My friend of 30 years keeps sending me social media posts and videos that I either don’t find funny or are disturbing. We live far away and rarely see each other, so we communicate through a messaging app. I’ve told her many times that I prefer positive or cute things, and I don’t follow American politics.
Her life is difficult and I understand why she spends so much time on social media. Last week she sent me multiple videos each day that were not of interest to me at all, including one with women slapping each other. She often buys into conspiracy theories until I disprove them. All of it upsets me. It’s like she doesn’t know who I am. I’m not replying to any of these messages but she keeps sending them.
I don’t want to throw away this friendship but I feel like we’ve been going in different directions for years. I don’t blame her for any of it or chastise her. I just don’t think she considers my feelings. How do I respond?
Eleanor says: A lot of us know someone who’s fallen down the algorithmic rabbit hole, and the weirdest part is it’s not even clear they’re attached to what they’re sharing. It doesn’t feel undergirded by genuine belief. It seems instead like some uncanny combination of recreation, imitation, boredom – at once sincere and not sincere.
It sounds as though a big part of what’s bothering you is that, when she does this, you being you doesn’t factor in. She just sends you things. You’re probably right: it’s mindless input-output. It turns you from a friend into an audience. “I want to say this” not, “I want you to hear it.”
Telling her you prefer positive videos hasn’t worked. Silence, the pointed non-reaction, sounds loud to you, but – well – silent to her. What about if instead of engaging with this as though it’s a Serious Problem in your friendship, or by pointing out the reasons you dislike these videos, you tried signalling to her that you find this a bit weird?
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt drew a useful distinction between lies and bullshit. Liars at least know that what they’re saying is false. Truth therefore still plays a central role for the liar, since they have the decency to be defined in opposition to it. Bullshit does away with the concept of truth altogether. It’s simply indifferent to it; it has no use for it. The bullshitter could be telling the truth, they could be saying something false, it doesn’t matter; the reason they’re saying it has nothing to do with its veracity either way. It’s all flotsam and nonsense, signifying nothing.
Much of the social media content that consumes the minds of the bored and angry is worse than false – it’s bullshit. I think that’s part of why many people who spend their days watching it let it go as easily as they got stuck on it. Oh, that conspiracy theory wasn’t true? You didn’t like that post? Ah well, the next one’s coming up. We don’t have this amnesiac restlessness for the non-bullshit we share, like a favourite film or a resonant piece of writing – things that mean something to us.
If that’s the way she shares this material, like bullshit – fast, forgotten, indifferent to the fact that you are her interlocutor – you might have more luck interacting with it as strange than as disturbing or false. Perhaps that means steering away from the tone of cautious and sombre disagreement – “Hey, I want us to stay close but … ” – and instead heading tonally closer to bemused bafflement: “What is this?”
People down the rabbit hole don’t always realise their experience isn’t universal. Social media is designed to make its consumers think everyone else shares that particular visual language, that attitude to what they’re seeing, that preference about how to use their hours. Since your other strategies haven’t worked as well as you’d like, you might have more luck signalling that you’re a baffled outsider to this world she’s trying to show you. If this content is bullshit, it can be treated as such.
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