‘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…
