“This Was the Mistake We Made”

In his 2020 book “Facebook: The Inside Story,” Steven Levy writes: “It is not unexpected that a group of college students would create an uncontrolled and global platform where people could express themselves and trade, and that they would be caught unprepared for the unprecedented consequences that might arise from this. Who could have predicted that something designed to connect people could grow so large? On the other hand, can you blame a person for pursuing an idealistic goal like connecting all of humanity?”

Throughout history, there have always been things that bring people together and connect them. For example, as Prof. Dr. Kürşat Demirci mentions in his talk titled “The Question of the Origins of the Sumerians” on the Archaeology Conversations YouTube channel, about 4,000 years ago, what connected the Sumerians in Mesopotamia to the people of Aratta, who lived in a region far from them—in what is now known as the Herat region of Afghanistan—was a stone they considered sacred and which was an important part of their culture, called Lapis Lazuli (Blue Stone).

It had the deep blue color that the sky takes on when it gets dark. The world's richest sources were found in Sar-i Sang in the Badakhshan region, and it was processed in Herat after being extracted. The Sumerians traded wheat to the people of Aratta in exchange for the Lapis Lazuli they were so interested in. At the same time, the Sumerians' main goddess, Inanna, was also the goddess of the people of Aratta. Demirci also suggests that there might be a common ethnic origin connecting the Sumerians and the people of Aratta, whose stories about this precious stone have survived to the present day.

While back then it was a beautiful stone that connected people, today this connectivity takes place digitally on platforms we call social media. In other words, what Lapis Lazuli did thousands of years ago is now being fulfilled by new media technologies. Levy notes that Mark Zuckerberg said on this subject: “[...] people use social products to interact with other people. So the most valuable thing we could do for them was to ensure that the people they love and value were using the same service as them.”

However, while speaking about the events that unfolded after the Cambridge Analytica scandal emerged in 2018 following Trump's election as president, he makes this confession: “The lesson we learned from the past few years is this: We had an overly idealistic and optimistic view that people would use technology for good purposes, and we didn't think much about the ways in which they could abuse this technology. This was the mistake we made.”

For us not to fall into this mistake again and again, what we need to be aware of, both individually and as a society, regarding new media technologies is this: Human basic instincts, drives, and emotions have not changed throughout history and will not change. However, due to the effect of technology that shortens time and distances (which we define as time-space compression), the bombardment of messages we experience on social media keeps these basic instincts, drives, and emotions under more pressure than we can psychologically and sociologically handle. The solution, while very simple, requires internal discipline: Being selective and spending less time to dilute the bombardment of messages we are exposed to on social media.