‘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. presidential election. And because of the coronavirus’s spread, we are beginning to better understand the myriad ways that we’re intricately connected, and the responsibilities we bear for our fellow humans.

So, for the greater good, consider social media distancing. With collective action, we can quell the first postmodern pandemic.

Individual vs. structural change

In a recent opinion piece in The Guardian, the tech journalist Leo Mirani suggested that social-media platforms such as Facebook should build social distancing into their interfaces. They could implement anti-viral design, Mirani argues, by deliberately creating “friction” for the user that makes it harder to share information.

What he’s advocating is structural, systemic change, not individual action: Mirani argues that personal efforts to quell the info tsunami are futile, empty gestures in the grand scheme of things, like eschewing flying or plastic straws. Reducing your personal doomscrolling or enforcing social media-free evenings might be good for your own mental health, but they don’t solve the bigger problem. “My belief is strongly that individual action is not the answer,” he told me. “These things are structural.”

But just as the U.S. government has failed to implement the measures necessary to flatten the pandemic’s curve, tech companies are unlikely, for now, to disinfect their systems as Mirani suggests.

Given that reality, the best hope is collective action. Companies, governments, and societies are made up of individuals. And as the more successful communal responses to the current pandemic have shown, the small steps we take as individuals can collectively have a massive impact.

I know, for example, that one person picking up bags and bottles won’t save the seas awash in plastics. But when I lived in Florida — where dead dolphins who swallowed plastics regularly drift ashore — I collected litter along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico anyway, one of many people hoping to minimize the harm our species was doing to others.

Likewise with social media. I feel responsible for my contributions — or lack thereof — although I’m under no illusion that these choices matter much in the grand scheme. But they matter to me, and to my circles.

So I’m circumspect online. I post rarely, and I limit how much I engage with the posts of others. It’s bad for professional brand-building, perhaps, but at least my excited utterances aren’t adding to the sturm and drang.

In happier times, I thought of myself as an online version of the Parisian boulevardier, or or flâneur, a “passionate spectator” who reveled in the bustle, people-watching and not saying much. Now I see my online activity through a public health lens, and these are the measures I take: I stay six (metaphorical) feet away, wear a (metaphorical) mask, wash my (metaphorical) hands frequently.

Practically speaking, what that means is stepping back: devoting less time to scrolling and giving more consideration to what I click on and read, its sources, and what amplifying effects brought it into my feed.

It means resisting the urge to directly engage: pausing before diving into that conversation, or sharing a quip, or even before expressing joy or outrage. In that pause, you may find — as I often do — that the expression seems unnecessary. The world doesn’t need two more cents.

And it means taking the time to rinse off the muck of opinions and feelings that we wallow in online, and to refresh with a good book, a conversation, or a piece of art.

A model for socially distanced information consumption

Watson, who advises tech companies on what tomorrow will bring and famously predicted this pandemic, shirks social media almost completely. The platforms are “the enemy of focus, attention and depth,” he says, promoting discord and dissatisfaction.

Watson advises taking in news slowly, pausing often, and reading on paper whenever possible, calling it “a vastly superior technology” for handling complex topics. As a futurist, his counterintuitive approach includes reading retrospectively, digging into dated publications as he prepares to make predictions. He says this allows him to see an expanded landscape and draw more connections. And it helps him feel calm enough to think clearly: Looking back, he sees what turned out to be important, and what was just noise.

Each of us can limit that noise too. The coronavirus crisis has shown the status quo isn’t fixed. Everything can shift quickly, and we all play a part — our actions spreading sickness or promoting wellness. The same goes for the information pandemic. We can’t save the internet, but we can mind our spaces, limiting the harm we cause through careful and responsible engagement.