this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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So, Dunbar's number comes into play here.
Super summarized, in 1993 an anthropologist (guess his last name), made a compelling argument that the average person cannot maintain more than about 150 meaningful relationships.
This idea has since been generally embraced by many scientists, and to my knowledge, the basic concept has been reaffirmed many times.
A more recent study in 2021 criticizes Dunbar's original methodology, but functionally reinforces the main concept, just concluding that via a more comprehensive statistical analysis along the lines of Dunbar's methodology, the 95% confidence interval is basically between 3 and 520 people.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0158
Anyway, yeah, the phenomenon of celebrity fame, and more recently parasocial relationships very clearly show that many, many people are seriously changed and challenged by being surrounded by, and interacting with a functionally endless number of fans, who are also critics.
The internet is, at this point, replete with people who turn into extremely shitty people, develop mental disorders, in some cases kill themselves, etc, because of the way that having a large 'following' warps your mind.
But, fast forward almost 15 years after Malcolm Gladwell largely popularized the concept of Dunbar's number amongst academics, intellectuals, Social Media went from a curious internet phenomenon seeming like it might be neat, might be a fad....
...To basically warping the fabric of reality itself via cutthroat and extremely exploitative business decisions causing more or less the 'norm' nowadays to be constantly flooded with content and constantly pressured to post content.
Especially in America, but obviously also in many other regions... many, many people suffer serious mental health problems from using popular social media apps, but it has become the norm... because they have been intentionally designed to be addictive.
To conclude: go touch grass basically, but maybe also try to remember the before time, and just uninstall apps that control you and make you mentally unstable.
Thanks, I like your comment and I agree that I think people just aren't evolved to have millions of fans/followers. If you look at people that got famous at a young age, most (maybe almost all) of them turned out into pretty unstable people. I'm taking about tv/movie stars here. Nowdays young people not only get famous, but also are bombarded with endless comments, lots of them very negative.
Even for young people that are not famous at all, when other kids around you always share things online where it looks like they have a much much "better" life, it messes you up. So many people just pretend to have a great life online, but never share all the bad stuff that also happens.
If you grow up with social media, you grow up with a complete fake version of reality. I kind of fear for the moment my kids will be old enough to want to join social media. As a parent you can't really stop them and I also don't want to be the super controlling parent anyway. It's something that scares me because I know I will have to deal with it in a few years.
Very interesting, I have long been familiar with Dunbar's Number, but I'd actually not thought about it connection with things like social media influencers/streamers. (Probably because that's not my scene, I don't stream/don't watch streams.)
That sounds about correct though, I actually can't even imagine trying to regularly communicate with that many people directly, in a chatroom style format. It sounds oppressive and demanding.
While this is good, at this point, the "apps" that "control you" are fully the operating system itself. Android and Windows now both especially push advertising in gross ways and spend way too much time sending way too much data back to home base. iOS and macOS are like maybe just slightly better in that regard, but not a whole lot.
Which leaves you with Linux for computing and android alternatives like LineageOS or GrapheneOS, all of which demand a little bit more technical knowhow on the individuals part.
It's so so much harder to escape than it used to be. It's pretty pervasive at this point and damaging to the average person, in terms of how "apps that control you" can really be the whole computer or phone.
I completely agree regarding mobile OS's.
I am currently writing this on an Android phone that is basically as de googled as i can get it via installing f droid, then the aurora store and neo store to replace everything I can with open source stuff, remove as many permissions for everything as possible such that it still functions, etc.
Problem is my computer was trashed, and I cannot risk accidentally bricking this phone right now, so no safe way to root this thing, using only itself, in a way that is 100% guaranteed exists, at least as far as I am aware.
Anyway... good luck explaining any of this to non tech savvy or non tech nerds. Quite literally the vast majority of them have already had their brains rotted via aforementioned social apps...
Basically we more or less live in a kind of cyberpunk dystopian zombie apocalypse: nearly all social media apps are equivalent to hard drugs that cause dependency, ruin attention spans, and generally drive nearly all users into echo chambers that cause extremism of some kind or another, steal much of your attention, alienate you from real world interactions, and as you mention are functionally both mass spying devices for governments, and for corporations to perfect market research and become even more effective at selling what is nearly always overpriced garbage, or laughably mundane and unoriginal 'content' of some kind.
Try explaining this to people, and that the only way to avoid it, not even to fight this but just to avoid this is to... learn things and give up their digital drugs?
In my experience they nearly always respond with emotional violence, social ostracization, and sometimes even physical violence.