The Biggest Problem with Social Media Nobody Talks About

Source: The Biggest Problem with Social Media Nobody Talks About, Unsolicited advice, 27:25, uploaded 2024-08-27, category Other / Unclear, playlist index 644.

Social media has become one of the rare subjects on which people across political camps agree. It gets blamed for poor mental health among young people, political polarisation, and the loneliness that seems to follow modern life. The video asks what a stream of words and images can do to people at such a deep level. Its answer comes from Byung-Chul Han’s The Transparency Society, which treats social media as one expression of a wider culture that values visibility, exposure, and measurable attention.

Han’s argument moves from the value of being seen to the damage caused by forced disclosure. It then turns to the glut of information and ends with surveillance. The final claim is severe: transparency can become a form of control, especially when people learn to demand exposure from one another and to volunteer it themselves.

Exhibition value

The video begins with a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value. Something has intrinsic value when its value belongs to the thing itself. Extrinsic value comes from a relation to something else, as with the price of tulips during the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip mania. The flowers had not acquired new physical properties. People simply wanted them more whilst supply remained limited.

Han introduces a related distinction between cult value and exhibition value. A sacred relic can matter because it exists and because believers venerate it. Some relics appear in public only a few times a year. Their hiddenness forms part of their value. Exhibition value works through attention. A film production company may ask its lead actor to perform a shocking publicity stunt because the act attracts more eyes to the film. The contents of the stunt become secondary to the attention it gathers.

This is the currency of the attention economy. Han thinks that exhibition value has spread into areas of life where other kinds of value once had more room. The video gives a small personal example. Someone the presenter knew would delete an Instagram post if it failed to reach a certain number of likes or views within an hour. The post’s subject mattered less than the reaction it produced. Its content served the aim of being noticed.

The same logic appears in the platform’s design. Algorithms make users monitor who likes their posts and how much attention their profiles receive. The pressure grows when people are told to build a personal brand. Physical attractiveness becomes part of the calculation because attractive images tend to receive more attention. Attention also has a direct economic value. YouTube measures the time spent watching the video, estimates what that time is worth to the platform, and shares part of the result with the creator.

The problem reaches beyond a creator’s income. If exhibition value becomes the measure of personal value, the judgement belongs to other people. It does not even belong to a known group of friends whose opinions a person has chosen to respect. It belongs to an abstract audience made from views, rankings, and passing reactions. Stoic philosophy gives the video one way to describe the danger. Epictetus separates what lies within the mind from what lies outside it, and the video also invokes early Theravada Buddhism and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy as traditions that treat the mind as a final reserve of value. Other people’s attention remains outside anyone’s control.

Disclosure and the loss of chosen intimacy

The second movement begins with the existentialist idea of authenticity. Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus use the term to describe a relation between a person’s deeper values, conscious beliefs, and outward conduct. Social media gives authenticity a more troubling use. TikTok trends often show people sharing a deeply vulnerable moment with strangers as soon as it happens, sometimes involving their partners or family.

The video does not treat every such post as a mistake. An individual may choose to share a private event for reasons that make sense to them. Han’s concern begins when the choice becomes a pattern or a social pressure. A culture of transparency asks people to appear sincere whilst making every part of that sincerity available for public inspection. The result is a demand for perfect openness combined with constant judgement.

Public vulnerability can also create a false kind of intimacy. Viewers feel emotionally close to somebody they have never met because the person exists for them as an object on a screen. Han calls this parasocial relation. The platform encourages the person on screen to turn their own life into material for that attachment. Their private feelings become content, and their value becomes tied to the attention that the content receives.

Han’s account of real closeness depends on a balance between openness and hiddenness. Erich Fromm describes love as a relation that joins people whilst preserving their status as separate beings. The video makes the same point through Aristotle’s observation that a person who is friends with everybody cannot be a friend to anybody in the full sense. Intimacy requires a choice about whom to trust and what to disclose. A person needs to remain a distinct other whose thoughts and desires deserve attention.

The public display of everything removes that choice. It leaves too little of a person for the people they love to discover, and it turns vulnerable parts of the self into material for general consumption. Han calls this the erotic dimension of interpersonal connection: people reveal themselves gradually and decide who receives access. Total transparency replaces that agency with an open exhibition.

The video takes Han’s diagnosis into its most severe territory when it describes a possible self-destructive narcissism. A person can begin to act for the sake of displaying a version of themselves that will attract approval, even when the display serves neither their own life nor a particular relationship. The presenter admits that Han may push the point too far. The pressure to make private feeling public still deserves attention because it can leave people exposed to anonymous judgement whilst their closest relationships grow thinner.

Information without judgement

The third movement uses Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” as an image of informational excess. Borges imagines a library that contains every possible combination of letters that can fit in a book. Its inhabitants have access to an infinite quantity of material, yet they lack a way to sort the meaningful arrangements from the rest. The problem is volume without a method for finding what matters.

For most of human history, information was scarce. Books cost money, literacy was limited, and access to a text presented its own obstacle. Social media reverses the problem. People receive far more information than they can read, check, or remember. The video reports that 41 percent of people aged 18 to 24 in the United Kingdom describe social media as their main gateway to news. That figure is presented as part of the video’s argument and has no underlying source in the description.

