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‘Social Media Distancing’ Is the Key to Quelling the Information Pandemic
Language is a virus, and you can help flatten the curve
The Beat writer William Burroughs once said that language is a virus from outer space, and he didn’t mean it allegorically.
Fake news, long before the phrase entered the national lexicon, was part of his evidence: Pieces of misinformation spreading quickly from person to person behave just like “viral mechanisms,” Burroughs said — aliens invading unwary hosts, feeding and growing stronger as they spread.
With the unprecedented communication power of the internet and social media, linguistic virality has reached epic proportions. The writer and futurist Richard Watson has gone so far as to say that we are living in an information pandemic, overwhelmed with hastily compiled, badly sourced, and unverified data. “There is now too much information and opinion circulating too fast,” he told me. The result is a nonstop assault of the “nasty, negative or poorly informed.”
That said, we’ve never been better equipped to understand the dangers of unchecked language virality — or to flatten the curve. We know that words, weaponized as fake news on social media, can be used to manipulate and undermine democracies, as they did with Brexit and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And because of the coronavirus’s spread, we are beginning to better understand the myriad ways that we’re intricately connected, and the responsibilities we bear for our fellow humans.
So, for the greater good, consider social media distancing. With collective action, we can quell the first postmodern pandemic.
Individual vs. structural change
In a recent opinion piece in The Guardian, the tech journalist Leo Mirani suggested that social-media platforms such as Facebook should build social distancing into their interfaces. They could implement anti-viral design, Mirani argues, by deliberately creating “friction” for the user that makes it harder to share information.
What he’s advocating is structural, systemic change, not individual action: Mirani argues that personal efforts to quell the info tsunami are futile, empty gestures in the grand scheme of…
