We Argue for a Censure Theory of Punishment? In A. du Bois-Pedain, & A. Bottoms, Penal Censure (pp. 67-86). Hart Publishing.
Burrell, J. (2016). How the machine ‘thinks’: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms. Big Data & Society, 1-16.
Cohen-Almagor, R. (2015). Confronting the internet’s dark side: moral and social responsibility on the free highway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edwards, J., & Simester, A. (2014). Prevention with a Moral Voice. In A. Simester, A. Du Bois-Pedain, & U. Neumann, Liberal Criminal Theory (pp. 43-65). Hart Publishing.
Friedman, M. (1970, September 13). The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. New York Times.
Fuller, L. (1969). The Morality of Law. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gillespie, T. (2020). Content moderation, AI, and the question of scale. Big Data & Society, 1-5.
Gorwa, R., & et.al. (2020). Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform goverance. Big Data & Society, 1-15.
Günther, K. (2014). Crime and Punishment as Communication. In A. du Bois-Pedain, A. Simester, & U. Neumann, Liberal Criminal Theory (pp. 123-140). Hart Publishing.
Hart, H. (2008). Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law. Oxford University Press.
Hirsch, A. v. (1993). Censure and Sanctions. Oxford University Press.
Jacobs, J. (2019). Censure, Sanction and the Moral Psychology of Resentment. In A. du Bois-Pedain, & A. Bottoms, Penal Censure (pp. 19-40). Hart Publishing.
Kelion, L. (2020, September 24). Facebook ‘Supreme Court’ to begin work before US Presidential vote. Retrieved from BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54278788
LeCunn, Y. (2020, June). Deep learning, neural networks and the future of AI. (C. Anderson, Interviewer)
McMahan, J. (2005). Self-Defense and Culpability. Law and Philosophy, 751–774.
Øverland, G. (2014). Moral Obstacles: An Alternative to the Doctrine of Double Effect. Ethics, 481-506.
Seelmann, K. (2014). Does Punishment Honour the Offender? In A. Du Bois-Pedain, A. Simister, & U. Neumann, Liberal Criminal Theory (pp. 111-121). Hart Publishing.
Simmonds, N. (2007). Law as a Moral Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strawson, P. (1962). Freedom and Resentment. Retrieved from UCL: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwstrawson1.htm
Suzor, N. P., & etal. (2019). What Do We Mean When We Talk About Transparency? Toward Meaningful Transparency in Commerical Content Moderation. International Journal of Communication, 1526-1543.
von Hirsch, A. (1992). Proportionalty in the Philosophy of Punishment. Crime and Justice, 16, 55-98.
von Hirsch, A., & Hӧrnle, T. (1995). Postive Generalpravention und Tadel. Goltdammer’s Archiv fur Strafrecht, 142.
West, S. M. (2018). Censored, suspended, shadowbanned: User interpretations of content moderation on social media platforms. New Media and Society, 4366-4383.
This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by Kyle van Oosterum, University of Oxford student
Section 1 – Introduction
Many of us are part of or aware of the existence of widespread echo chambers on social media. Echo chambers seem concerning because their members are led to believe bizarre things and disagree viciously with others. For example, some people genuinely believe the Earth is flat. Others disagree about basic political reality as we saw with those who stormed the U.S. Capital on January 6th 2021 and, more recently, the Brazilian congress. A great deal of this may be attributable to the way social media algorithmically sorts us into echo chambers. However, this sorting is partly so effective because we have not become disposed to exit echo chambers or deal well with the individuals who inhabit them. Even if we change these algorithms, we may also need to change our dispositions to better deal with these individuals.
In this paper, I argue that Confucius’ ideal of harmony provides us with practical dispositions that help with the problems posed by echo chambers. In brief, my view is that echo chambers threaten our social relationships which can undermine social stability. As such, maintaining social stability may require managing these social relationships. Confucius’ ideas are well-suited to making these points.
To that end, I start by briefly defining what echo chambers are (Section 2). I then introduce Confucius’ idea of harmony and how it helps diagnose what is wrong with echo chambers (Section 3) and prescribes how we can live harmoniously with echo-chambered individuals (Section 4).
Section 2 – What is an Echo Chamber?
The concept of an ‘echo chamber’ is still being figured out in academic circles. However, almost all philosophers and non-philosophers agree there is something wrong with being in an echo chamber.[1] If we suggest a person is in an echo chamber, this is usually meant as a criticism either of what they believe or how they have come to believe it. This might be quite obvious, but it raises an interesting question about people in echo chambers. Why would people be part of something that they know is wrong or problematic?
