David Baddiel: What social media has done to people (including me and my daughter)

Having said that, what the documentary doesn’t do is a deep dive into any of the big trigger issues that we all know lead to instant fury on social media. That’s because what I am trying to do with this film is ask a more general question than: so, vaccines/trans rights/Israel-Palestine — WHAT SIDE ARE YOU ON!!!? I am trying to explore something broader, which is: what is it about this technology that seems to have led to so much rage, across many issues — why that has happened, and what this might mean for all of us.

Key to this is that I agree with David Bowie. In a 1999 Newsnight interview Bowie, ahead of the game as he often was, The Laughing Gnome excepted, said that “the potential of what the internet is going to do to society — both good and bad — is unimaginable”. Jeremy Paxman asks: “It’s just a tool, isn’t it?” And Bowie replies: “No, it’s an alien life form.” This was before social media, before, indeed, the internet had become the dominant social nexus for all of us, so it was remarkably prescient. But Paxman’s response is important. There are people, I think, who still believe that all the internet, and particularly social media, is simply a kind of enormous global connective tunnel. It connects everybody but has no effect on those it connects. It’s just a lot of people talking. It’s almost as if Paxman is saying: “It’s just a very big phone, basically, and because I use a phone, and I’ve not noticed that shifting my basic human essence, I can’t see how the internet is going to lead to any deep-seated social change either.”

Paxman is out of step with history, though. All new types of communication — whether it be indeed telephones, or the printing press, or radio, or TV — have, when they appeared, altered who we are as much as how we communicate. We are social beings, and social media, therefore, isn’t just media. Margaret Thatcher was always wrong about there being no such thing as society, and that is clearer than ever now that society can be seen interacting in real time, all the time.

David Baddiel with his daughter, Dolly, in Cornwall in 2018

One clear effect, for example, that happens when you put everyone in contact with each other is that everyone isn’t just conversing any more: they are broadcasting. Everyone is on stage to a possible mass audience now all the time, and as someone who has spent a fair amount of time on stage, I can promise you that that in itself changes what you say and how you decide to say it. And I can also promise you that if an argument starts between two people on stage, two people who are being watched by an audience for any sign of vulnerability or misgiving or self-doubt, the self-consciousness involved will only cause that argument to spiral.

Now multiply those arguers, and that audience, by potentially billions, and mix that up with an algorithm that gains economic benefit for its platforms through attention — attention that is drawn to friction, controversy and the spectatorship of rage — and you get some sense of how and why social media hasn’t turned out to be just a large series of discrete conversations just like we have in whatever it is we call real life.

Which is not to say that there aren’t many reasons our society gives us to be justifiably angry, and social media does without doubt give voice to many with those reasons who weren’t previously being heard. Near me, there is a bridge across which someone has graffitied “WHAT IF THE IGNORED UNITE?” and I don’t know when it was painted, but, if it was a while ago then, like Bowie, that artist was a prophet, because you do sometimes see that happening on social media, and it sometimes has great social effect.

But, meanwhile, the overall level of anger in public discourse has gone wildly up. And whether or not all this anger is just performative, the fact is, the blows are landing in real life. I talk to one TikTokker whose house, after negative comments about his little funny films of his family that he puts out on that platform reached fever pitch, was arsoned. I meet the journalist Sali Hughes, whose very body language, defensive and vulnerable, speaks of how terrorised she has been by a group of haters dedicated just to her on the dragging site Tattle Life. I put myself into an MRI scanner to see how my brain reacts to abusive tweets about me, and it is not good: I can see on a screen how my neurological chemistry is being distorted by hate. And I speak to my daughter, Dolly, who is 20 now, about how social media impacted, badly, on something we have kept private up till now, her eating disorder.

This was a complicated decision. But it was hers. It happened almost by accident: I was halfway through filming and realised I’d been speaking mainly to middle-aged people, about a phenomenon that a younger generation have lived with their whole life. I don’t know many young people except the ones who live in my house. So I asked Dolly, who was born in 2001, if she’d like to talk about growing up in this new world. She said yes. But then in the conversation it became clear that there was something else she wanted, and maybe needed, to say, and it was about anorexia: about how social media’s insistence that you must have a broadcastable, easily graspable identity can lead those whose identities are not yet formed to feel desperate, and to bounce themselves into any identity, even a negative one, even illness. Anorexic is a defining, all-encompassing identity, and for a long time during her teenage years it was my daughter’s.

It’s hard writing that, but I know that Dolly feels that speaking out about this may, in some small way, help others who are younger than her and at present drowning in the identity swamp. This film is an intellectual exploration, but it is also a personal one, in which I look at the impact of this technology on my family, and indeed on me. While I know all the pitfalls of social media, I am addicted to it. There is something in me that needs to have an audience, needs to feel part of the conversation. That’s OK — I am a comedian and writer — but what’s become clear to me is that having access to that constantly is bad for my mental health. We weren’t meant — even I, who love the sound of my own voice — to be broadcasting all the time. We certainly weren’t meant to live with this level of reactivity.

When in the documentary I give over my social media passwords to someone sworn to keep them under lock and key, it’s not easy — it’s not Lou Reed being barred from seeing his dealer in 1973, but my thumb twitches towards the bird every time I take out my phone — but two weeks later I can feel my mind is quieter, my anxiety levels are lower, and away from the conversation and the audience though I am, I am also blissfully away from the noise and the anger.

I went back on it, of course. Because just to mix it up more, let me say: I think social media is amazing. I think it offers enormous possibility for humanity, and, on a personal level, I have made quite a few friends there (many of whom I have never met in, yes, real life). In moments of sorrow and despair I have even found comfort there. Power in any room always goes to the negative, and the power in this particular room has gone to all the shouting and angry types inside it, but the majority of people inside it, even on nasty old Twitter, are in fact fairly quiet and nice and some are witty and lovely.

We are living in a time of real change, and like all such times, the good and the bad of it are jostling, and it will be up to history to work out how it all shook down. Or to put it another way: the truth is always complex. My fear is that that is exactly the truth that sometimes, and perhaps more and more, social media doesn’t accept.
David Baddiel: Social Media, Anger and Us is on BBC2 at 9pm