Social Media Is the Next Step in Human Evolution

Social media gets a bad rap these days. It’s common to see headlines like “Why social media is bad for you” or “Why social media has ruined an entire generation”. We are constantly hearing about how social media has ruined dating, dinner night, and our social skills. We hear about how social media has destroyed our self-esteem and how kids these days no longer are able to hold eye contact with people. Studies have come out showing that instagram has a negative impact on the self-confidence of teenage girls. The list goes on.

But with all this negativity surrounding social media, few people are talking about the revolutionary impact social is having on human evolution. Steemit itself represents part of this shift in how humans think, feel, socialize, work, etc.

The story of human evolution is not just a story about genetics. It’s also a story about cultural evolution. The evolution of ideas. The spread and filtration of concepts, theories, inventions, etc. Science was an idea that changed the world. So was democracy. But the idea of computation has probably done more to change the course of human history than any other singular idea. And computation has of course led to the rise of social media.

Historians often talk about three big revolutions in human culture. First there was the Agricultural Revolution. Then there was the Industrial Revolution. And now we are living in the age of the Digital Revolution. But more precisely, I believe the 21st century will be known as the beginning of the Social Media Revolution.

Why? Because social media is more than merely social and more than mere media. It represents so much more than just sharing memes, cat videos, or pictures of babies. It represents a shift in the fundamental mode of human interaction. Baby boomers complain about how teenagers riding in a van would rather text each other or snapchat than they would vocalize out loud. But is this really a bad thing? Or does it represent a fundamental shift in how humans communicate with each other? It goes beyond the mere sharing of emojis. It represents a shift in human consciousness from the physical world to the world of information. People are spending more time forming a digital, “second self” than they are their physical self.

And I want to argue this is not necessarily a bad thing or a step backwards for humans. It is neither inherently good nor bad. It simply is. The key to human survival has always been our radical plasticity, our ability to adapt to novel environments. Social media is about as radical an environment as you can imagine. And humans are currently in the process of adapting to it. Some people have found incredible success through social media and others are falling through the cracks. But like it or not social media is here to stay and the next few decades will place upon us a great adaptive filter according to who can benefit from social media and who cannot.

So rather than decrying how social media is ruining an entire generation, we should instead be focusing on how we can best adapt to social media and take advantage of our human plasticity. Our minds are literally forming in response to this new digital environment. What happens next is up to us.

images from pixabay