Why did primates and then humans develop a facility for advanced language? One theory is that it helped primate tribes defend themselves better against predators and other dangers. Before the development of language here's an example of tribal coordination when a saber-toothed tiger drops out of a tree with lunch on its mind:
SOMEONE: Eek!
SOMEONE ELSE: Arrgh! [Kill it!]
At that point everyone panics and either runs away or attacks the tiger depending on their personal levels of bravery and stupidity. Result: Satiated tiger. Here's how it goes after the development of language:
SAM: Tiger!
TRIBAL LEADER EDWARD: Fred, grab that big stick and start waving it. Joe, take point. Bob and Andy, you're on flank. Charlie, go get some fire.
Result: Dead tiger.
This is not a bad theory, as these kinds of theories go, but there's a better one based on the idea that the greatest threat to humans is other humans. In operational terms, it means that the development of language was mainly due to a desire to gossip about each other.
This must have been a powerful force. It didn't come for free, after all. It required changes to the larynx that made choking more likely, and it required the development of a large brain, which needed more energy and made childbirth more dangerous.
Nevertheless, for a dominance-hierarchy species like ours, knowing who's up and who's down was critically important. And affecting who's up and who's down was the difference between living a decent life and being tossed to the wolves as a small child. Naturally this started a linguistic arms race, since tribal dominance depended on ever-escalating subtlety and nuance among the gossipmongers. The side effect of all this was the eventual ability to construct pyramids and solve differential equations, but that was never the original plan.
So time went by and language became ever more sophisticated, as did cooperation and betrayal. We invented writing, which provided new scope for gossip and backstabbing, and then movable type. Then there was the penny post and telephones and finally social media.
And this explains what social media is really for: bitching and moaning and talking shit about other people. There is nothing new about this, and it taps into the core motivation for developing language in the first place.
There's more, of course. The big difference between, say, telephones and Facebook, is that Facebook is generally more open and blunt. But didn't I say that language had grown ever more sophisticated and subtle over the years? I did. So why is Facebook famous for being rude and stupid?
Answer: Because it's populated mainly by idiots. No one with any sense would do any serious scheming on Facebook even if they had all their privacy settings applied correctly. It's just too risky. The best and most serious communicators in the modern world use social media for occasional propaganda, but otherwise stick to telephones and encrypted emails and so forth.
This is the basic story of social media. It seems like it should be the latest and greatest advance in human communication, but it's not. Just the opposite: It's designed to appeal to one of the core motivations of humankind, but only in the most brutal, unsubtle way. This makes it mostly a way to corral kids and unsophisticated communicators away from everyone else, which is why it seems like such a cesspool. It's how kids and idiots have always talked, but in the past we've mostly been able to ignore them.
And we take it seriously even when we shouldn't. Don't get me wrong: kids and idiots can cause a lot of harm. This is why staying abreast of social media is important. But it needs to be seen for what it is: a communication medium that appeals to our strongest human instinct—meanspirited gossip—but is mostly just a distraction from the real centers of power and sophistication.
And now I shall tweet out a link to this blog post.
... what social media is really for: bitching and moaning and talking shit about other people.
I can certainly agree with that, without necessarily buying into the hypothetical evolutionary anthropology.
I think, though, there is one other aspect that's new to social media, with which we have not yet come to terms: the way it enables, to a much greater degree than previously possible, the development of wildly different, yet large and fully viable, subcultures, even in small communities.
Briefly, I suggest that it used to be that, for a really crazy subculture to develop, either it had to happen in a Big City, where there are very large numbers of people and hence enough of almost any variety eventually to discover each other and start a self-reinforcing community, or it required deliberate social -- and usually geographic -- isolation, Jim Jones style. Otherwise, you just couldn't avoid being part of, and influenced by and noticed by, the mainstream community; at best you'd be a weird loner.
But now, crazy subcultures are a couple of clicks away, and they're big and vibrant and full of people who think like you do and reinforce your beliefs, just as you do theirs. You can be part of the Peoples' Temple without ever leaving your suburban home or your 9-to-5 job.
This is not entirely bad: for example, it has allowed a lot of marginalized people, like gay and trans teens, to find community that they wouldn't necessarily find otherwise. But it has also allowed real weirdness to flourish, and what has happened to the Republican Party is Exhibit A.
Does anybody care about gays or trans???
[Editor's note: he seems nice.]
Well, let's see. First, I expect that gay and trans people care about gay and trans people. The friends of gay and trans people care about gay and trans people. Many close relatives of gay and trans people care about gay and trans people. Good Christians care about gay and trans people; after all, they too are God's children. Finally, decent people generally care about their fellow human beings, including gay and trans people.
If you don't fit into any of the above categories, please go away and stop bothering the decent people.
Nobody cares about trolls.
Please go away now, little Midgard. Adults are speaking.
This is blatant Anna Kendrick erasure.
Without speaking to your apparently rhetorical question about 'gays or trans', I'm fairly confident that very few people here care for your company.
