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Breaking The Digital Spell
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In the credits of last week’s episode, I announced that Breaking the Digital Spell was going back on hiatus for the indefinite future. When I began working on new episodes back in August, I had no idea this podcast would soon become a part-time job for me as a result of some sudden life changes. Six months, 56k words, and nearly 8 hours of recorded audio later, some more life changes (good ones!) are around the corner, and having just concluded my commentary on Breaking the Social Media Prism, this is a natural stopping point - for the podcast, at least.

Are there any practical ways we can reduce polarization on social media from the bottom-up?  Bail proposes three strategies. The first strategy, “Seeing the Prism”, is straightforward: we need to teach people to see how social media bends and distorts our identities. The second strategy, “Seeing Yourself Through the Prism”, is more complicated: we need to learn how to see how social media distorts us and how we portray ourselves online is often not the same as how people interpret us online. The third strategy, “Breaking the Prism”, builds on the first two strategies to suggest how we can begin taking baby steps to meaningfully reach across the aisle and close the perception gap through finding common ground.

What is the “perception gap”? Simply put, the perception gap is the chasm created by false polarization; it’s the distance between how extreme people perceive others to be compared to where people actually are. The average Republican believes the average Democrat is more extreme than there are actual liberal extremists, and vice-versa for Democrats. This chasm between perception (the sense that the average Democrat or Republican is extreme) versus reality (that the number of both conservative and liberal extremists are a minority of the population) is the essence of the perception gap.

Social media has reached a saturation point where the average person cannot completely avoid interacting with it in some way. The only people who can truly go “off the grid” at this point are people with either enough privilege and power to have people do their social media work for them, or people with a strong support system of family members and friends who collectively agree to build alternate social systems so they can all stay off together.

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Breaking The Digital Spell
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