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flamingswordThe ease of finding people and content on social media platforms is also one of its downfalls. Tumblr and Twitter in particular are easy to get what’s called an amygdala hijack, which is like being triggered but can be for social aggression/ostracizing behaviors as well as fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses. Those are states that most people can't sustain for 20 minutes of reflection, so if something takes 20 minutes of thinking about to post, the poster is likely to get calmed down and more rational during the process of crafting the post. Things that reward stuff that happens more quickly than that ~20 minute limit are going to therefore incentivize those triggered-adjacent responses.
And people forget pretty easily that disgust is one of our primary emotions, so the public shunning of people who messed up even a little, even in purely subjective ways, is one result. Your brain takes less time to access those 8 primary emotions than it does to have secondary emotions or meta-cognition about those emotions. So since we're rewarding the hottest, fastest takes, they are likely to be much less nuanced than those from platforms that reward slower reactions and social responsibility. And due to emotional contagion in social species, if it disgusts one person, even a little, then one person's "It Is Bad" becomes a group's "You Are Bad" becomes a community's “We don’t take kindly to your sort around here.”
Here on DW, we have more of a Walled Garden effect, where we can limit the availability of our content to be less accessible to the entire internet. Since it is relatively harder to find people and the spaces are more insular, we tend to get a social cache system of vouching for the reputation of others in our spaces. That also leads to more social pruning and social hegemony, which are mixed blessings, but it is less like the Wild West over here because of it. I am old enough to find the atmosphere restful and reflective, where to those used to tumblr it seems stultifying.
The Small World effect is also stronger on platforms where it is easy to see the social network of posters. If you are within a few degrees in the six degrees of separation, you are likely to be more reflective and careful of those around you when you recognize members of your community as connected to the poster who caused the trigger/disgust/amygdala hijack. That being said, larger networks give feelings of anonymity and with it, feelings of greater freedom to express unpopular opinions and weirder takes and OTPs that nobody else ships.
So, weirdly, we kind of need tumblr and places like Discord that keep the younger and faster-moving parts of the fandom happy? But it’s good to have guidance from DW users and crossover fans who use multiple platforms, to help keep things civilized.
And people forget pretty easily that disgust is one of our primary emotions, so the public shunning of people who messed up even a little, even in purely subjective ways, is one result. Your brain takes less time to access those 8 primary emotions than it does to have secondary emotions or meta-cognition about those emotions. So since we're rewarding the hottest, fastest takes, they are likely to be much less nuanced than those from platforms that reward slower reactions and social responsibility. And due to emotional contagion in social species, if it disgusts one person, even a little, then one person's "It Is Bad" becomes a group's "You Are Bad" becomes a community's “We don’t take kindly to your sort around here.”
Here on DW, we have more of a Walled Garden effect, where we can limit the availability of our content to be less accessible to the entire internet. Since it is relatively harder to find people and the spaces are more insular, we tend to get a social cache system of vouching for the reputation of others in our spaces. That also leads to more social pruning and social hegemony, which are mixed blessings, but it is less like the Wild West over here because of it. I am old enough to find the atmosphere restful and reflective, where to those used to tumblr it seems stultifying.
The Small World effect is also stronger on platforms where it is easy to see the social network of posters. If you are within a few degrees in the six degrees of separation, you are likely to be more reflective and careful of those around you when you recognize members of your community as connected to the poster who caused the trigger/disgust/amygdala hijack. That being said, larger networks give feelings of anonymity and with it, feelings of greater freedom to express unpopular opinions and weirder takes and OTPs that nobody else ships.
So, weirdly, we kind of need tumblr and places like Discord that keep the younger and faster-moving parts of the fandom happy? But it’s good to have guidance from DW users and crossover fans who use multiple platforms, to help keep things civilized.