The salient difference[1] between you and the group you have chosen to demean is that they don't tend to be objectionable in public, whereas you put a lot of effort into actively being so.
[1] Aside from the fact that you're a mean drunk, that is. I've got you pegged as a corn likker man.
The premise that the greatest threat to early humans was other human beings is disputed among anthropologists.
@Perry
Anthropologists may debate threats to prehistoric humans, but a look at the world we currently live in suggests that yes, our greatest threat is each other. [Disclaimer: I Am Not A Scientist, but I know some stuff.]
It doesn't take a scientist to realize that no other animal has nuclear weapons. We are not only the greatest threat to us, we are BY FAR the greatest threat to us.
In 2021, maybe. But historically we had murderous little foes like plasmodium falciparum, yersinia pestis and variola major.
While I completely agree about social media, I think complex language evolved because of sex and food, and everything else is in support of that.
And, also, notional 'dominance' is largely specious, the 'alpha' character in a group is the one with the most friends, the one better at communicating, not the biggest brute.
(And that's the primary reason why social conservatives seem subhuman, they actually work at being foundationally wrong).
As with everything evolutionary, there are certainly multiple causes for communication, all animals communicate and even plants communicate; when attacked they release chemicals that stimulate neighbours to initiate increased production of defensive chemicals, for example. It seems likely to me, if one considers the evolution of human societies into larger and larger social groupings (family units, tribes, small nations, larger nations, empires) that differentiating ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ must have played a significant role i.,e., it reinforces our tribal instincts. After all gossip only works if one speaks the same language and has similar cultural sensibilities. As for social media, I rarely use it and only Facebook to see postings from friends, I never post anything. One aspect of Facebook I’ve noticed, is that it is used by people who are not particularly social, so it’s kind of a lazy way to maintain relationships without actually having to leave one’s home.
Yes, I tend towards the "tribalism" theory - language is a very efficient way of distinguishing between 'us' and 'them' in ways that other animals do not seem to have developed (although it's clear that those tribal distinctions do exist.)
Gossip seems to be very much a side-effect of this tribalism, in that it provides ways of both talking about other tribes and also about shifting balances within one's own tribe.
I'm not going to spend time digging up examples, but I know I have read articles and commentaries in the past where various public figures (such as politicians, media figures, reporters, columnists, etc.) talk about twitter as the public forum of our time, and they explain that they have to be there so as to not miss anything "important." Is there any truth to that? I have no doubt that twitter is predominantly a sewer, but, for some segment of certain professions, does it actually serve as a pre-eminent forum for ideas, updates, news, or whatever?
I don't know. But I tend to doubt it. The fact that any of those people could have a twitter mob turn on them - at the drop of a pin - with violent threats and shocking profanities leads me personally to believe that twitter, facebook, you name it - they're lost causes (at least in terms of constructive public debate or discussion).
That being said I do post some photos on Facebook sometimes: I just don't post private info or personal updates. And I never debate anyone about anything.
Jesus. "A dominance hierarchy species like ours." Thus does pseudo-scientific crap become accepted common knowledge.
Even research into species *with* legible dominance hierarchies is complicated. Exceptions and contingencies abound. Do you think it's any easier with humans, whose power structures change contextually based on what building you're standing in and what time of day it is?
Chimps don't speak but they can do this:
https://youtu.be/DqoImw2ZWmI?t=106
An evolutionary tradeoff with an upside.
We are unlikely to ever really know the "reason" humans evolved speech. In fact there is unlikely to be a single reason. But one important thing that I find is rarely considered in discussions about evolution is that what drives evolution is not so much survival but reproduction. An animal that lives a hundred years and never reproduces may as well have died in infancy from an evolutionary perspective.
So improvements in speech among early hominids did not necessarily need to increase any individual's odds of survival, but it did need to increase their odds of reproducing. Think of the peacock's tail. This is a major drag on survival but a major asset in reproduction.
My feeling is anything as crazy as the reshaping of the hominid larynx, which increases the chance of choking (few animals besides humans are even capable of choking) is exactly the sort of thing that could be driven by what is known as "sexual selection". Humans tend to flirt and romance one another before agreeing to "mate". This may be a "just so" story but I think the ability to be witty and charm potential mates is as good a reason for speech to evolve as anything else I've heard of. We eventually found all kinds of other uses for speech of course.
Kevin seems kind of cranky today
Chomsky, is that you?
I guess I'm the only one who read this as largely tongue-in-cheek? The title and "illustrations" (ha) are pretty amusing, at least.
Not that Kevin doesn't mean what he's saying about social media, but c'mon, folks. Every post doesn't have to be a chart-laden whitepaper.
Add me to your list.
And for that matter, wolves manage to coordinate their hunts without the need of a complex spoken language. One could even argue that a language, with its potential for misinterpretation, could be a real drawback during the hunt. And that doesn't even include scaring off the game.
Long ago, in a mythical time, the sages advised that one should never read the comments section of any media or content, This was generally wise advice, the erudite commenters of Jabberwocking notwithstanding.
