When it Comes to Making Us Feel Bad When We're Online Social Media isn't the Half of It--Media Media is the Problem

It has become a commonplace to remark the tendency of our subjection of ourselves to others' narcissism on social media makes people feel more lonely and depressed.

The conclusion seems to me plausible enough. But in emphasizing the braggadocio of nobodies on Facebook and Twitter in discussion of the psychologically negative effects of media exposure seems to me the all too familiar matter of thundering against small-time offenders while looking the other way on the really big offenders.

If someone is in social media very much they are also likely to be that much more in contact with the media generally, which causes the same problem in at least two ways, with consequences likely to be far more severe than seeing some random nitwit brag on their account:

1. Relentless subjection to an advertising culture that ceaselessly cultivates and exploits fear and inadequacy on the part of the onlooker.

You, they tell you, are fat, tired, slow, aging badly, uneducated, financially insecure and everything else you might prefer to not be. Give us all your money, and all the money you don't have but can lay your hands on--take out a loan on any terms you can get!--to fix that for you.

Disgusting in any quantity, it is ever more pervasive, relentless (Thought you were going to turn on that Adblock, huh? Not so fast!) and finely, sociopathically individualized as they invade and hoover up your personal information (for such are the glories of Big Data that had so many of the mainstream media's idiot sycophants incontinent with excitement at some bold new age of commerce).

2. Similarly pervasive, relentless, finely, sociopathically individualized subjection to the media's glorification of the few who have great wealth, status, power, celebrity (the media's courtiers treat billionaires as gods, in their abilities and wisdom and worth), and denigration of those who lack these things (e.g., you), in a way that makes me picture Ludwig Von Mises screeching his hatred for working people through a megaphone directly in your face every second that you are in contact with it.

It does not seem too strong to say that if either of these things (never mind both) was being done by one person to another they would call it a campaign of harassment and even terror, and have no problem whatsoever getting a restraining order against the offender. Their overlooking that advertising culture, overlooking the raging elitism of the general tone of the media from journalism to pop culture, to focus on the more obnoxious behavior of "the little people" has me remembering a silly remark by a Hollywood actress about people being on social media because they have some need to be "validated" by people they don't know of which she seemed implicitly critical.

The actress in question at about that time was, while still in her twenties', well on her way to a superstardom which was to very soon make her the highest-paid actress in Hollywood; with a list of awards nominations and wins (soon to include an Oscar) that was lengthening to the point that it now has its own Wikipedia page; and a Revlon contract that had her commercial on TV constantly in those days before "woke capitalism," "Body Positivity" and the rest made the meaning of such things far more ambiguous. For a person to whom life had given so much to criticize others for wanting validation betrayed an astonishing lack of self-awareness--or just plain narcissism.

So it goes with our commentariat generally on this matter--as it does on so many others, when they are not cheerfully and venally complicit.