Has the Internet Broken Us?

Friday, January 17, 2025

Has the Internet Broken Us?

Doomscrolling: I’m sure we’ve all done it. We read stuff on the internet—news and social media sharing—about unhappy events. Whether on a smartphone or a web browser on a computer, we scroll down to reveal one item of bad news chasing the next. We’ve got the built-in psychological penchant for magnifying the negative, mainly what we see when looking far from our own individual lives.

We’ve all heard about the workings of dopamine and social media. In short, social media automate our search for dopamine hits. The chime or buzz of a social media notification gives us the quick thrill of social engagement. But the excitement that keeps many of us on social media is mainly anger. It’s hard not to conclude that the internet gets worse than ever, each and every day, especially since so much of it builds and feeds on anger.

The folks at Kurzgesagt—In a Nutshell take that as true and ask: Now what?

To me, that internet of yore—from before social media—very much resembles what we’re doing here at CSLF. It’s about the interaction rather than fueling fear, anger, and loathing.

This may very well be the way the internet itself evolves. The initial explanation for the success of social media had to do with so-called network effects. That was the convenient concept that explained why Facebook succeeded when the contemporary effort of MySpace flopped. Network effects meant that the more people were on your site, the more popular it became. People wanted to go where everyone was.

But eventually the fabled Yogi Bera-ism came into play: “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Nowadays, Facebook has lost its original appeal. Most people who use it seem to complain about it. Younger generations use it less because it lacks newness: They aren’t interested in the things that appeal to their parents and grandparents generally, and they don’t really want to hang out with them online in their spare time, either, thank you very much.

This is not to claim that Facebook is withering away: The company is a success and its user base remains huge. But they may not be as engaged as initially.

Social media now seem to be evolving into online niches, where people can hang out because of shared interests and a preferred way of communicating. Instead of self-reinforcing centralization via Facebook, there’s a balkanization of different social media platforms where people can get together in a more private way.

Perhaps this is explained by the comfort of smaller groups: the hypothesis of Dunbar’s number. The novel feature of the internet is that there are no natural boundaries between groups. You can still surf from one place to the next instantaneously. There are no barriers between sites—at least not the ones without membership fees. Big social media are free to use because they monetize data about their users, sharing the data with advertisers, as we know.

Or so it has been so far. But what if that form of internet use has maxed out in terms of its utility for most people? Maybe they’ll move off to more limited clubs of narrower scale, whether paid or free. If so, maybe it will help to settle things down, to make them less gloomy. That would be a welcome shift.