Introduction

One of the things that makes us human is collective learning—our ability to share knowledge and pass it down across generations. The networks of knowledge we have built have expanded across human history, though at varying speeds and not without backward steps. In 1969, the size and speed of these networks took a giant leap. Researchers connected a few universities in a digital network called ARPANET. It was the precursor of the Internet. At first available only to a few scientists, this technology is now available to over half the world’s population. Once requiring complex code, today the Internet’s search engines and social networking applications allow anyone with a smartphone or other computing device to take part. But is this maximized connectivity good or bad? And since it’s half the world population and not all, what happens to the people who are left offline?

“You” on social media

Your phone alarm wakes you. With the device still in hand, you check your Instagram. How many likes did you get while you were sleeping? How many people looked at your post? Did anyone message you? Next, you check your Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, iMessage, Whatsapp, Twitter, and whatever new social network everyone just started using.

You’re not alone, even if no one else is in the room with you. All across the globe millions of people are doing the exact same thing. They are checking out the latest cute cat video, funny meme, makeup tutorial, or political diatribe.

Social networks as we know them today have been around for less than twenty years. For many people, though, it’s hard to remember a world when they didn’t exist. When you arrive at someone’s house, do you ring the doorbell, or do you send a message that says “here”? Have you ever gone to the post office to send a letter to a friend or a postcard home while you are traveling? Do you get your music from a compact disc or just search for it on YouTube or Spotify? Ask your parents or guardians how they would have answered these questions twenty years ago.

Social media: connecting people around the world

Social media and the Internet unquestionably have an incredible power to connect people around the world. Take music, for example. In 2012, the song “Gangnam Style” by the Korean Rapper, Psy, went viral. Its catchy chorus and amusing horse-riding dancing got people across the globe to sing and dance along, shamelessly. “Gangnam Style” became the first video to reach one billion views on YouTube. Such internet-based applications have caused our musical tastes to become increasingly synchronized worldwide. In 2018, the magazine The Pudding produced an infographic, musical map called “Empire Records.” It analyzed the top YouTube songs in 3000 locations. The map revealed that a large portion of the world were listening to the same exact song and many people to the same genre of music.

Technology also has allowed musicians on opposite sides of the globe to collaborate by both sharing and remixing their traditional culture. In 2014 the French-Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux released her song “Somos Sur,” (“We are the South”). It also featured British-Palestinian rapper Shadia Mansour. The collaboration connected beats, dance moves, and resistance movements in the global south.

Social media also allows us to connect in geographically scattered “virtual” communities. Facebook has been the most dominant example. Launched in 2004, Facebook is even more widely used than YouTube. High school reunions, concerts, and even parties can be organized using Facebook Events. People commonly post “selfies”—a word that didn’t exist before Facebook—showing themselves in their best moments. Companies promote their products, and some teachers share their homework assignments via Facebook groups. Families whose members have migrated across the globe video chat via Facebook Messenger, perhaps showing newborns to their grandparents for the first time.

Social media apps like Snapchat and Instagram keep us connected to each other visually. Millions of users post images and videos on these apps. Friends and strangers around the globe can glimpse the daily lives of all users with public profiles. They respond to each other with direct messages or with emoticons expressing approval or disapproval. Online dating apps have changed the nature of flirting. In some countries, they have largely replaced traditional ways of meeting potential partners.

Organizing through social media

These new networks based on social media are great examples of collective learning in the modern age. Hashtags allow users to view posts of people with similar interests. Subjects run the spectrum, from skateboarding to comic books to photojournalism. Apps also have been used to organize mass political protests, sometimes right beneath the watchful eyes of governments. In what became known as the Arab Spring in 2010, opposition movements grew in the Middle East. These protestors coordinated their actions over Twitter and Facebook. During uprisings like those in Chile and Hong Kong in 2019, users increasingly uploaded videos to Instagram and Snapchat. They showed themselves out in the streets to publicize their discontent with their government.

Twitter has been an essential tool within the United States for social activists. They use hashtags (#) to mobilize people around a cause. In 2013, an African-American teenager named Trayvon Martin was killed, and man who killed him was acquitted. In response, a group of community organizers in Florida launched the hashtag BlackLivesMatter. The hashtag became a movement, well beyond the phone screen. It united people who wanted to fight the systemic racism that continues to harm black people. Another example is the MeToo movement focused on helping survivors of sexual violence. Twitter has allowed people who were previously marginalized from mass media to elevate their voices and engage in important discussions. Their power in social media has allowed them to advance policy in ways never seen before.

Social media clearly has a dark side

However, these benefits of social media are not available to all. There exists a wide “digital divide”—the fact that a technology that is “cheap” for some can be unaffordable for others. Almost half the world’s population doesn’t even have internet access. Among those who do, some people—mostly the wealthy or those living in wealthy countries— get better service and have a greater ability to post and consume material.

Social media also can be used to divide us with messages of hatred and discrimination. Here’s just one example: In Sri Lanka in 2018, tensions between two ethnic groups—Muslims and Sinhalese Buddhists—grew much worse as Facebook users fanned the flames of hate. A man uploaded a video in Sinhalese telling a false story that a Muslim restaurant had planted sterilization pills in its food as a plot to prevent the Sinhalese population from expanding. The video went viral, and an angry mob attacked and burned down the restaurant. Messages calling for the murder of Muslim people started circulating on Facebook. In the following weeks people were burned and beaten to death. Investigations soon revealed that violent messages shared on Facebook played a role.

In addition, social media can be used to repress as well as liberate. Yes, people can use social media apps like Twitter to organize against authoritarian governments. However, those governments can use those same apps to confuse or suppress protests. In fact, through social media our personal data is available to just about anyone who can pay for it. In 2018, for example, Facebook came under increased scrutiny in the United States. Investigations revealed that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had inappropriately harvested data from 87 million Facebook users. It then used the information to influence elections. These “social” campaigns were cleverly crafted and aimed divisive messages at people who were likely to believe them, even when they were false. Today, a great deal of false information is available via social media. Much of it has been created with the intention to turn us against each other.

A world together, or worlds apart?

Social media divides us in other ways as well. Social networks increasingly bring people’s private lives into public view. Selfies have become an important form of expression for young people. They can affect teenagers’ self- esteem based on how many likes their photos get. Kyla Fox, a clinical therapist who analyzes the impact of selfie culture, put it like this: “If you put out an artificial sense of yourself, that makes it really challenging when you go out into the world and you have to be you—just you.”

Beyond self-esteem, social networks can leave us lonelier. People retreat into their phones and limit their social interaction to apps. Less and less, they meet friends “irl.”¹ As more people gain internet access, those who think about the public good ask whether social networks will lead to less social interaction in real life. They also wonder whether social media will unite us or instead divide us into groups with less contact and increasingly polarized views of each other. What is the future of collective learning? Maybe you will play a role in answering that question.

1 In social media, irl means “in real life,” and if you needed a footnote to tell you that, then you have not given up real life connections for social media, so that’s gr8.