My explanation for this starts from the observation that people in echo chambers probably do not think there is anything wrong with the environment they are in. In fact, given how confident people in echo chambers tend to be, they will think they have joined (or remained in) the echo chamber for good reasons. Perhaps they think they are more likely to discover the truth about something, so they join the echo chamber to obtain knowledge. Alternatively, they may join the echo chamber to obtain the good of a community who share their values. These are perfectly good reasons that motivate much human behavior. However, given our shared fallibility, we sometimes make mistakes in pursuit of what we think is good. I think this last point is crucial for understanding what echo chambers are. An echo chamber looks like the kind of social environment in which goods like knowledge or community can be obtained, but, in reality, they frustrate our access to these goods. In other words, they are troubling social environments that are parasitic on ones from which we can obtain certain goods. This squares well with what we think of a typical echo chamber member. Despite their efforts, they tend to have false beliefs and viciously dislike people who do not share their beliefs and values. In short, from understanding why individuals join these environments – to pursue goods they think they will achieve – we get a better understanding of what echo chambers are.
Section 3 – Introducing Harmony
Harmony or 和 (pronounced ‘her’) is a crucial concept in Confucian thought rendered in different ways over time and by different thinkers (Li, 2008). In keeping with the methods of the Confucian tradition, the concept of harmony is best illuminated with an analogy. The oldest analogy relies on the similarity between governing harmoniously and making a good soup. When one makes a soup, there are a variety of ingredients that one needs to add and different quantities of each ingredient must be added carefully to achieve a dish that is balanced in flavor. Similarly, a ruler should solicit many different points of view on what an acceptable policy is and take note of the dissenting and approving verdicts and determine an optimal balance of preferences. ‘Harmony’ is explicitly referred to in Analects 13.23:
The Master said, “The gentleman harmonizes without being an echo. The petty man echoes and does not harmonize.” (Confucius, 2014: 13.23).
The thing to avoid in making soup, ruling a country, or trying to reconcile different things that are in tension is to have too much ‘echoing’ or ‘sameness’. For example, having too much of the same opinion in government or having too much of the same ingredient in a soup. The problem with this, to reference an ancient Chinese thinker, is that “this is like trying to improve the taste of water with more water. Who would want that?” (Confucius, 2014: ‘Commentary on 13.23’). Harmony in the broadest sense is a process by which different things are brought together into a constructive whole (Wong 2020). In this context, I will work with harmony as a moral ideal which implores us to reconcile our inevitable differences with other people in a constructive manner and without conforming to what others believe or how they act.
The ideal of harmony sheds light on the problem of echo chambers. Whether we are in or exposed to them, echo chambers show us individuals with whom we viciously disagree yet must co-exist. Their members ‘echo’ each other too much and those outside the echo chamber become too frustrated or bitter to try to break up these echoes. Over time, echo chambers cause damage to these interpersonal relationships and to the prospect of managing our differences with others. Research by political scientists confirms these ideas; people are far too polarized around their partisan political views and continually told their ideological opponents are not to be trusted (Jamieson and Capella, 2008; McCarthy, 2019; Nguyen, 2020). This is a familiar problem and Confucius recognized a version of it, though perhaps not remotely on the same scale as today. Nevertheless, Confucius would urge that we manage the delicate relationships we have with others – relationships to our family, friends, and civic peers – to which echo chambers cause much damage. Why must we learn to do this? Insofar as we are interested in maintaining social stability, we can work on maintaining the social relationships that together constitute a society. As such, harmony offers a plausible way of diagnosing the echo chamber as partly one of fractured moral relationships with one another, which, over time, may threaten social stability.
Section 4 – Harmonizing with Others
So far, we know that harmony is a kind of moral ideal or standard, but it is not yet clear how we ought to harmonize with others. Which actions or which ways of acting count as satisfying the standard of harmony? Confucius does not offer direct advice on this question, but David Wong (2020, MS) suggests that harmony can be elaborated through the idea of accommodation. Accommodation is a moral value whose emphasis is on maintaining a constructive relationship – of respect and concern – in the face of continuing disagreement. It comes into play because societies, in their best attempts to maintain convergence on moral values and ideas, will nevertheless disagree on how to interpret the weight of their shared values and how those values interact when they conflict (Wong, 1992). Human life is marked by significant disagreement and to accommodate is to live with such disagreement rather than seek, unsuccessfully, to dissolve it.
