Social Media and the Mainstream Contrarian

A contrarian is defined as someone who is rejecting popular opinions or widely accepted standards. Most of us would conform to social norm, be it by education, fear, or laziness. Some of us, however, decide to go against the flow. It could be due to a thoughtful analysis, an elating or traumatic personal experiences, or a strong desire to stand out. So far, this would seem to confine contrarians to a relatively easily identifiable minority.

There is however a caveat. Our brain, still largely wired as when we were living in caves (as a species, not those of you enjoying their recreational bunker), tells us that we have to fit in to avoid the most terrible fate of all: die alone on the margin of our societal clan. But the society we live in tells us that we need to be special. So, how do we reconcile the two, how exploiting this ambiguity became a multibillion dollars business, and a perception management heaven?

 This brings us to the “mainstream contrarian”, nicely reconciling our modern society’s need for individual recognition with the psychological safety of not straying too far from the social norm. Concept unthinkable until the advent of social media, with both the scale and affordability to make everyone special without breaking the bank.

Much has been said about Facebook using their deep learning technology to match with their users content that would be offending enough to make them react, while not outrageous enough that they would just tune out. Generating emotions is, of course, the surest way to get someone to act or react (which in the original business model meant to purchase goods or services proposed to users through specially targeted adds). Naturally, just getting someone angry doesn’t help much. So, not only do you need the exact right balance to not turn your audience off, but you also need to offer them this instant stardom of getting the world they want (or the one they are the most likely to engage with) at their feet. When the model works, they are not surfing THE internet, they are surfing THEIR internet, all tailored to their tastes and profile.

 The sense of empowerment that comes from being at the center of our digital universe, and receiving pre-digested content that has been designed for our profile, comes also with a big drawback: we have no control over that universe.

Back to our mainstream contrarian, now we are in your own digital cocoon, in the safety of a medium used by billions of our fellow social creatures, but with enough scale on the social media platforms to find a larger group of individuals who nurture the same grudge or fear we do, or simply have the same inherent bias. We have now effectively eliminated the biggest hurdle from being a contrarian, namely the risk of being ostracized. Now, we can be a contrarian, be unique, but with the comforting thought of belonging to a large group that gives us this sense of social safety. We can now effectively be a mainstream contrarian.

 What is wrong with that would you say? The platforms make incredible margins, and their users feel both happier and more vindicated. Yes, but…

The illusory social prominence of belonging to a like-minded crowd displaces our inherent social loyalty from our traditional circles (family, office, friends, etc.) to this virtual posse. It doesn’t take long from there to be invested enough in this digital citizenry to run the risk of becoming a social vigilante, seeing the world through, and defending the interest of our newfound online social circle.

What before we could create only with significant time and treasure, now, not only requires a minimal amount of sophistication (literally anyone can become a famous voice to be heard from on social media), and a negligible investment (the simplest smart phone will get you started), but it gives us access to audiences that a lifetime couldn’t generate without social media.

 This certainly didn’t go unnoticed, and what marketers saw as a good way to sell their products, others saw as a good way to sell their ideas. Imagine for an instant how, say in the 1960s perception management would work. Not only would one have to travel from place to place in order to start influencing their audience, but the farther they would travel, the stronger would their audience resist, as their frame of reference would be tainted by local values that are not necessarily be congruent with the ones they are trying to instill. The cost and difficulty would make it all the easier to spot, and counter.

 Now that we can explore online someone’s stream of consciousness, we can also exploit it at a marginal cost. In other words, target exponentially more people than we would have dreamed of in a pre-social-media era, for a cost so low that we couldn’t even dream of it.

To add to the difficulty, the low cost makes it an easy endeavor for all sort of fringe groups, making enough noise to more easily hide the ones we should worry about, from domestic to international terrorists, from organized crime to state-sponsored groups (think active measures).

And to top it all, the little funding necessary to manage perceptions, and engage people into a wide range of responses (including insurrection in a democracy that until recently most would have thought safe, as we have seen this past January) makes it all the more difficult to detect, track, and counter. Indeed, “following the money” is usually the easiest investigative trail to track, and funds mostly make their way to their intended target through highly regulated, well documented, and easily auditable channels. But when so little funds are necessary to start such operation, there is literally no trail to follow.

The bottom line is then an environment where all sorts of dangerous groups can operate without the need of a benefactor, and state actors can operate easily enough, and in so much noise, that it is easy for them to do so with near-absolute plausible deniability.

This author is not one to promulgate more regulations, but it seems that we are reaching the point where so much damage can be done at so little cost, that some rules need to be set to identify, and give preferential treatment (be it operationally or fiscally) to individuals and organizations that follow generally accepted standards in a legitimate, or legitimized use of digital media platforms.