Social Media Engagement is Mental Enslavement
The tribal nature within us
Humans are tribal animals. Being tribal allowed humanity to progress and survive times of hardship. Our devotion to the tribe eventually led to building civilizations. The tribe is still alive within us and ingrained throughout our development.
When you are born you immediately are entered into the tribe that is your family. Your family’s tribe is part of a larger tribe that includes the background, culture, and ethnicity of relatives and friends. The tribe you are born into has a huge impact in the way you see the world, values you adopt, and the way you grow up.
When you enter school you are thrown into a system that requires you to associate, join, and maneuver among many tribes.
The pull of tribes is all around us and has a huge influence in our decisions.
Tribe matters.
The tribe will have your commit crime, graduate college, get married, drop out, kill yourself, start a company. The tribe has influence on an individual and depending on the constant response by the individual with the tribe it will shape how the individual interacts with the world.
Technology has pushed tribes towards the online space. Like attract like.
There are tribes within tribes within tribes.
Technology has democratized tribal associations. Instead of having to rely on the immediate local tribes, one is able to join tribes online and become part of entities that aren’t local.
The evolution has been great for individuals attempting to find those with similar interests, but it has also aggravated the tribal instincts we have within us.
Engagement is king
Social media platforms have exploded in the last decade. The ability to interact and associate with humans has flourished in the online space. Humans are naturally gravitated to this ability and this has allowed technology giants like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to rise.
Social media platforms make their money through advertising. They hold the attention of users and get companies to pay to show advertisements to those users. The more information the social media platform has on the user the more valuable the advertisement slot becomes. Facebook has grown into the monster that it is because it has an extremely detailed understanding of most of its users. This provides advertisers with exact populations to target and how to target based on this detailed understanding.
Because social media platforms make money through advertising and having detailed understanding of its users it demands the user to stay on the platform as long as possible.
This is where engagement comes in.
Engagement is how you keep the person interested and invested in feeding the social media platform more information.
Engagement is how you keep the person using your platform to feed them more advertising.
Social media platforms are therefore financially incentivized to create mechanisms that drive engagement and keep users hooked.
Tribal association
Social media platforms have control over your feed and they do this to attempt to have control over your engagement.
This feed is what you immediately see when you get on a social media platform.
If the feed isn’t producing results then it is a bad feed. The feed needs to fulfill the needs the company has and get the user to function as they want the user to function.
You have algorithms that take in data from what you have done on the platform to create a more personalized feed that encourages engagement.
What this does is create a manipulated feed with a distorted view of reality.
One of the main reasons that Trump’s election came as such a shock to people was that many of people’s feeds on Facebook were organized to feed into what would provide the individual most engagement. This prompted many that opposed Trump to see nothing but posts supporting Hillary, attacking Trump and little in support of Trump.
The individual either turned off posts from individuals that were Trump supporters, stopped being friends with those individual and/or Facebook knew exactly what kind of posts to provide the individual.
If conservative posts get zero engagement or interest in the individual then Facebook will feed that into its algorithms and stop showing them.
This happens and continues to happens with every individual.
What such engagement addiction by social media platform creates is a groupthink bubble where everyone believes the same thing and opposition is muted, blocked, or pushed away by engagement algorithms.
Engagement addiction creates an unrealistic view of the world. This unrealistic view of the world then creates huge emotional shocks to people that believe everyone sees the world the way they do.
The focus on engagement has created incentives for tribe association to become even stronger.
If you are a conservative you will not want to deal with liberals and vice versa. This pushes people that would normally be friends to become separated and eventually become strangers, even enemies.
Incentives for tribe association also creates a strong influence on individuals that are most susceptible to tribe influence.
You are more likely to take up the ideas and thoughts of others in order to not be different or stand out. You don’t want to be ostracized for your ideas and you don’t want to be attacked.
Social media engagement is mental enslavement
The power of the tribe, engagement is king, and tribal association creates the incentives to mental enslavement.
The power of the tribe creates a natural state that drives individuals to listen and believe what the tribe believes. It is less likely to do anything that doesn’t align with what the tribe believes.
Engagement is king provides the mechanisms on social media platforms to drive engagement and have it become a race to get more engagement.
Tribal association provides a dominant influence on the individual to adhere to the tribe and not stray away from it for fear of being ostracized.
The incentives are all present to mentally enslavement you.
Individuals cater their content to get the most engagement which requires the tribe to accept and agree with it. This tribal association has a strong influence in what the individual will talk about and believe in.
The more the individual is invested in his/her social media presence the more dominated it will be by its tribal association. The individual does not want to upset the order and risk being kicked out. This investment has a strong influence in what the individual will talk about and believe in.
Instead of providing content that is appealing to the individual, the individual begins to create content that is catered to the tribe that it is dominated by.
Instead of thinking like an individual, the individual begins to think in ways that align with the tribe that it is dominated by.
When you become part of a tribe and swear your allegiance to it you are expected to do what is within reasonable bounds of it and failure to do so brings negative backlash.
The individual begins to strip away his/her individuality to cater to those within the tribe. A tribe that is overwhelmingly made up of strangers.
Mental enslavement is rampant. It is easy to fall prey to it and fall into habits that keep you attached to tribes instead of true to yourself.
The path forward
Tribal association and influence will always exist. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to get rid of it the influence will always creep in.
Instead of fighting a battle that cannot be won you need to be observant of the influence the tribe has on you and be willing to seek paths that are less traveled.
Instead of basing your social standing and self esteem on your engagement you focus on what matters most which is your individual self worth.
The path is less traveled because you are an individual.
You are different, you are special and you have to develop what makes you special.
The social media tribes will attempt to lure you into their camps and keep you enslaved. This enslavement is fun and exciting. You are part of something larger than yourself. But if left unchecked this membership to the tribe can be limiting to your growth and distort your view of reality.
You need to be willing to think for yourself and not worry about your engagement, your friends, or what others will think of you.
You are a work in progress and your work should not be in the hands of a tribe that only cares about its own growth and survival. Be selfish and be stubborn.
If you want to truly make a difference in this world you need to be willing to be constantly ostracized, think differently, and be different.
Do not let social media engagement mentally enslave you.
