Browsing our bias

Should we curate our feeds for community or for challenge?

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

A woman stands between two table, one of friends and the other more argumentative.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

“Would you like to continue using this app?”

I stare at the question on my phone screen. It’s there by design – I have it set to prompt me every five minutes so that I don’t fall into the trap of endless scrolling. Often, it’s enough to make me close the app and move on with my day.

Today, however, I’ve been doomscrolling - endlessly flicking through the discussions around the General Election. I have already told my phone I’d like to keep this social media app for another five minutes, and another five minutes, and another. I didn’t open X with any real hope of finding answers to my many questions about the upcoming election (the crucial one being: “who should I vote for?!”). From there, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole. There is simply too much information, and I can’t always tell what is real or true. I can’t make it more than two or three posts before I stumble across yet another logical fallacy or false equivalency.

When my phone prompts me again to close the app, I pause. I have suddenly realised that I’m upset. It has taken the pop-up box on my phone to make me pause and notice that that I’m overwhelmed and helpless but I still feel like I need to speak, say something, anything useful. But maybe there is just nothing I can say. Maybe I can’t usefully add to this debate. Or perhaps I can’t usefully discuss it in this format.

There is little nuance in the discussion – people are simply yelling at one another.

I close the app to leave this angry space.

I’m not sure I have gained any real insight into the debate from this experience. I can’t help but think that many people are here only to assert their opinion. Nobody is here to listen. Nobody is here to learn. This sort of platform encourages us to speak, to be seen speaking, but doesn’t promote discussion and debate in a way that is constructive. Let alone create a safe well-lit space for it. It doesn’t take long to find someone supposedly invalidating another’s argument by pointing out a grammatical mistake. There is no grace here.

I’m wary of following or subscribing to users who have completely different viewpoints from my own because I am concerned about my own digital image.

I find this online space a difficult one to occupy. My feed is mostly friends and a couple of carefully chosen pages. There’s nothing that is going to particularly challenge me there. I don’t particularly want social media to challenge me. It’s comforting, more than anything – a way of staying in touch with friends and family (particularly during the pandemic) and keeping up to date with organisations I’m involved in.

I don’t tend to go on social media to engage in discussions or debates. I know that this leads to something of a confirmation bias. If I get all of my information from the same sources, and from the same people all the time, I’m not going to learn about other perspectives. If I follow the trade union that supports my workplace, it’s obvious that I will only receive information supporting one particular party. If the only people I follow are people who share similar views as mine, I will simply find myself with my own opinions and feelings being validated.

It’s also worth noting that, perhaps shamefully, I’m wary of following or subscribing to users who have completely different viewpoints from my own because I am concerned about my own digital image. I worry about someone opening my page and making assumptions about my views simply based on those I follow online. I know others share this concern. Public social media accounts are sometimes a delicate exercise in personal branding. I am likely confirming someone else’s bias with my social media presence. I’m almost definitely part of that cycle.

I find myself torn between wanting to use social media more effectively to learn from other people and wanting to make it literally a pastime.

There are certainly arguments to be made about whether this approach to social media is good or bad. It’s certainly comforting though. At the end of a long day, a video of my friend’s dog is going to improve my day just a little bit more than trying to pick apart the truth from the lies in social media and in politics more generally. It’s important that I remain conscious that this is the way I have chosen to use social media. I can’t be complacent.

If I engage with other perspectives and debates, I have to do so more consciously and deliberately. I try and drop in and out of those spaces through the news tabs, tags, searching specific people who I know hold different viewpoints, or looking up specific topics. It always runs the risk of falling into the trap I’ve found myself in today – scrolling through seemingly endless perspectives that I don’t agree with, people wishing harm on another for having a different perspective, a vicious “us and them” narrative that follows through every other post. I need to learn where I can find the most accurate and reliable information. More importantly, perhaps, I need to learn how to close apps when I find myself in angry spaces where debate cannot flourish (and I’m almost never going to find that in a comment section.)

Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll stop carefully curating my social media feeds – mainly as an act of self-perseveration. It’s not that I don’t care – it is never that I don’t care. Just that the 24-hour news cycle becomes too much when there is little that I can do. I’m not going to figure out who to vote for my scrolling arguments on X or Facebook.

I find myself torn between wanting to use social media more effectively to learn from other people and wanting to make it literally a pastime. There is certainly potential for learning - I can access real-time perspectives on almost anything. On the flipside, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern what is real and what is fake news, or simply AI generated. On the flip side, sometimes I just want to find out if anyone else was as confused by the answer to a TV quiz show as I was or just see a picture of a friend’s cat sunbathing on a windowsill.

How might we find this balance? Sadly, it seems that this is a conversation that’s now only worth having offline.

Article

Comment

Sport

20 August 2024

5 min read

What’s Simone Biles doing today?