Han sees a culture of transparency treating quantity as a good in itself. Companies collect customer data because more knowledge about a person can make future purchases easier to predict. Platforms and creators also have an incentive to produce shocking material that attracts clicks, even when the information has little use beyond the reaction it creates. The result is an economy that gathers and spreads data because it can, then leaves the question of quality for later.

Excess also prevents attention from settling on one idea. Han’s other work praises the slow concentration that lets a person remain with an object long enough for a more developed understanding to form. A profitable information stream encourages the opposite movement. The viewer sees a fragment, makes a quick judgement, and moves on before insight or trained intuition has time to develop. Han’s point is about the pressure of the surrounding system. Deep thought remains possible, though it requires a deliberate effort to work against the feed.

The video connects this claim to Søren Kierkegaard’s essay The Present Age. Kierkegaard predicted that an excess of information could create confusion about truth on the scale produced by ignorance. When people cannot establish what is reliable or important, they may treat information as an aesthetic possession. The most fashionable or clever position becomes attractive because it is easier to select a style than to establish what is true.

Algorithms intensify the problem by arranging information around prior behaviour. Users are shown views they are likely to engage with, including opposing views that provoke anger, frustration, or ridicule. The opposition still reinforces the platform’s understanding of what holds their attention. Han describes the result as a form of intellectual narcissism. People shape the world presented to them around their existing beliefs, then mistake the resulting fit for confirmation from reality.

The video says that human beings have always had cognitive biases. The platform makes those biases easier to exploit and scales the resulting exhaustion across every waking hour. People become more isolated inside their preferred information, while the volume itself leaves them too tired to judge much of it.

Transparency as control

The final movement takes the argument from discomfort to politics. The familiar defence of surveillance says that anyone with nothing to hide has nothing to fear. Han traces this logic through Rousseau’s demand for civic openness and Plato’s decision to house his ruling class together so that its members could watch one another. The supposed moral person should welcome complete visibility because an inspection would find only good conduct.

Older systems of surveillance belonged mainly to the state. The video names Stalin’s NKVD, Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, and Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as examples of centralised observation backed by punishment. In the panopticon, one guard can watch any prisoner at any time. Each prisoner therefore has to behave as if they are being watched continuously.

Han thinks this model describes modern surveillance only partly. People hand over information semi-voluntarily as the price of using online platforms. The platform supplies access to Facebook or Instagram without a direct payment, and the user supplies personal data, sometimes including the contents of messages. The purpose has shifted towards profit. The ordinary user is usually observed so that somebody can sell to them, rather than to send them to prison. The difference changes the mechanism even when the loss of privacy remains.

Surveillance has also become easier for ordinary people to carry out. A phone gives nearly everyone a recording device. People record strangers and post the material online with an accusation of infidelity, family conflict, or bad behaviour attached to it. The old defence appears again, though the speaker now comes from a comment section or a TikTok account rather than a secret police service. People participate in one another’s exposure whilst accepting the same exposure for themselves.

Han calls this a decentralisation of surveillance. Society has not escaped the panopticon. It has distributed the watching and added a demand that people consent to their own observation. The subject bears themselves because they have developed a need to be seen. This is the point at which surveillance begins to look totalitarian in Han’s account. Outer force becomes less necessary when people organise their own public display and demand it from others.

Trust gives the argument its final turn. People can trust one another because they cannot see every motive, desire, or future action, yet they still expect the other person to avoid harm. A certain lack of information leaves room for freedom. Total transparency treats that lack as suspicious. It asks what somebody would do if the cameras disappeared, which makes more surveillance appear necessary and gives suspicion a self-confirming structure.

Public accountability can require information about governments and institutions. Han’s argument concerns the interpersonal cost of applying the same demand everywhere. A society that records every private moment removes the freedom to live for a time without being judged. That freedom gives people room to form their character, test an idea, change their mind, and speak without the pressure of a permanent audience. In exchange, they receive the ability to record somebody else. The trade leaves everyone anxious and gives the greatest advantage to people who enjoy exposure and to the companies that profit from it.

The video ends with Han’s diagnosis rather than a programme of reform. It asks readers to examine three assumptions before accepting them: more information always helps, attention determines value, and privacy looks suspicious. Han’s work does not make every private act good or every public act harmful. It puts pressure on a culture that treats visibility as proof of virtue and attention as proof of worth.

Limits

This is a secondary account of Han’s The Transparency Society, and the presenter says that the book contains more than a 27-minute video can cover. The argument is philosophical and diagnostic. The video does not establish that social media caused the mental-health, loneliness, or polarisation claims in its opening, and it does not name the source behind the 41 percent news figure. The historical examples and references are used to clarify Han’s line of thought rather than to supply a full history of surveillance.

Han’s strongest claims also remain open to argument. Public disclosure can support solidarity, accountability, and chosen forms of community. A private life needs protection from coercive exposure, yet hiddenness can also shelter abuse and corruption. The useful question is therefore about who demands transparency, for what purpose, and whether the person being observed retains any meaningful choice.

Further reading / references

• Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society.
• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”.
• Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age.
• Erich Fromm on love and the preservation of otherness.
• Related: social media and short-form stories, social media virality as perception design.