Forgotten Manners

Monday, August 12, 2024

Forgotten Manners

The Monday newsletter still appears to be largely on summer hiatus. Maybe it’s a permanent state at this point. Maybe this is all being generated by some computer algorithm. Wouldn’t that be convenient? No accountability would ever need to be admitted, not even in passive voice.

There was something that got my attention over the past week, though: something I’ve noticed but haven’t tried to bang out in detail. Now, I tend to pay attention to a subset of the news that interests me the most: national security and international relations. Because reporting on these topics is distributed rather than concentrated, Twitter/X is a good means of keeping track. You can find reporters and subject matter specialists there that you wouldn’t find at any particular single news outlet. Instead, on TwiX you can find people reporting the news who live in or near the areas of interest who try to let the world know about what’s going on. You find academics from specialized university departments spread around the world.

This is my main reason for using TwiX, which is different from how many other users seem to use it, including the site’s obnoxious celebrity owner. The most popular use appears to be heaving insults and fueling the stupid rage storms that dominate social media, where people of all ages try to stand out by acting like rude, out-of-control adolescents, each hoping to reap the rewards of viral “likes”, up-votes, and other versions of “attaboy” incitement.

Social media mildly rewards positive feedback for positive behavior, but what it really rewards is negative behavior. The personal insult, the angry sarcasm, the verbal smackdown: those are the things that earn social media users positive feedback. Negativity is the natural perception bias in the human mind, and natural mental biases are fed by live social media constantly. Social media represents the unconstrained natural mental tendencies of humankind, and those tendencies aren’t pretty. They inspire angry complaint: personal fulfillment by way of negation and nihilism. It is the human expression of disorder and demolition, of entropy, of the fleeting pleasure of tearing things down, which is by nature far easier than building things up.

There was a time not so long ago that our public lives involved self-restraint. It’s been decades since communication technologies and the internet began changing all that. There was a time when communication wasn’t instantaneous. It was a time when each of us thought actively whether it was worth the effort to put pencil to paper—much less paper to typewriter—to write up an expression of impassioned dissatisfaction with something we’d read or heard in the news. We might have thought to ourselves: “That commentator is an idiot! The claim he just made makes me upset, and I’d really like to give him a piece of my mind! I want him to know what I think of him—and I mean right now!”

But we then thought about sitting down to draft a letter in longhand, making it look presentable to a stranger who didn’t know us. For instance, we’d want the handwriting to be presentable, and not just some juvenile chicken-scratching that might have been written by an eight-year-old child with poor grades in penmanship. Next we would have to find the correct address for the recipient by making phone calls. We’d have to use a postage stamp, maybe even make a trip to the post office, and there’d be an obvious postmark with the mailing location, date, and time. We might even have to look a postal employee in the eye with some potential degree of shame for carrying out an act of juvenilia inspired by a passing fit of pique. And the recipient would be the only person to read it, most likely, just crumpling the whole thing up and dropping it in a wastepaper basket.

The entire affair of telling off some stranger by landing a really hurtful insult might easily mean spending hours of time we could be using to do other necessary things, like cooking a meal or resting after a tiring day at work. In fact, we might think to ourselves, maybe the whole idea is itself too silly and poorly devised not to be worth doing at all. Maybe the ill mood itself was inspired by some annoyance at work earlier in the day, like when some jerk cut us off in traffic earlier, or after eating something that didn’t agree with us. Letting our emotional dyspepsia dictate our actions that would involve such extra effort and inconvenience would seem like something a person would do who wasn’t quite right in the head. Why would we want to spend all that time and energy announcing to a complete stranger—even if we wanted to give him or her what-for for presenting such vile opinions about some distant event in the news—that we were so obsessed that we gladly would waste so much time, energy, paper, and postage? On top of that, it would mean doing so in the knowledge that the recipient of our rage wouldn’t even feel the burn until days later, when the original source of the conniption was long past and maybe even forgotten.

In that vanished world, we each knew that we would look like a crackpot to behave in such a fashion. Behaving like that would make a stranger want to tell his friends about someone being so crazed and psychologically imbalanced as to be the topic of conversation and the types of furtive glances you might give to someone wandering the streets in a state of filth and squalor suggestive of dangerous lunacy.

Thanks to technology, that world is only a distant memory. First the internet, then constant access to direct communications to each other everywhere and all the time, then websites dedicated to exchanging messages to complete strangers everywhere and always: The parade of technological advancements that got us here are clear and obvious in retrospect. They have removed the inconveniences of time, effort, paper, and postage from the things that used to inhibit us from behaving poorly in public. They have removed the natural inhibitions against making ourselves look psychologically unstable. They have converted that psychological instability into a potential source of pride, if only our latest angry outburst can “go viral” by attracting the notice of our fellow creatures.

This, of course, elides the great gifts of being able to find out immediately about occurrences worldwide that might affect friends and family. There are benefits of being able to reach the people most important to us instantaneously to share causes of joy and happiness. We still have to relearn the social inhibitions now that the physical constraints that once made us circumspect have all been removed.