Shadow Plays

 

Imagine you are a prisoner who has been trapped since childhood. Bound and shackled with your head restrained and facing the inside wall of a cave. You hear other prisoners but cannot see them because of the restraints. A fire is burning from behind the rock you have been chained to. Between you and the fire is a raised walkway where footsteps echo from unseen shadow actors. These actors carry objects above their heads that throw shadows reflected from the fire onto the wall in front of you all. As years go by, everything you see and know comes from the shadows projected in front of you.

Eventually you are freed from the chains that restrain you only to find yourself faced with the arduous journey of making your ascent from the cave to the surface. Your eyes burn, overwhelmed with the sunlight you have missed out on all these years. You continue to adapt slowly finding yourself attuned to the intelligible world. As the sunlight continues to bathe your eyes, you feel overwhelming joy for the ability to finally see the world as it truly is.

However, with your new knowledge there is increased responsibility to free those who were imprisoned with you. Now that you are awakened to the intelligible world you travel back down to free the other prisoners who were restrained with you. But they resist. All your fellow prisoners see is someone who speaks of things that they struggle to understand. They refuse to come with you, choosing to stay in the cave with the shadows and the world they have grown accustomed to since childhood.

The story above is the well-known Allegory of the Cave, recounted by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. Socrates uses the allegory to illustrate the difference between the sensory world based on illusion and ignorance and the intelligible world based on the true essence of reality. While the Theory of Forms—or the ‘true essence’ of reality—is an important overarching theme in the Allegory of the Cave and Platonic Philosophy in general, the allegory’s strongest cultural relevance is the striking parallel between the cave and the use of social media in modern society.

Written in 380 – 370 BC, the Allegory of the Cave foreshadows the methods employed by contemporary social media platforms to target and retain users. Much like the prisoners in the cave, social media users are shown curated images imitating reality but rarely reflecting ‘true’ reality. The shadow actors in Plato’s Allegory have been supplanted by social media algorithms that preselect posts/content for users to consume. Like the cave, social media offers a version of reality presented to users but never allows users to fully interact with the outside world.

Isolation plays an important role in both Plato’s Allegory and modern social media platforms. The cave is a metaphor for a world based on illusion and sensory experience that isolates prisoners from the intelligible world and leads them to ignorance. Data suggests that social media platforms may be achieving similar results with similar tactics. A study published in Social Media + Society found that, for people 18 to 40, the use of social media multiple times per day causes higher levels of reported loneliness. It is ironic that platforms designed to be social are producing feelings of loneliness and isolation for social media’s key demographic.

In the same study, people over 40 reported significantly lower feelings of loneliness from daily use of social media. Which raises the question: why do baby boomers and those over 40 report less isolation than their younger counterparts, Gen Z & millennials? If you look at how social media use differs amongst different age demographics the story becomes a little clearer. According to a study that appeared in BMC Pediatrics, people who start using social media at a young age are more likely to develope social media addiction and suffer from lower overall executive functioning. Whereas baby boomers and older generations grew up without social media, Gen Z and millennials have grown accustomed to using these platforms since childhood.

It is also important to note how the nature of social interaction in the digital age differs between those under 40 and those over 40. Whereas our parents and those who grew up before social media largely use social media to connect with old friends, there is a tendency, especially within younger generations, to substitute digital communication for real social interaction. Social media use by older generations is more like a camping trip into the wilderness versus an everyday event. For Gen Z and millennials, social media has become a mainstay of everyday life used to interact with friends, build a career, peruse pop culture, and collect the news.

If isolation is the first building block of an artificial community, the creation of the echo chamber is the second. Echo chambers are environments where individuals only encounter beliefs that correspond with their own thereby reinforcing preexisting views and prejudices. Such environments can be dangerous because they can reinforce fundamentalism and staunch dialectic dialogue. In the cave, the prisoners with their limited perceptions accept illusory shadows as true reality. The prisoners even castigate and repudiate those who come from the intelligible world to try to change their perceptions.

The operating tactics of social media platforms have analogously created online digital echo chambers. All social media platforms are governed by algorithms that funnel content to users based on user interaction and preferences. The resulting social spheres that develop around similar interests and beliefs tend to become exclusionary and amplify currently held perceptions. A study published by Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences of the United States of America found that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were extremely effective at creating groups that scored highly in terms of homophily and bias towards like-minded users/publications as measured by what information or news users were willing to listen to and then repost or share. The modern social media echo chamber inundates users with self-confirming information and content that reinforces their biases and further isolates them from dialectic conversation that could serve to prosper truth or discovery.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is an apt metaphor for modern social media usage. The isolation that social media is creating amongst users and the cultural echo chambers that social media is creating within our communities is fundamentally changing the structure of our society. Real life interaction, speaking on the phone, speaking face to face, going out to experience the real world are important factors of the biological and cultural make up of human beings. So too is dialectic dialogue. Being able to hear opposing viewpoints and arrive at the truth after philosophical/scientific discovery is the essence of life. As Socrates famously said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The illusory nature of the cave is only possible through every prisoners’ participation in that artificial reality. And though it may be an arduous journey to find real meaning in the world, “better to become servants to a poor man” than to accept anything less than the truth.