Can Tikkun Olam Fight the Ills of Social Media?

This is the third piece sponsored by Tevel b’Tzedek discussing Tikkun Olam with some of the Jewish world’s best minds. This week’s conversation is with Dr. Micah Goodman, a celebrated Israeli writer who has published books about Maimonides’s “Guide for the Perplexed,” Yehuda Halevi’s “Kuzari,” Moses’ last speech in the Torah and conflicts within Israeli society. The video conversation revolves around Goodman’s yet-to-be-published book about what social media has done to human society and the human spirit.

As Goodman explains, digital access and social media are controlled by several huge corporations that have discovered an enormously valuable resource which we tend to undervalue — our attention. With the help of supercomputers, Facebook, Google, Twitter and other digital megaliths systematically use our data to capture our attention, mining it to gain valuable advertising revenue and sellable information. Like a hillside that’s been blown open to mine copper or gold, our minds — and our society — will never be the same.

Facebook wants us to spend as much time looking at our phones as possible. According to Goodman, engineers have learned how to do this by feeding us information that confirms what we already think we know. Social media algorithms feed right-wing posts to right wingers and left-wing posts to left wingers, leading each of us to inhabit our own information bubble. What’s even worse is that the algorithms have discovered that lies are more viral than the truth and that anger is the emotion most likely guaranteed to keep us glued to the screen.

Politics used to take place in the town square, in newspapers and on television screens, which may not have been perfectly neutral but were at least committed to promoting the facts and a variety of opposing views. But that public space of politics is now privately owned and operated by social media giants for monetary gain. The result is increasingly polarized politics around the world and a failure to agree on the truth of even basic facts, opening the door to conspiracy theories and authoritarian politics. This polarization destroys democracies, leads to violence and makes it much harder to cooperate on the urgent issues.

The digital revolution has also impacted our psyche. Since 2011 — the year that smart phones began to be widely used — depression and suicide rates have been rising to unprecedented levels, especially among young people. Our happiness depends on our ability to be present in whatever we are doing. But because our phones interrupt our conversations and concentration, we spend less and less time in face-to-face conversations, where we expose our own vulnerability and witness that of others. As a result, our ability to empathize with each other is crippled. Despite our multitude of digital connections, at the end of the day, digital contact leaves us feeling lonely.

Moreover, since we are constantly cultivating an image of ourselves that we can present on social media, we lose touch with who we really are. Witnessing the curated lives of others makes us less able to be happy with who we are and what we have.

Goodman concludes that despite its promise, the digital revolution has collapsed into the three paradoxes: It is divisive, not inclusive; it is constraining, not liberating; and it spreads lies, not the truth.

Despite its promise, the digital revolution has collapsed into the three paradoxes.

Tikkun Olam means being able to proactively fight back against these negative phenomena. Judaism has long recognized how vulnerable our minds are to subconscious influence — no matter how learned or righteous we are. Sages like Rabbi Nachman, teaching at the very cusp of capitalism, taught us that a society based solely on financial gain is not spiritually sustainable.

To recover our attention and take back our politics and our lives, Goodman says, we have to work on three fronts.

• We need government regulation. “This phone,” Goodman says, “Is dangerous. We know that now. The irony is that parents give their children a phone because they worry about them. They should worry about them once they have a phone.” Just as the government outlawed child labor and smoking in public places, there needs to be a set of regulations that will prevent social media companies from using the tools they have developed to addict us.
• We also need a change in culture. We’ve traded our ability to give our full attention to each other for constant availability. This needs to be reversed.
• We need to use technology to overcome technology — to create apps that protect our attention, instead of demanding it.

Goodman concludes by charging that regulating social media, holding companies accountable and reclaiming control over our minds and our attention is an urgent example of the kind of Tikkun Olam we need to focus on today.

This conversation with Dr. Goodman can be found here. Read the first piece here and the second here.

Rabbi Micha Odenheimer is a writer and journalist and the founder of Tevel b’Tzedek, an Israeli organization working to address extreme poverty in the Global South.