Virtue, Online—And Off
The brave new world of social media and the Internet demands habits that will cultivate virtue both on the ‘net and off it.
Review by Bradley Yam
It’s very likely that somewhere in the digital cloud, an algorithm decided that you were exactly the kind of person who would read this kind of article. And then it recommended it to you by displaying it on your newsfeed. What are we to do with the fact that what we “choose” to consume has somehow gotten more complicated?
Forty years ago, a President of the United States of America won his race under the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again.” He wanted to roll back government intervention, rebuild American economic power, and establish a military space force. In particular, his focus on American values won him support with both social conservatives and religious folk. This President was also a popular television personality. There is no shortage of comparisons between Reagan and Trump, which has led commentators like Paul Krugman to draw a straight line from one president to the other. However, the point of the comparison is subtler: to point out that both figures created their base around a particular technology.
Television was the “command center” of the 1980s, but social media and the Internet are the gravitational centers around which everything orbits today. I recently took a break from newsfeeds and Netflix to read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, a prescient perspective on our media environment. Postman explains the failure of public discourse and the degradation of social institutions in a world of infinite televised distractions. For Postman, technology shapes our thinking. If he is right, then the dawn of these monolithic media platforms and their algorithmic helpers are the substance of our cultural epistemology.
Postman writes that “the medium is the metaphor,” drawing on Marshall MacLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” My mother used to tell me that television would rot my brain, but Postman believes that television remakes it. According to Postman, television is its own unique epistemology, with its own unique biases: decontextualization and particularism. It gives us fragmentary and decontextualized information by unshackling news from the constraints of space and time. A television set in Arkansas can play an ad made in New York, or a political speech broadcast from the Capitol, or even something from another country. He calls this the “Peek-A-Boo” world. It is ephemeral, fragmentary, and endlessly entertaining: content sans context.
More importantly, Postman argues that decontextualized information is non-actionable. Since the majority of the information that we obtain through the television is so far removed from us, there is rarely anything that we can do with it. In other words, it becomes trivia—knowledge for knowledge’s sake. This might seem harmless, but for Postman it indicates the waning of critical acumen. And according to Aristotle, this kind of critical thought—practical reasoning (phrónēsis)—is core to the proper acquisition of virtue. Since practical reason is primarily concerned with what is to be done, the flood of unactionable information can only stifle its proper formation.
In his book The Shallows, Nathan Carr explores a similar argument drawing on neuroscience and psychology to show how the newfound accessibility of the internet search can affect our cognitive abilities in profound ways. But the interaction of virtue and technology goes beyond the exercise of our intellectual capacities. To illustrate this, Postman hones in on the fact that an obsessive focus on federal politics to the exclusion of local politics can be corrosive. For Aristotle, politics defines our teleology. Therefore politics is the end through which virtue is primarily cultivated. Since practical reason determines the right course of action in both the personal and the political, our political masters and their platforms are indeed reflections of ourselves. Political action was the crucible through which phronesis was born. The natural result of the golden age of television is the stone age of virtue. It is no mere coincidence, but certainly an irony, that Reagan won on the promise of the revitalization of American values—American virtues—through the television screen.
But the stereotypes have reversed, and media consumption has changed. Most of us would consider ourselves active participants in, not passive consumers of, the media and politics. The effects of internet search on our brains and long-term memory as explored by Carr were only the tip of the iceberg. If the citizens of the television age were apathetic, then the netizens of the social media age are activists (if only from our armchairs). Before, we might have been silent and pandered to, but now we are polarized and yelling into the digital abyss. What have social media and its algorithms done to virtue?
I consume more media today than ever before, and I’m experiencing a small personal renaissance with the aid of Netflix and YouTube algorithms. The data suggest I am not alone. A PCMag study from 2019 shows that the most edacious Netflix streamers (14 percent) in the U.S. watch between 31 and 60 hours of content per week, which is 8.5 hours on average per day and on the high end of the spectrum. Recent surveys show that 51 percent of streamers have increased their watch time as a result of COVID-19. Whatever accounts for the reversal of stereotypes, it is not that we consume less.
