IT’S SOCIAL MEDIA! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

By Jeffrey Erickson, Ph.D., Senior Editor

After earning a doctorate in English from Stanford, Jeffrey Erickson escaped academia for the software industry, where he edited Integrated System Design magazine and wrote documentation for Oracle, IBM, eBay, and Genesys. He also acts and sings opera at the Dickens Fair and other venues. He joined Menlo College Magazine in fall 2022, demonstrating that you can, in fact, go home again.

You may have heard or read about the U.S. Surgeon General’s recent advisory on social media and the mental health of the young. If you did, you’d be excused for thinking that the advisory contained nothing but dire news, because the national media thoroughly ignored the section of that report entitled “The Potential Benefits of Social Media Use Among Children and Adolescents” (I’m lookin’ at you, NBC News).

The advisory notes that social media can provide “positive community and connection with others who share identities, abilities, and interests…access to important information…and social support from peers,” especially for marginalized youth. Among adolescents, most feel that social media helps them feel more accepted, two-thirds like having a group to support them through tough times, and 80% feel more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives.

Similar benefits accrue for adults. 67% of Americans say they met their current partner on a dating app. After my divorce in the 90s, I eased myself back into dating through Love@AOL; my wife and I met on match.com (she said “you had me at Weltschmerz”). More recently, I’ve deepened friendships among people I’ve worked or performed with but would otherwise have lost touch. I hear perspectives and learn about subcultures I would never have been aware of. Many of us do a significant amount of socializing through our jobs; for me, retirement was a blow softened in part by social media, especially because I retired near the beginning of the pandemic. Oh yeah, the pandemic. Social media was, for millions, a lifeline to the outside world—in some cases a literal one. Suicide rates, predictably, rose, but we may never know how many lives were saved by some small act of online kindness, some intervention.

But…but…bullying! Political and economic manipulation! A platform for white supremacists! Fraud! All those evils exist, and social media certainly plays a role in their reproduction. But social media created none of them. Every major historical advancement in the distribution of information has increased both the pace and sophistication of manipulation by those devoted to exploitation, from Yellow Journalism, to the Red Scare, to Make America Great Again, from Drink More Ovaltine to Let’s Get Mikey to an AI genie that magically knows your every desire and offers you a Buy button to fulfill it.

Each AI and social media article in this issue of Menlo College Magazine agrees on one (and maybe only one) idea: the most important thing we can do, our society’s main hope in controlling the uses and abuses of technology, is educate our young. Before we can insist on governance and transparency, we have to understand precisely what it is we have to govern and how we can make it transparent. Ignorance is the real problem we have to solve.

Great to see you at the reunion. Here’s what I’m up to now!