Social Media is the Soma

I’m on week three of a two-month long social media hiatus, and I’ve gotta say, I’m loving it. I feel a little out of the loop, so I’ve been occasionally browsing news sites to stay somewhat informed, but otherwise it’s like a weight has lifted off my shoulders. During the first couple days I’d catch myself mindlessly reaching for my phone to check notifications (I deleted the apps) when I had a lull to fill, but that quickly tapered off.

The way people, groups, or entire pages can go silent or completely disappear from the Internet with hardly the slightest ripple is a stark reminder of how insignificant our online impact generally is. I’m not suggesting our virtual behaviour doesn’t have real-world consequences, because it certainly does. What I am saying is our social media presence can give us a false sense of importance, or rather, creates the impression that our online efforts can translate into meaningful real-world change without any accompanying real-life (IRL) action.

Social media has taken the greatest fears of people like Huxley, Postman, and MacNeil and said “hold my beer”.

In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote the general public has been “amused into indifference” and “it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public narcoticized by technological diversions”. That same year, Canadian writer and journalist Robert MacNeil wrote an article entitled The trouble with television in which he described television as “the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World”. My favourite line from that essay was, “Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody”. (While I wasn’t yet born during the Howdy Doody era, I do know that it was a television show from the fifties).

Soma is an excellent metaphor for the variety of technological diversions we can enjoy to escape reality (however temporarily). If you haven’t read Brave New World, I highly recommend it, and this article does not include any spoilers. To provide context, however, I will tell you that in this novel soma was a pill given to all citizens by their government. This narcotic made people complacent. When on soma, people felt a sense of wellbeing, they experienced no discomfort or distress. While soma did not cause any hangovers or withdrawal symptoms, it did rob people of their capacity for critical thinking, making them compliant citizens who were extremely easy to manage and manipulate.