Rather, social media, and the Internet they are built on, have created a new idiosyncratic epistemology that only intensifies the fragmentation and particularism of the television age. Television compelled us to listen; the Internet gives us the option of talking back. The flow of information is inherently bidirectional. In a word, we have moved from “consumers” to “prosumers”—consuming and producing our own content. The docile baby of the Peek-A-Boo world has grown up into an angsty, capricious teenager.
Keeping our algorithms healthy requires the same consistency and discipline that is required to keep our physical bodies healthy.
If the puberty analogy rings true, we might be on the cusp of communicative maturity. We could see a return to the discursive potentialities of the typographic age that preceded the television age. Postman heralds this age as the high point of intellectual life. It is the age that gave us Protestantism, abolition, liberal democracy, German Idealism, Marxism, and so forth. But an internet shouting match of apoplectic proportions seems more likely. Recent protests across the nation suggest that conflicts are likely to evolve into violence and catastrophe.
Television subdued our virtues, but social media has kicked them into overdrive, albeit in a distorted and confused mode. Users of social media seem more ready than ever to extol their virtues while condemning those on another side. It is not a novel thought that social media changes the way we treat people. Jacob Groshek and Chelsea Cutino demonstrate that our online interactions are more likely to make us mean, antagonistic, and abusive. We are driven to do insane things in real life, like enact “performative violence,” for the approval of our online audiences.
The problem may lie with how online communities are dislocated from reality. For Aristotle, the crucible of virtue was the political community. The presence of so-called online communities that are not constrained by genuine political life can in their best instantiations be flourishing niche interest groups and in their worst be fear-mongering, perverted, evil hate-groups. Members of these groups can enter, act, and exit at no cost. Practical reason seeks the best path to accomplish its ends. We can take anybody down by doxxing them. We can make anyone feel small by calling them names. We can even twist the truth as long as it serves our interests. But the real people whose virtues are being malformed in virtual environments are bound to enact real violence.
The story of a former Buzzfeed employee who took part in the ill-fated right-wing extremist attack on the U.S. Capitol illustrates the schizophrenia of the “practical reason” cultivated primarily on social media. Anthime Gionet’s professional and personal virtues were encapsulated in one sentence: “He’d do anything for the Vine.” Flitting from Bernie supporter to alt-right extremist and back again, his colleagues reflected that “His politics have been guided by platform metrics.” The author of the piece, Ben Smith, who was founding editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, seems to be only just coming to the realization that this “social media power” can exert “an almost irresistible gravitational pull.” The people who are pushing the hardest at the gates of the social media revolution don’t seem to know what floods they are unleashing. The growing rift between our awareness of socio-political problems and our inability to have a conversation about them is rivaled only by the ascendant stock prices of tech companies.
Unseen algorithmic agents that enable content to circulate in online communities may play a key role. The incentives of the attention economy require social media companies to retain our attention for as long as possible. This is accomplished by producing yet more tantalizing content. A staggering 720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day.
The solution is artificial intelligence, which is just a fancy way of talking about algorithms. Artificial intelligence isn’t “intelligent” in the human sense. It works by using cutting-edge research in mathematics and statistics to adapt to customer data—your data. Platforms use artificial intelligence to match customers with the content that would provide them the “best” experience. For example, Netflix employs two highly specific algorithms. One personalizes your movie recommendations. The other selects thumbnails that maximize the likelihood of you clicking through. YouTube’s most powerful algorithm is its recommendation engine, capable of granting obscure content creators blockbuster levels of fame overnight. The sole purpose of these algorithms is to hold your attention for as long as possible, maximizing views, ads, and profits. There is no guarantee that what the algorithms serve us will be good, true, or even contextualized. We are merely guaranteed that it will be sensational.
