The Blind Giant (23 page)

So deindividuation is a huge phenomenon: a societal force, a shaper of revolutions and of horrors. It is also attributed to situations where individuals feel downward pressure and stress upon them that they cannot sustain; the self melts into the larger group as a defence against a situation that it does not understand and in which the individual feels there is no right course, no survival strategy. In other words, it’s an aspect of how people living under regimes that have no compunction about torturing and killing dissenters cope, and how they eventually come out of the
shadows and rebel, despite knowing objectively that many of them will probably die. They become part of something larger, and that larger entity is angry and cannot effectively be punished or destroyed.

The same force is also at work, apparently, in the way people act online. Anonymized and disconnected (in the face-to-face sense) from the people with whom they interact, Internet users can become spiteful and splenetic to a degree that would never be permitted in a physical social context, or, if it were, it would be profoundly uncomfortable and might devolve into violence. This can be seen as another aspect of the crowd phenomenon: self-reinforcing certainties unchecked by social brakes derived from actual presence.

French psychologist
Gustave Le Bon proposed at the end of the nineteenth century that this kind of anonymity resulted automatically in a kind of lowest common denominator of human behaviour, a disinhibition. (Eben Moglen would no doubt counter that anonymity, and perhaps that very disinhibition, is a vital aspect of the liberty of the individual. If you feel there may be adverse consequences to expressing your opinion, your free speech is muffled and democracy suffers – as indeed does the wisdom of the crowd.) It seems that loss of contact with the world and of understanding of the self’s place in it can lead to a kind of inability (or unwillingness, which in this context becomes the same thing) to regulate one’s own behaviour. In the digital arena, where norms are either contested or not established, where there is an apparent anonymity, and where ultimately everyone is speaking not from their buttoned-up, outside-world self but from the unmoderated hearth, the private kingdom, the normal constraints seem not to apply.

It has to be acknowledged that there are profound differences of degree here. Those living under the kind of regime that was prevalent in the Middle East undergo an extreme version of this process, an absolute bewilderment that leads to the kind
of wild, appalling demonstrations of pain that culminate in self-immolation. In the case of the UK riots, a growing sense of abandonment and contempt seems to have been a major factor, a hopelessness that I think does strongly mirror the US 1930s’ experience, and will do so ever more if the situation worsens and persists, as now seems likely.

By comparison, the deindividuation of Internet use is mild, and perhaps somewhat differently constructed – but still very real. Net users feel anonymous because they are physically alone and can choose screen names and so on (and because the general awareness of how exposed a given user is on the Internet is quite low). The lack of a physical component means there are no obvious adverse consequences to anything that happens, which implies that there will be no blame. It’s even possible that the constant barrage of legalese, far from restraining users, actually liberates them: if there are rules aplenty and structures to prevent you from doing things, that means that anything that is possible must be acceptable. Further, the world is formed neatly into teams, and the enemy is faceless not only because it is removed by distance and invisible, but also because it is structural: governmental or corporate. These are classic conditions for a low-level deindividuation.

The consequence appears to be a sort of ongoing digital nuisance: the kind of language you’d expect someone rather ill-tempered to use in heavy road traffic appearing in what ought to be the enlightened debating space of news website comments pages; cyberbullying; unlawful file-sharing. And yet it stands in stark contrast to the idea of social media as something positive, a medium allowing genuine connection and self-determination. Possibly this is because the situation is less monolithic and – once again – more patchworked. Some aspects of online life lead to deindividuation, and in those areas people behave badly. Others do not, and encourage and reward good behaviour.

But in any case, are social media really that important?
Aren’t they just a replacement for physical encounters? And most significantly: can they really help us deal with massive problems?

The Internet is not a broadcast medium.

I never get tired of saying that. I keep having to say it because people of my own age and older grew up on the assumptions of a world of television, newspapers, film and so on which was essentially a one-way flow of information and ideas. The paradigm for media was a poster at a bus stop. You told the public what you were doing and then they knew about it. That was it. They could write to you, of course, but it was time-consuming and you weren’t really expected to respond. More, the speed of events was perceived as being slower. Before email and fax, an urgent query would take a day to arrive (providing it was posted before the last collection) and the reply could not take less to return. In other words, the timescale for all but the most urgent correspondence was three days, and more likely a week. News, business and government moved – to outward appearances at least – more slowly. Data were harder to gather, and the effects of policy decisions could only really be estimated over a term of years. The public was not generally privy to government statistics in any case, and the UK’s institutional culture regarded anything not specifically public as confidential. Information did not flow.

The Internet, however, is a mass communications platform: it allows the flow of information in all directions. And out of that quality have emerged the social media, which are also not for the most part hierarchical or top-down. Everyone can communicate with everyone. That’s how they work and what they are. Participating in the social media is a very different activity from merely accessing websites or playing non-social online games. It involves interaction with other people, and they are a discriminating
bunch. If you give nothing, you get nothing. If you engage at a low level, what comes back to you is by and large pretty unexciting. On the other hand, if you put some effort into social media, people respond rapidly with perceptions and favourite things of their own. Social media are reciprocal, and you can tell how you’re doing because it will be evident in people’s reactions to you. Social media are about connection rather than isolation: Twitter, Facebook and the rest are each in their own ways
feedback structures.

