Digital Universe. Peter B. Seel
us prisoners of the here and now.” In other words, the never-ending 24/7 cycles of constantly “breaking” news and constant social media posts provide little respite from the tidal wave of information accessed on our mobile devices and at home. He cites Canadian media theorist Harold Innis as predicting that modern communication technology would make society “‘present-minded’ and unable to focus on anything except what is happening right now.”8 (see Chapter 7 for more on Innis, telecommunication, and empires). Anyone who has social media alerts transmitted to their mobile phones or their office computers is intimately familiar with the distractions they cause. Table 1.1 charts the global diffusion of social media since 2002.
Table 1.1 The global diffusion of social media since 2002
| Site | Year widely available online | Founders | Active monthly users (2020) | Employees (2020) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn * | 2002 | Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Jean-Luc Valliant, Eric Ly | 772 million | 15,800 |
| 2006 | Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Noah Glass, Biz Stone | 321 million | 4,600 | |
| 2006 | Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes | 2.7 billion | 52,534 | |
| WhatsApp ** | 2009 | Jan Koum, Brian Acton | 2 billion | ** |
| Instagram ** | 2010 | Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger | 1 billion | 5,275 |
| Snapchat | 2011 | Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, Reggie Brown | 238 million | 2,734 |
| Tik Tok | 2016 | ByteDance – Zhang Yiming | 800 million | 6,500 |
| * LinkedIn was purchased by Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2 billion. ** Now owned by Facebook. WhatsApp employees are included in Facebook’s count. | ||||
These digital tools have provided the potential for a type of super-human intelligence due to the relatively easy 24/7 online access to all types of information. The connected human being in this “Age of Awareness” can have intellectual “super-powers” by knowing which questions to ask – and when to ask them. This type of omniscience has been a dream of humans since the advent of fire as a cooking technology. It came into clearer focus with the invention of instantaneous communication in the form of the telegraph and the telephone. Knowing where and how to search for information by asking carefully targeted questions will be a key aspect of what it means to be an educated person.
In this era of universal online access to all types of information, becoming an “educated” human being is much less about memorization of facts, than it is about understanding how to interpret the “tidal wave” of data generated by our searches and requests. It will also involve learning how to separate facts from fiction in this new age of intentional disinformation. One month after the 2020 US election won by Joseph Biden as president and Kamala Harris as vice president, 68 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump believed that the election was stolen from him.9 After more than 60 judges ruled in multiple election-related lawsuits that there was no fraud committed, Trump still insisted that he was the rightful winner. These repeated assertions in social media were a contributing factor to the assault on the US Capitol by an angry mob on 6 January 2021 after Trump urged them to do so during a nearby rally. Many were captured on mobile phone videos shouting “stop the steal” as they smashed windows and doors and rampaged through the Capitol building, halting the proceedings of the House of Representatives and the Senate who were certifying Biden as the winner of the election. The rioters had been goaded at the rally to halt the Congressional proceedings by the president, his son, Donald Trump Jr., and his attorney, Rudolph Giuliani. The rally had been promoted for weeks in advance utilizing social media, especially through the president’s Twitter page, @realdonaldtrump. Trump had urged his supporters to attend and protest the alleged theft of the election stating, “Be there, will be wild!”10 After the riot caused seven deaths and extensive damage to the capitol, social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat took the extraordinary step of permanently shutting down Trump’s sites, claiming that they were inciting violence.11 As privately owned communication channels, they had this right, but multiple observers noted that this was like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. They stated that social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook should accept responsibility for their roles in helping far-right groups in organizing the assault on the Capitol and spreading the falsehoods that motivated the rioters. Journalist Giovanni Russonello summed up this critique in an opinion article published five days after the riot:
Trump came to power by exploiting the flawed incentives built into social media platforms: their promotion of outrage over reasoned discussion, their emphasis on personality over substance, and their unwillingness to monitor the information being shared.12
Social media sites have claimed that they are a conduit for the free expression of ideas and should not have to censor their user’s posted content. However, the excesses of the Trump presidency and his failure to accept his loss of the 2020 election led to the riot in Washington. The role of social media in Trump’s election, presidency, and fall from power makes a fascinating case study for the Tao of Technology. We tout the arrival of new communication technologies as new channels of free speech and expression – but only after their widespread adoption do we come to understand their negative potential for spreading misinformation and outright lies. The process of separating fact from fiction (or lies) online is enhanced at present by the dramatic expansion in the number of information search tools netizens can access.
Polarization and Division in the Digital Universe
This begs the question as to why there is so much rancor, polarization, and misinformation online. Some of it is intentional, planted there by government agents such as the Russian “Internet Research Agency” cyberwarfare unit, which took legitimate social posts and modified them with exaggerated messages, both to create division in the British debate over the “Brexit” from the European Union, and to affect the 2016 presidential election in