Social media and violence

The late Zygmunt Bauman, eminent sociologist and author of Liquid Modernity (2000), said something about social media in one of his last interviews that sheds some light on the link between the latter and the propensity for violence. I would argue that Bauman’s insight may go so far as to explain the role of digital platforms in some cases of school shootings. Bauman pointed out that social media is a network and not a community, and this distinction is crucial because you belong to a community, while a social network belongs to you.

Bauman explained that the digital platforms that serve as the basic architecture of social media offer a mediated substitute for genuine human connection. In belonging to a community, you accept its rules and give up some personal freedom, but you also gain a secure space where you are never truly alone. In this context, a person learns, among other things, the necessity and value of restraint. On the other hand, owning a network through social media puts you in charge. You control your connections, clicking to add or delete friends whenever you wish. For Bauman, this digital context creates an illusion of control: Because it is so easy to block or delete people online, social media users easily avoid friction, controversy, and real compromise. Here, in this algorithm-driven environment, there can be far less restraint and more machine-enabled validation.

Under conditions of hyperconnectivity, digital natives – i. e., people born into the world of the internet and digital media – may fail to learn the difficult, but necessary, social skills needed for navigating everyday offline social spaces where they cannot simply “delete” disagreement, or block unwanted participation. The lack of deep human connection associated with offline communities is then replaced, in digital spaces, by a precarious social existence where networks exploit our deep fear of abandonment and exclusion by offering ready metrics such as likes, reactions, and friend counts, instead of responsibility and the enduring connection it enables.

The hyperconnected individual is thus denied the more durable cultural resources that restrain and direct behavior towards particular social ends. This cultural condition evokes Rousseau’s description of the miserable life he tried to fix with his Social Contract: The hyperconnected digital native is now free of social restraints but everywhere he is in chains. Chained to the digital nexus that is optimized for outrage and where attention is monetized. This context, resistant to deep human connection and defined by lack of restraint, is clearly primed for violence.