How to live with winning and losing.

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

Simone's gold medal moment.

@simonebiles

I wonder about what Simone Biles is doing today. She is one of the many athletes whose Paris 2024 was about more than gold; it was about redemption. Now the Games are over, what happens to their restoration story?

The narrative about redemption seemed to dominate the headlines and linger in post-event interviews. Some Olympians came to the Games seeking it. Gymnast Rhys McClenaghan was tipped for gold in Tokyo 2020 but stumbled on the pommel horse, finishing in seventh place. In France, he climbed to the top of the podium.

Others completed a fall and rise within the two weeks themselves. Sprinter Jeremiah Azu had a faltering beginning to the Games, disqualified for a false start in the individual 100m heat. Just six days later he was clutching a bronze medal for the relay.

Then there are those like taekwondo athlete, Jade Jones, who also laboured for years and gave their all – but didn’t get the payoff that they sought. What does the story mean when it is unfulfilled? And when the Games are over, how do people live with winning and losing?

Into our messy, maybe frightening, sometimes ordinary, lives, we love a redemption story to brighten and neaten things up.

After years of professional procrastination, a few months ago I finally took the plunge and joined LinkedIn. An impressive feat, I know. It was driven by practicality; I was finishing a job as a climate policy advocate and making the leap into consultancy. But I’ve been fascinated to discover how people in my community, and millions of others, are sharing tender and vulnerable ideas and thoughts in this social workspace. They are coming with questions – what does success look like? How are you navigating your purpose in the day to day? What world do you want your children to inherit? – and gentle ideas about their answers.

People are asking about and reflecting on how to navigate winning, and losing, and living in the murky space in between.

This feels striking because one of the other prevalent stories many of us believe, maybe unconsciously, is that life will generally be good and any setbacks are the exception. Growing up in the Nineties the message seemed to be: the world is your oyster if you work for it. Put in the effort, and the losses will be few and the trajectory will be up.

But the last few years in particular – economic volatility, growing exposure of deep inequalities, the worsening climate crisis – hammer home that this is not reliably the case. No matter how much effort you put in, we rarely live through one type of season at a time. Joy and suffering co-exist. And amongst the highs and the lows, there is a whole lot of everyday living. Show up at the desk, the school gate, the supermarket.

Into our messy, maybe frightening, sometimes ordinary, lives, we love a redemption story to brighten and neaten things up.

The sting of winning or losing is softened when we stop ascribing all meaning to them, and instead cast them in the context of a wider story.

But part of the problem with many of the redemption tales we share is that they rely on the person themselves to deliver their own restoration. They’ve had (and are perhaps blamed for) a fall from grace, and now it’s up to them to find it within themselves – their physical, mental and emotional capacity – to achieve restoration. That’s a heavy weight to put on anyone’s shoulders (however broad they may be).

And any redemption gained is fleeting. Medal winners talk about ‘gold medal syndrome’: the post-competition feeling of depression, loneliness and emptiness. For those athletes who’ve now headed home after fulfilling a salvation arc, is the emotional dip going to be even steeper, harder?

Most of us won’t be Olympians, despite how expertly we discuss the diving scores every four years, but that sense of deflation after achieving a long-sought goal can be resonant. We’ve strived and risked ourselves for something, only to find the aftertaste is a bit flat. That new job is good but flawed. Winning that award doesn’t stop a rejection landing in the inbox the next day. The house renovations are already showing cracks. Winning and losing are both transient. A redemption made ourselves rarely satisfies or lasts.

The sting of winning or losing is softened when we stop ascribing all meaning to them, and instead cast them in the context of a wider story. One that goes further than a single person or moment – a birth, a podium, a bonus. Such a story can speak beyond our own lives to the core challenges we face in the world: fairness into a broken economic system; peace instead of violence in our communities; flourishing, not escalating environmental crises.

During my years of climate advocacy, I have sometimes envied colleagues working on more tightly defined topics with the possibility (only fulfilled through huge amounts of wisdom and graft, of course) of winning. Change a law, solve a problem. As the climate gets warmer and more unpredictable, it’s easy to have a sense that, at best, you are just making things a little less bad. The wins are in the context of a lot of disappointments, and a whole lot more grey space in between.

But by being able to root my day to day in a bigger story, I can move forward with hope. Understanding our lives as part of an even greater narrative – the story of this world that God loves and sustains and restores – saves us from the pressure and heartache of trying to redeem our own lives. Instead, we can live them – the wins, the losses, and all the mundane moments in between – in light of that bigger story.

Looking at the world through the lens of God’s redemption story helps us to stay clear-sighted: celebrating the successes and not make them our whole world; naming the problems and still acting with hope and grit.

A redemption arc is a beautiful one. I want to hold onto that longing, but find it in a story that’s deeper, longer and richer than I can see. A story that lasts.