Accommodating others involves three things. First, it involves having an epistemic openness to the possibility of expanding one’s view of the good life or at least trying to understand other ways of life. Second, it involves a tactfulness to act on your moral opinions and values in ways that aim to minimize damage to your relationships with others who have opposed views. Third, it involves amenability. This is the willingness to compromise on what we hope to gain for our moral views for the sake of sustaining relationships with disagreeing others (Wong 2020: 133). Accommodation is key to living harmoniously with others, but does it help us deal with echo chambered individuals? I will argue that it does.
The value of epistemic openness is readily seen when dealing with run-of-the-mill echo chambers containing political partisans. Some philosophers have argued that the chances that one will be right about everything are often very slim (Joshi, 2020). When one is a stubborn political partisan and, I would argue this is true of echo-chambered individuals, one believes those outside the echo chamber are systematically getting things wrong. This is a belief that it will be hard to find a rational justification for. To move forward will involve being epistemically curious and being genuinely prepared to change one’s mind, which may help others become open and curious to make such changes too.
Openness does not always require one to change one’s moral beliefs for these may be foundational to one’s identity. But the importance of our moral beliefs and values does not entitle us to insult or denigrate those who oppose us in attempts to ‘score points’ for our views. This is unfortunately how much discourse in echo chambers and social media in general takes place. Just as we would hope that others not denigrate our views, exercising a similar tactfulness towards them builds the relationship within which these difficult conversations can take place. Relatedly, the familiar injunction to ‘pick one’s battles’ becomes relevant here too – never being amenable frustrates the relationships with these disagreeing others and robs us of the potential to find some degree of harmony. In short, harmony recommends we become disposed to being open, tactful, and amenable in accommodating those with whom we disagree. As such, it is a useful prescription for dealing with echo-chambered individuals with whom we encounter serious disagreement.
Of course, one might doubt whether harmony requires us to be open, tactful, and amenable with echo chamber members whose views are beyond the pale. I am referring to the ones that espouse controversial conspiracy theories and morally offensive political ideologies. The temptation may be either to ignore or ‘force’ such individuals to change their mind. Even in these cases, I argue one should maintain their epistemically open disposition. It is likely those individuals are mistaken about the good life, but curiosity and tactful question-asking may help them become aware of the implications and difficulties of holding their beliefs. Empirical evidence in psychology suggests this approach may nurture their motivation to change their mind, which may be more effective than acting on the temptations above (Itzchakov et al., 2018; Wong, MS). More to the point, taking this step does not foreclose the opportunity of living harmoniously.
However, missing from this is the element of courage one needs to harmonize with others. This is especially true in online environments where much disagreement takes place that is fueled by echo chambers. Acting in a harmonious manner is demanding, the gains are often not visible to us and the costs are unpleasant and even dispiriting. As a result, harmonizing with disagreeing others – whether in Confucius’ time or ours – must involve some degree of courage to be open, tactful, and amenable in the face of these obstacles.
Conclusion
I have argued that Confucius’ notion of harmony offers (i) a diagnosis of why echo chambers are problematic and a (ii) prescription for how to manage our social relationships with echo-chambered individuals through openness, tactfulness, amenability, and courage.
This prescription highlights the final point that I want to make, namely, that the problem with echo chambers is not only an epistemic one to do with what people believe. As I hope to have shown, the problem is also profoundly ethical. It is equally about what we owe to our disagreeing others and how we can relate to them better. Confucius’ ideas practically orient us toward managing these social relationships, the flourishing of which contributes to a stable society where people can co-exist despite persistent disagreement.
—
Notes:
[1] Well, not every philosopher agrees with this, see Lackey, 2018; Elzinga, 2020; Fantl, 2021. However, that is not unique to this issue.
References
Confucius (2014) The Analects (Lunyu): Translated with an introduction and Commentary by Annping Chin. Translated by A. Chin. New York: Penguin Books.
Elzinga, B. (2020) ‘Echo Chambers and Audio Signal Processing’, Episteme, pp. 1–21. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2020.33.
Fantl, J. (2021) ‘Fake News vs. Echo Chambers’, Social Epistemology, 35(6), pp. 645–659. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2021.1946201.
Itzchakov, G. et al. (2018) ‘The Listener Sets the Tone: High-Quality Listening Increases Attitude Clarity and Behavior-Intention Consequences’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(5), pp. 762–778. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217747874.
