Every so often it’s entertaining to read old magazine issues to remind oneself of how much things have changed. The January 10, 2005 Sports Illustrated cover featured USC quarterback Matt Leinart after the Trojans’ thrashing of Oklahoma in the BCS National Championship Game, 55-19.
Inside the magazine the still nascent F/X Network was heavily promoting what it presumed was its next great show, Tilt. In a look ahead to the 2005 college football season, the expectation was that USC would repeat since its BCS victory (a second straight national championship) signaled the “makings of a dynasty.” The top SEC team at the time, basically the Alabama of the early 2000s, was Tennessee. The Vols were expected to contend alongside Texas, Michigan, and USC. In reality, Alabama wasn’t even the next SEC dynasty in 2005. Figure that Urban Meyer was still coach at Utah, and had yet to take the Florida Gators on what turned out to be an all-time-great run.
Notable about the issue mentioned was a full-page ad that asked somewhat raffishly, “Who’s Your Girl?” SI was conducting a search for swimsuit models. Can any reader imagine SI placing an ad like this today? Without a major societal outcry? Of course, that would presume anyone would notice. What was once a weekly magazine is now an every-so-often publication that can sadly claim much smaller circulation relative to ’05.
Still, the call for models was telling. Or is telling. It turns out people have been judging other people based on their looks long before the internet was such a thoroughly dominant factor in our lives. This is important only because it’s increasingly bruited by the supposedly deep-in-thought that Facebook, Instagram and others have made people, and in particular girls, extra sensitive about their physical appearance. Supposedly all those pictures scrolled through on the various sites have generated envy, anger, and unhealthy outcomes of the anorexia and bulimia variety.
Except that eating disorders and splashy female imagery well predate the internet. Before the latter rendered magazines yesterday’s media to varying degrees, those same magazines were chock full of pictures of the beautiful. And some females were binging and purging. Related? The guess is no, but who knows? What we know is that life as we know it progressed. There was no mass societal breakdown, nor were college and high school campuses bereft of females who’d been hospitalized for a difficult-to-shake habit of throwing up what they’d eaten.
Which brings us to politics and the internet. According to AEI senior fellow Peter Wallison, Facebook and other social media are using “algorithms” that are “embedded in their systems to discover their viewers’ particular interests. This enables them not only to personalize advertising to a viewer’s interests, but also to present information that will hold their viewers’ attention for extended periods while the advertising is presented.” How dare an entity offering a free service cater to its users’ needs! For shame!
Except that’s what the normally free-market leaning thinker in Wallison believes; that Facebook is acting badly, and in catering to our needs, the social media giant is dividing the U.S. as a nation more than we’ve been divided “since the Civil War.” Wallison seeks legislation that would “forbid the use of algorithms that identify and reinforce the interests of social media users.” It seems the Left want to neuter the rich by making them pay their “fair share” in taxes, while members of the Right want to neuter same by limiting their ability to meet the needs of customers.
Wallison is not alone. Both sides of the ideological divide increasingly feel victimized by Facebook et al. In a recent New York Times conversation between right-of-center op-ed writer Bret Stephens and left-of-center Gail Collins, Collins expressed agreement with Stephens’s lament about Facebook’s alleged impact on political thought. Stephens said he blamed “the algorithm people at Facebook, for accelerating our national descent into a collection of self-contained, self-reinforcing, mutually loathing echo chambers.”
Yes, supposedly before Facebook, Twitter (Stephens says Jack Dorsey has reduced “the act of thinking into the act of grunting”) and other spawn of the internet, the U.S. was populated by much wiser, open-to-opposing-thought people engaging in deep discussion that included expression of ideas that extended well beyond 280 characters. Presumably at Starbucks, New York Times editorial page readers were handing to Wall Street Journal op-ed reading customers the musings of Collins, Nick Kristof and Paul Krugman, only for the Times readers to devour the thoughts of Holman Jenkins, Mary O’Grady, and yes, former Journal editorialist extraordinaire, Bret Stephens.
The thing is, Stephens knows well that discourse wasn’t remotely civil before the internet. He also knows that the laments today about societal division along political lines resembles past laments expressed before the internet. The only difference before was that alleged echo chambers were filled with people whose opinions had supposedly been formed by quick “sound bites” (remember those?) versus the Tweets and posts of today.
Rest assured that the “algorithm people” at Facebook allegedly capable of transforming “the national conversation” (Collins) won’t be capable of doing much of anything for long. It seems the only person who knows this is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. His investment of tens of billions in an entirely different future (Meta) for his creation is evidence of just that.
Zuckerberg knows well that what dominates today in the dynamic economy that is the U.S. economy will almost certainly not dominate tomorrow. After which, what’s ahead (will it even be called “social media”?) will surely be blamed as the cause of some national division as though division is something new. Except that it isn’t.
Better yet, media was never the cause of the division in the first place. Arguably the more realistic driver has been a long-term unwillingness of national politicians to swim within their constitutionally narrow lanes. In other words, the more that national politicians “do” for us, the more they divide us. It’s not Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, it’s that Americans are far smarter than pundits realize. And they don’t like national politicians making local choices for them. Facebook et al are where they express this truth.

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