Our brains are simply not set up to deal with the information overload we get from social media

I started writing this blog in 2008, Friday will be the 16th Birthday of the Barnet Eye. At the time I didn't have a Facebook account. I wasn't on Twitter, Instagram didn't exist and I still occasionally looked at Friends Reunited. I didn't 'share'' the blog anywhere. I didn't tweet new blogs. I just wrote them and if people stumbled across them, then fine. In hindsight it is a miracle that anyone looked at it. I joined Facebook in March 2009 and Twitter in April 2011. When I joined Facebook, it wasn't to promote my blog. It was a handy way to keep in touch with friends and family and share pictures of events etc. I've no idea when I first started posting my blog to it, but it was a fair while after the blog started. In fact to start with, it was my friends who posted it. I had no intention of joining Twitter. It was only constant nagging of friends, who said that it would help get the message across, that I succumbed. I very quickly realised that all of my fears about Twitter were true. It was a toxic environment, where you could fall out with complete strangers and get absolutely slaughtered. I learned that some groups of people (Militant Cyclists are the worst) are absolutely ruthless at organising pile ins. From time to time I deliberately wound them up to generate traffic, but I long since got over the buzz of getting 3,000 blog hits from people who hated my guts, happy in the knowledge that I'd annoyed them far more than they upset me. 

I used Facebook far more to promote my band, I liked to keep the two things separate. I realised that this wasn't possible, quite quickly. When I worked in the Corporate IT world, I ended up doing a whole series of courses about how social media platforms interact with corporate entities. A malicious troll reported me to the company I was working for, stating my blog brought my employer into disrepute. The HR department didn't know what to do. I didn't state anywhere that I had a job with the company and I didn't mention them in any of my blogs. But I did write controversial political commentary. The company had no rules at all to deal with the situation, one way or the other. The Troll wouldn't let it go and proved I had a link, via my Linkedin profile. The HR people didn't know what to do. It turned out that I knew more about social media than anyone in the company. I was asked to help draw up a 'policy' and educate the staff about the risks. I did some research, found a social media Guru and we ended up setting up seminars for safety on the Internet. It was illuminating. In a short presentation, he managed to explain how staff were putting the safety of their families at massive risk of extortion by organised crime syndicates, by having badly thought out social media profiles. He explained how simply wearing a work pass with your name and company on exposed both you and the company to enormous risk, by putting personal information on line. A criminal who knows where your children go to school, who your friends are and when you are at events etc, is a criminal sitting on a gold mine, if you work for a company where there is the potential to make money from inside information or forcing you to commit fraud.

It was the first time I realised that I was completely unprepared to live in a world where social media was an ever growing power. As the platforms evolved, I started to find out all manner of things about friends and acquaintences. Sadly much of it was things I'd rather not know. There are friends who I politely avoid, because there postings have made me realise that I don't really fancy a curry and beer with them. Occasionally one will launch a tirade at me, taking me to task for something I've written in a blog. Generally when I write a blog, I do a lot of research and acquaint myself with facts. The tirades are usually a bunch of opinions that have little basis in reality. This was especially true during the Brexit referendum. It was clear to anyone who did their research that the UK would a) Take and economic hit b) It would cause a massive issue in Ireland c) Would increase rather than decrease immigration and c) Increase the prospects of instability in Eastern Europe, as Russia would see Brexit as undermining the unity of what was the EU block and removing a champion (the UK) of smaller countries that were exposed to threat from Russia. 

The blogs are there demonstrating all of these points. There are several local Brexiteers who have since conceded that their tirades were ill informed. All of them believe that this was because "Brexit has been betrayed" but as I explained that this is exactly what they would say at the time of the rant and subsequent discussion, they have too concede that on these points they were wrong. However, the human brain has simply niot evolved to deal with the amount of information we have to process. University professors specialise in a topic and know it inside out, but a Chemistry professor will simply be a layman when it comes to a chat about Geography or Religious studies and vice versa. Of course there are polymaths, who can seemingly be genius level operators at all of these, but they are few and far between and generally are unknown outside acedemia.

What Twitter, Youtube and Facebook has made us start to believe is that we know as much, if not more than these experts who have spent a lifetime researching a subject. We see Tweets from sources that seem informed, with links to videos that seem to have incontrovertable evidence and we are convinced. We then see some unworldly professor, usually on a platform we don't trust (The BBC, Fox News, CNN, GBNews, take your pick) spouting views and opionions that contradict our carefully formed views, researched over a tea on Google, and we think that we are being conned and lied to. 

Let me give you an example, Margaret Thatcher was an advocate of Neo Liberalist Economics guru Milton Friedman. Now I fundamentally disagree with Thatcher and think that the effects of Friedman's views have massively damaged the wellbeing of billions of people on Planet Earth. But his knowledge of economics was light years ahead of mine. He was capable of present a coherent case that his view would lead to stronger eonomic activity than the Keynesian consensus that previously was considered orthodox in the West. The problem with theories such as those of Friedman, Karl Marx etc, is that the people who actually implement them are too thick to properly understand them. 

What social media has done is make us all think we are capable of operating on the level of such deep thinking experts. The trouble is, reading a few articles on Google, seeing a few Tweets and watching a few Youtube videos does not mean that you have the same level of knowledge on a subject as someone who has a Degree, a Mastecrs a PhD and has spent their life researching a subject. 

When you look at what has happened with things like the anti vax movement, you have millions of people who have no qualifications at all, passionately believing that the establishment is lying to them, poisoning them and killing them. Academic types rather patronisingly say "How can you believe that, there is no evidence", missing the point that there is plenty of evidence to support such views, admittedly most of which is inaccurate or flawed or lacks rigorous scientific evaluation. 

Let me give you an example. I have received covid 19 vaccines. Last year, suddenly I found that my PSA level doubled and my prostate cancer had changed in a matter of months from benign to aggressive. Both of these things are facts. I have read articles on the internet that claim that covid 19 vaccines 'turbocharge' cancer. I could, quite reasobably conclude that my cancer was the result of having a jab. If I believed this, I could make a very sound case, put it in a well produced Youtube video and claim the establishment is covering everything up. Whilst it is possible that this is true, it is extremely unlikely. None of the cancer specialists I spoke to, and they are amongst the best in the world, suggested for a second that there was any link. My brother in law is a doctor and we discussed this. He agreed with me that unfortunately, in my position, there was always a distinct possibility that the cancer would return after HIFU in 2016. I was told that HIFU was experimental at the time, and was part of a trial. But it would be very easy for me to misrepresent the facts.

Sadly we see all manner of people making claims that on the face of it are reasonable but are complete nonsense in reality. Having seen the work that goes into writing a fairly non controversial blog about Capita in Barnet Council, what you'd need to do to properly support a claim that something like my cancer could be attributed to covid 19 would be monumental. I'd need to find everyone who'd had HIFU, see who had covid jabs, who hadn't and whether there was a credible correlation between the progress of the cancer and the jab. Given that prostate cancer is very expensive to treat and usually takes a long time to kill you, the NHS would be crazy to ignore any link. One thing I've learned about the NHS and health. Follow the money. If vaccines weren't effective and value for money, they wouldn't use them.

The truth is that our brains are simply incapable of dealing with the information overload we get from social media. They work to identify threats and nullify them. When we are bombarded with information, we simply lose the ability to rationally analyse it all. I don't know what the answer is, beyond selling social media detox courses. That will be the next big thing!