Online all the time

Social Media looms large in our lives these days. Almost everyone has a Facebook account or a twitter account, and we all are tempted to share the posts that engage us the most.

Some of the posts are from, or about Qanon orphans. These people, we're told, are younger people who have "lost" their older relatives to a rapidly-spreading conspiracy theory called Qanon, after its supposed founder, who hold a "Q" (top secret classification) in the government administration.

This phenomenon follows on from similar social scares ranging from the Satanic Panic of the Eighties to the Fox Widows of the Oughties – people who have been radicalized by the media and then isolated from their "normie" – non-radicalized – relatives.

My own experience with online communities is very different. I emigrated to the US in 1989, just as the wired community was ramping up. I was online immediately, using the ability to talk to my friends in the UK and make hundreds of friends all around the world. Friends who have lizard pets. Friends who watched (and obsessively detailed) the X-Files. Led Zeppelin fans. Jack White fans. Star Wars fans. All of these had messageboards – or ‘communities’ as people now call them – dedicated to the topic, and quite often had messageboards limited to a few friends, dedicated to talking about the people on the main messageboard. There was LiveJournal, Archive of Our Own, Fanfiction.net, the comments sections of popular blogs. Many people have had a similar journey, from listservers to Compuserve, Deja News, AOL, to Facebook and Instagram in the twenty-twenties. From modems in the early nineties to cable or free wifi in cafes, the experience has been positive and encouraging.

What, then has gone wrong in the relatives of the orphans and widows mentioned above?

In my opinion, two things. First, personally, I wanted to make friends and involve them positively in my life and thoughts. I looked for similarity in hobbies and outlook and sought to think of mutually interesting topics to write about. I did not wait for people to find me and attempt to influence me. Secondly and more importantly, old fashioned message boards did not have "algorithms". These computer programs are written by such as FB and Twitter to work behind the scenes and bring you, the reader, content you will engage with (click on or linger on). They know you will engage with it because you have done so with similar items before. This is a positive feedback loop – if you click on something, you will see more of it. You will click on it again, and so the algorithms are trained to show you EVEN MORE.

Unfortunately, it's a feature of the human psyche that we click on (and linger over) items that make us angry. Get us up in arms, as the cliché goes (alas, literally these days). The algorithms have taken us away from our friends, who post pictures of their cats and lasagnes, and into the arms of Q, who gets us mad about crazy happenings elsewhere that we can't take care of ourselves, and so we go back, over and over again, to make sure that SOMEBODY is doing something.

We can't do much about FB's algorithms and their tendency to show us a world where things are out of control. We can, however, trim our own behavior and look for – and click on – posts from those we trust, and join in the celebration of togetherness.

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We were asked to write an opinion piece in our non-fiction writing class, and this was mine.