And then Twitter came along and turned the comments *into* the content, and Jesus wept.
You got any citable sources for uh, any of this?
When I consider FB now I always think of this quote from D.F. Wallace from his essay ostensibly about TV and fiction writing but also very much about TV's ubiquitous power over the culture, "E Unibus Pluram." 1990.
For me, FB is just a mirror, and if you hold a mirror up to 2.5B humans the Good/Evil ratio is uncomfortably close to 50-50.
"It’s undeniable that television is an example of “low” art, the sort of art that tries too hard to please. Because of the economics of nationally broadcast, advertiser-subsidized entertainment, television’s one goal – never denied by anybody in or around TV since RCA first authorized field tests in 1936 – is to ensure as much watching as possible. TV is the epitome of low art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But TV is not low because it is vulgar or prurient or stupid. It is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to please Audience. And I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be really similar in their vulgar and prurient and stupid interests and wildly different in their refined and moral and intelligent interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor viewers are responsible for quality."
Yrah, well he was thinking of broadcast teevie and two or three "stations", total. We've got extreme narrowcasting now, so there's no need to try to appeal to the lowest common denominator of the entire population.
And surprise! we're now in yet another Golden Age of teevie.
Cable TV was here long before 1990, and more broadly, DFW was WAY ahead of his time re: televisual mediums' power.
It took me 3-4 reads, but "we're now in yet another Golden Age of teevie" is very illustrative of one point he was trying to make, which was that to an uncomfortably large degree we are ruled by our screens, right down to the person getting mowed over by a bus because they were walking and staring at their phone.
Anyway, I think FB shows us pretty precisely how much we as a species have evolved and for at least one dependent "customer" (actually product) of FB it's pretty discouraging.
https://tayiabr.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/e-unibus-pluram-david-foster-wallace-1990/
David Foster Wallace sadly did not live long enough to see the subscription model of streaming prestige television.
Yes but he famously did not own a TV ("because I'll sit around all the time and watch TV") and once again, the mere fact that people are MORE than willing to pay to stare at their furniture for extended periods of time was where he was coming from.
Like I said, it took me 3-4 reads, but "E Unibus Pluram" is an argument I accept almost in full now.
You fight sabre-toothed tigers with a middle management vision team from Verizon?
What can't Lily do?
Facebook I found to be like a high school reunion. It was fun to catch up with people I hadn't seen for 30 or 40 years; disappointing when a few people who used to be good friends wanted nothing to do with me; annoying when a few losers I never liked kept pretending we'd been best buddies; and when someone suggested we exchange addresses and phone numbers so they could drop in next time they were in the neighborhood, it was time to leave.
Trump turned Twitter into an entirely new tool in politics and the media. Was it a permanent innovation, or will it prove to be a nine-days wonder? Only time will tell, as journalists used to say in newspaper 'analyses' when they were clueless about a topic.
Maybe the social media thing isn't necessarily a bad thing in of itself. Maybe the negative characteristic is the scale. Human groups can't be too large or there is breakdown in communication and stability.
There was a second Steele dossier,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/03/mi6-spy-christopher-steele-produced-second-dossier-donald-trump/
Apparently the Kremlin has more than just one Trump sex tape.
Who else thinks the real blackmail here is there are people who will pay anything not to see them?
"No one with any sense would do any serious scheming on Facebook even if they had all their privacy settings applied correctly. It's just too risky."
A part of me wants to discourage anyone from trying to inform idiots about their failures -- you don't want to tell the bank robber where the money is, after all -- but then I am reminded that idiots generally have great difficulty overcoming cognitive biases.
Back in the days before the internet, people would yell at the TV. Before TV, they would no doubt yell at the radio (still do actually!) Before that? Newspapers? Cave paintings?
Facebook rants and twitter tirades. We're all just talking to ourselves.
Twitter is the worst outlet ever created- short thoughts for short people ( Apologies Randy).
FB, on the other hand, has been good in so far as it has revealed how many people are complete as-oles. Way more than I imagined.
For me, the real problem with Homo Sapiens being a dominance hierarchy species is that there is a sizeable minority for whom that model simply doesn't make any sense and within that minority there's a group who aren't even able to fake compliance with it either. And those people are generally perceived as being "weird" rather than just adapted for the 'wrong' sort of society.
(Oh, and there's also the problem of the solipsists or 'predators' who absolutely love dominance hierarchies because it means they are often gifted with victims without actually having to work for it.)
I like playing the armchair anthropologist too, but at least I've lived among primitive tribes. We are NOT a dominance-hierarchy species. Village chiefs are NOT alpha males who get all the females. Hierarchy is very small in little communities. Dominance is frowned upon. They become prevalent because of scale - when the village becomes a city. But that, I posit, is not how we evolved or how language evolved.
Of course some of us just use social media to wish Aunt Betty a happy birthday, post the fact of our vaccination, and enjoy the kitten videos.