Feedback, if you aren’t quite sure, is a simple notion for something that can become fiendishly complex. Most people are aware of it now as a public relations term: companies and councils are forever seeking our ‘feedback’ on customer satisfaction forms. They then take our opinions of their work and (notionally) use those opinions to improve their service. Everyone benefits. Except, of course, that in many cases it feels to us on the outside that the feedback is simply ignored and the point of the exercise was not improvement but pacification.

Real feedback is the flow of information from the output of a system back into the earlier stages; when a microphone gets too close to a speaker, the output of the speaker is fed back into the amplifier through the mic. The noise gets louder and louder until either the mic is moved, the speaker or the amplifier is switched off or something explodes. In a more constructive setting, though, feedback can be a powerful force for positive change. The best example – as
Decision Tree
author Thomas Goetz observed in
Wired
recently – is probably those interactive road signs that tell you how fast you’re going as you approach a pedestrian crossing or a school; you get information about your speed (which you already have, but the sign is external to your car dashboard and hence isn’t part of the regular noise of driving, so you take notice of it) and you compare it to the limit. The result, across the board, is a 10 per cent reduction in speed which persists beyond the immediate vicinity of the sign – generally several
miles beyond. There’s no threat, no penalty, no physical restraint. The feedback itself, coupled with a low-level desire not to be a menace to kindergarteners, is enough.

Social media in particular, and digital technology more generally, are capable of doing exactly the same thing – providing relevant information in real time – in more diffuse human situations. That sounds like a small thing, but the effects are potentially huge, especially when that information is combined with a suggested action in response. In my first example of the road signs, the proposed action is obviously lowering your speed – but it can be something more sophisticated: an action that is itself a form of feedback into someone else’s loop. In the case of the Middle East
revolutions, users monitoring themselves and their fellows realized that the moment had arrived, that this time something really was going to happen, and then uncovered an array of possible actions in support. Those actions were themselves feedback to the regimes they focused on, urging a modified behaviour: compromise, resign or flee.

The most effective feedback systems, according to Goetz, are those that influence us subtly. The sweet spot is a fuzzy area between obnoxious and intrusive on the one hand and inconsequential on the other. Information supplied in this cosy band is the most likely to have the desired effect. In the context of social media, this is the more likely to occur because the feedback is actively solicited by the user. It’s not an unwelcome irritant from a nagging external source, like the road signs – which I always find a bit finger-waggy – but simply a part of a pre-existing and continuing personal interaction. Lodged in the social network in this way, users are connected to group, place and person. That doesn’t mean, as we know from the
Arab Spring, that they retreat to a previous position, but rather that a new set of perceptions of reality are instated as norms. Under some circumstances, this will be a kind of reindividuation, a calming. In others, the collective mood will be of anger and discontent, and
that will become a part of the individual until the perceived issues are resolved.

The social media site and the group of people associated with it become, in other words, the repository of a counter-culture – but do not create or define it. That is still done by people. The Riot Wombles weren’t created by social media either; rather, the communications network allowed a local whimsy to reach out across the country and, using a childhood image that is widely known among people in the UK, take root in a variety of locations. Knowing that others were doing the same, and that the media were picking up on the story, and therefore that more people were coming to help, was a virtuous feedback loop.

By putting people in touch with others who feel the same way, digital communications technology compounds perceptions, facilitates the generation of movements, gives reinforcement to those who otherwise might feel alone. Above all, though, it allows us to understand in real time things that historically have taken place on slower scales, over months, years or decades. Websites such as They Work For You allow constituents to monitor the voting records of members of parliament day to day, and constituents unhappy with their representative’s performance can say so immediately. Almost anything can now be observed as it takes place, rather than after the fact, and the heartbeat of nations, rather than playing out across timespans of generations, can be heard every morning and afternoon in the financial figures and the political reports. We are no longer disconnected from what’s happening around us. We can see not only ourselves – courtesy of those road signs, and the systems that allow you to check your electricity consumption, your calorie intake, your use of the working day – but our nations.

Digital technology can also make us conscious of ourselves as parts of the systems that make up our society. This is not to say that we’re all cogs in the machine. We are individuals, each of us
interesting and special in ourselves, but we are also, consciously or not, parts in any number of systems – as with the shuttering of the
News of the World
. The paper’s demise was partly triggered by communications from members of the public to advertisers: ‘don’t associate yourself with this; we are angry.’ The message was heard loud and clear, and advertisers withdrew (demonstrating among other things that
commodification does not render you powerless, though it may change the nature of your power). The interesting point is that there was at least a moderate consciousness in the public debate that targeting advertisers was a way to send a message to the paper. It was not simply a question of people disapproving of the brands’ involvement with the
News of the World
. It was that in telling the brands of their disapproval, they could create a desired reaction: a conscious use of feedback. Being aware of our status gives us a degree of control over our environment.