Jamieson, K.H. and Capella, J. (2008) Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Joshi, H. (2020) ‘What are the chances you’re right about everything? An epistemic challenge for modern partisanship’, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 19(1), pp. 36–61. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X20901346.
Lackey, J. (2018) ‘True Story: Echo Chambers are not the Problem’, Morning Consult. Available at: https://morningconsult.com/opinions/true-story-echo-chambers-not-problem/.
Li, C. (2008) ‘The Philosophy of Harmony in Classical Confucianism’, Philosophy Compass, 3(3), pp. 423–435. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00141.x.
McCarthy, N. (2019) Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nguyen, C.T. (2020) ‘Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles’, Episteme, 17(2), pp. 141–161.
Wong, D.B. (1992) ‘Coping with Moral Conflict and Ambiguity’, Ethics, 102(4), pp. 763–784. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/293447.
Wong, D.B. (2020) ‘Soup, Harmony, and Disagreement’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 6(2), pp. 139–155. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2018.46.
Wong, D.B. (MS) ‘Metaphor and Analogy in Early Chinese Thought: Governance within the Person, State and Society’.
This brings me to the most embarrassing reason I stayed on social media for so long: ego. I genuinely believed that my posts, tweets, likes, and retweets and the blue check mark on my account actually meant something, that all the followers I’d amassed proved that I was worthy and important. I also embraced the delusion that social media was vital to my personal and professional success as a writer and activist. Without it, I was sure I’d miss out on parties, protests, and publishing contracts. Yet an honest accounting forced me to admit that my ability to party, protest, and publish has been far more enfeebled than enabled by social media. In short, I haven’t built my career on posts, tweets, and feeds. I’ve built it on books, essays, and speeches. And I haven’t built my strongest communities on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I’ve built them on porches, around firepits, and under the stars.
In 2013, Google shut down its celebrated RSS client, Google Reader, citing a decline in RSS usage. Today, millions of people still use RSS readers, but many times more use social-media sites and don’t even know that RSS exists. This imbalance means that media outlets and other content providers have greater incentive to invest in social-media infrastructure rather than RSS support, leading some to drop the latter entirely. But though the internet’s creative output deserves our attention, social-media companies do not. When the primary way we read online is filtered through the algorithms of capricious corporations that can change what we see on a whim, both writers and readers suffer. RSS is a reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Long-time readers know that I’ve been preaching this message for years and years (see the “RSS” tag at the bottom of this post). If you don’t believe me maybe you’ll believe Yair.
One thought about that incredibly creepy Snapchat TV ad — so creepy that I’m not even going to link to it — the interesting thing to me about it is not, in fact, the creepiness, it’s the fact that the big selling point is using augmented reality to deprive the people around you of their own faces and substitute faces (human, animal, vegetable, whatever) you prefer. It’s not accidental, I think, that the ad is set in a subway car, because public transportation confronts you with the plain old humanity of those you live among. Snapchat, the ad says, can relieve you of the burden of living among other human beings. It’s an ad made by sociopaths for sociopaths.
Imagine if the Supreme Court threw caution to the wind and radically rolled back Section 230 protections; to the point where it became legally unviable to operate any sort of major platform that harvests attention using algorithmic-curation of user-generated content. In this thought experiment, Facebook disappears, along with Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, and even YouTube.
This certainly would devastate the tech sector for a while. It would also hurt the portfolios of those invested in these companies. But what would the impact be on the average internet user? It might not actually be so bad.
I would quaver a bit at the loss of YouTube, but … okay. You’ve got a deal. Sign me up.
The metaverse heralds an age in which hardly anyone still believes that tech firms can actually solve our problems.
After years of the NBA being the most Extremely Online sports league on the planet, the chickens are coming home to roost. ESPN hot takes, podcasts, halftime shows — no matter the medium or the source, players are feeling some kind of way about the scrutiny they’re under. Sure, Alex Wong’s dispatch might be a little inside-baseballbasketball for non-fans, but it’s breezy and distillative enough that you’ll leave with some sense of what the r/nba obsessives among us live with every single day.
Welcome to the NBA’s generational wars, where today’s terminally online athletes are fed up with seeing every detail of their lives analyzed under a microscope. Unlike other, less permissive sports leagues, the NBA has long embraced the amplifying powers of social media—from its early embrace of Instagram recappers like @HouseOfHighlights to its cultivation of NBA Twitter—but now we find ourselves at an inflection point, and its young stars are fed up and lashing out.
FreshRSS 