But the Skynet-esque vision of artificial intelligence in popular culture is misleading and unhelpful. Algorithms aren’t the all-seeing overlords directing hapless victims to their doom. They are more like extensions of ourselves, trained to perform very specific tasks. The integrationist view of human experience puts together our real life, our online personas, and the algorithms that we depend on as a single cohesive unit. This view provides the most helpful model to think about virtue in the networked age.
Aristotelian virtues are based on the human capacity to reason, and the political society that reasoning men were embedded in. Eugene Sadler-Smith in one study summarizes scholarship from Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph, and other cognitive scientists to build a case for the evolutionary-biological roots of virtue. In short, he argues that virtues arise from biological capacities, such as compassion, empathy, and reasoning. Moreover, Sadler-Smith emphasizes the way these specific traits evolved in communities, which entails the “practical refinement of predispositions in situ as a member of a community of practitioners.” Therefore, technology matters on two levels: It has altered our human capacity, and it has altered the communities in which we refine our virtuous predispositions. The integrationist view reveals something potentially staggering: to strive to be virtuous in the social media age could be to strive to define a new model of virtue for a new type of human existence.
A comprehensive theory of modern techno-virtue is out of the scope of this essay. But the starting point is abundantly clear. We must choose to cultivate the algorithms in our lives in the same way we cultivate our biological predispositions. We must choose our online communities carefully, without forsaking our local political ones. Aristotle reiterates that what separates adult humans from children or beasts is the refinement of reason over our predispositions. Algorithms are another predisposition; they are not pre-defined by biology, but by the economic incentives of tech companies. If we cannot abstain from them, then we must make the effort to cultivate them.
YouTube’s recommendation AI doesn’t have to give us the most addictive, mind-numbing videos. It can give us educational, uplifting, and nuanced content if we are disciplined enough to seek it out. This means judicious use of the “Do Not Recommend” button and avoiding clickbait. These algorithms show us what they think we want the most, so why not train them to give us what we think is good for us?
Keeping our algorithms healthy requires the same consistency and discipline, indeed, the same training in virtue, that is required to keep our physical bodies healthy. They are like a second brain in the cloud, perpetually processing the information we feed them. Give them the wrong information and they can quickly degenerate. For instance, after a few days of binge-watching How I Met Your Mother videos, my recommendation feed became a sordid mess of sitcom rip-offs.
I would like to suggest three starting points for cultivating our algorithms. First, we must respect context. There are content curation services like Feedly, Google Alerts, and RSS feeds that can help us narrow our consumption to the contexts that are most relevant to us. Second, we have to re-connect with our local communities. This can involve supporting the local news, or simply participating in the social life of our neighborhoods. Third, we have to treat people online in the same way that we would treat them in real life. It is far too easily to vilify when we forget that the line between good and evil runs through each one of us.
Postman posited that the way we interact with our mediums is an ethical choice, citing the ancient wisdom of the second law of the Decalogue. We ought to rebuild even better and more robust contextual narratives. We ought to publish and share our take with others. All of this takes discipline, effort, and consistency. In other words, virtue: the opposite of the leisure and entertainment that the media used to offer us. If Aristotle is to be believed, we can only do it together. The neutral option has been taken away from us. If we do not choose to cultivate our media ecosystem, the choice will be made for us.
Bradley Yam writes non-fiction commentary on technology, politics and religion, his work has been published in Inheritance magazine and danamic.org. He also writes short stories and is working on a longer novel. Bradley is finishing a B.S. in Ethics, Politics, Economics, and a second major in Computer Science at Yale University, where he also served as the editor of the Yale Logos, a student-run campus publication that engages with culture and religion.
This piece was written as part of the Veritas Institute, a program of the Veritas Forum at which college students spend a week learning from top scholars in the fields of science and technology and write an essay about a topic at the intersection of science and the big questions. Fare Forward is pleased to support the Veritas Institute by publishing some of the best submitted pieces.
