The Big Picture
Actually, we can take back social media.
The Boston Globe used to have a blog called The Big Picture1 with a weekly round up of photos their staff took from around the world. It hasn’t been updated since early 2020, when global travel ground to a halt. But there’s also been a shift in the way we access world news since 2020 that makes the big picture both more important and harder to see.
Seeing the big picture is distinct from seeing all the pictures. Even before COVID-19 put a lengthy pause on travel, we had increased access to information via social media but decreased trust in the quality of that information. In a previous post, I focused on how Big Tech’s profiteering and increased automation promotes bad-quality art. I wrote about how art is a discipline that takes time. Photo-journalism is a form of artful communication that is tragically unviable in current digital spaces.
Social media ballooned from the idea that individual voices carry equal importance, but many people feel more isolated because of social media use instead of more heard or more connected. The antidote is not to quit in isolation or scream louder in isolation, but to recognize that we’re underutilizing the power of connection. The big picture is formed from a million little pictures. Communicating with the collective good in mind will require a shift in the way many people currently use social media, and it’s very different than how Big Tech wants us to use social media.
The state of media and communication right now is bad, and it’s not your fault. It’s not even our collective fault as users. We’re accustomed to believing that trends in information sharing are “market driven” because at the beginning of the digital age, they were! The old concept of marketability was to design products and services that people wanted enough to pay for. While social media has never been perfect, I’m not alone in having liked the product, quite some time ago.
The ability to connect with people over distance is incredible, valuable, and nothing short of an evolutionary step for our species. The drift of social media from a tool for connection to ghastly arm of regimes isn’t user-driven or organic growth or even what a robot calculates as best. It’s profit-driven and designed by real people who stopped listening to user feedback a long time ago. Relying on a system that is incentivized to treat me poorly feels bad. That’s because it’s exploitation.
It’s a private company and they have a right to make a profit. It’s free to use, no one is forcing you. If you hate it, why don’t you leave?
No. Your exploitation is actually not isolated. The myth of individual choice is a secret friend of systemic evil. Have you noticed that there are no long distance communication options for humans in the United States that are not controlled by private companies or government contracts?2 No internet, no phones, no physical mail, and no travel that does not incorporate a for-profit third party. Humans cannot communicate for free and that is an imposed situation, not a natural one. Trees can communicate long distance via the mycelium network, and that’s free.
Putting the onus on the individual to opt out of long distance communication or access to information is like saying, “If you don’t want to use the hospital, you’re free to die.” Which is an outlandish comparison for half a second, until you realize that that’s exactly how for-profit healthcare and the insurance empire in the United States works. And, communication is a life and death issue.
Great, so we’re locked into a destructive system without established alternatives. How do we claim collective power? By connecting instead of isolating. Rather than squashing or hushing individuals, collective power building relies on individuals to share a variety of skills that no single person has.
I am an idea person. I am a big idea person. It’s a skill that not everyone has, and it gets glamorized sometimes, but it’s not a very useful skill in an isolated context. I’m not skilled at breaking an idea down into practical steps, I don’t have the skills to implement all the steps by myself, and I am virtually incapable of following through on a step-by-step plan without support. Even the best idea is no good in isolation.
Having big ideas is also not quite the same skill as being able to see the big picture. But seeing the big picture is a skill that can be learned through practice, despite targeted obstacles attempting to prevent you from doing so.
I quit reading or listening to major news outlets including NPR, the BBC World, Al Jazeera, and the briefly promising Roca3. Most of the news they share is credible, but monetized information distributors are no longer in service of the common good and an overview of global horror with no personal context causes anxiety rather than fueling collective engagement. Like big ideas, seeing the big picture is useless without a point of personal connection.
Instead, I focus my listening on individuals and organizations who specialize in certain areas that I’m interested in; garment manufacturing, Central Asia, US prison policy, literacy, my state budget, etc. While gathering information by subject seems more isolated than general news at first, it is a more human path toward collective knowledge. It also helps us let go of the notion that holding a vast amount of tailored information in our palms means that we’re seeing everything clearly.
By choosing my biases and shrinking the scope of my news funnel, I can readily admit that there are a lot of important things I don’t know anything about. Paradoxically, shrinking my personal focus has made me more open to listening to other people’s personal focuses without the burden of educating myself on every category. If you bring some injustice that I don’t know about to my attention I will likely take you at your word and be like, “wow, damn. That sounds awful,” in total sincerity.
Ideally, the social part of media plays out like this (with examples):
I’m in touch with people or groups that I like/trust/find interesting/care about. (I’ve been volunteering with a national prison abolition collective for four years.)
You bring up something that you care about. (The state of women’s healthcare, especially for Black women.)
Now it’s on my radar because I trust you. (“Wow, damn. That sounds awful.”)
I connect the thing you care about with the thing I already know about. (Incarcerated women are shackled to hospital beds while giving birth in North Carolina; recently banned except when there’s “probable cause,” so a flimsy protection.)
As individuals, we have limited awareness and scope of influence. We extend that by working together. With multiple points of contact, we can see a global issue and figure out how it applies on a local or personal scale, and when we experience something personal or local, we have a framework for connecting our experience to the big picture.
The volume of information presented to us from traditional news outlets and social networks has accelerated faster than our capability to process it by several eras of human development. Advertising notwithstanding, the amount of information available is a morally neutral factor that we can take individual action to adjust based on our health capacity. BUT, more connectivity shows measurable results toward individuals collaborating for good.
The ongoing genocide of Palestinians has brought to light stark examples of the effectiveness of big-to-small and small-to-big picture connection across distance, and how it threatens the imposed commerce-over-connection exploitation by Big Tech and the government.
I’ve heard that social media is bad for us so many times that I forgot that I’m not stupid for using it. I’ve been using it to connect on a smaller scale, and apparently so were a lot of other people. While American news outlets tell grotesque lies or simply don’t report about the genocide that is only possible because of US government funding, individuals on social media have been connecting and organizing to boost awareness and action to hold our own government(s) accountable. Online and in-person awareness and action have fueled each other toward an effectiveness that was not possible in isolation.
The sharing of information is in fact so powerful and effective a tool for good in this case that corporate and government efforts to repress it are in full force. Online and in-person organizing has inspired grassroots lobbying against weapons manufacturers, campaigns against politicians and celebrities who’ve put their personal profiteering above their public service, and boycotts of companies that fund munitions shipments. The impact has been felt in loss of executive revenue4, fueling the targeted murder of members of the press in Palestine, US government legislation to shut down TikTok because it provides access to information about genocide that threatens the control of the government’s narrative (and profiteering), Meta repeatedly repressing information about the genocide, and people losing their jobs for even talking about genocide in Palestine.
Your individual voice does matter. It is needed to make the greater chorus even louder in service of us all as people who need connection. The big picture can be painful, scary, and emotionally distressing, but you were never supposed to look at it alone. The more we are connected to one another, the more we enter into a collective consciousness that can combat systemic evils and help us get free.
The photo of the newsstand graveyard is from the Big Picture blog and I re-blogged it in 2009 during the beginning of the extinction of print. Fifteen years later, indie print is experiencing a revival which is a very sweet dovetail to the subject of this post.
There may be free options in other countries, I don’t know, but I’m guessing that since most tech development and social media originated in evil American labs (haha), the US standard has infiltrated the globe.
Who lost me on their supposed lack of bias on an issue that had a glaring good vs. evil component. Moral neutrality is not a flex.
Another current example is the massive labor union movement across the United States as exploited workers recognize that inequality is not organic - bosses are perpetuating it, and the workers working together have more power than the boss.