Social media has turned conversation into competition and it’s making us ill

Roughly 15 fifteen years into a life largely lived online, we find ourselves not the beneficiaries of the sort of cultural cyberosmosis imagined by the Facebook founder and his peers, one where we all learn from each other and delight in gaining new perspectives. No, instead we have largely cast out those we disagree with – deemed unfit for our friendship, or even respect, by dint of their opinions – and retreated into our ideological cliques. But we’re not particularly happy here either, competing with our allies for attention and acclaim, hoping it will bring us validation but finding the goalposts move with every successful tweet or story.

This discourse tournament, this dense field of soapboxes, is something a lot of us don’t happily participate in. That such a vast swathe of human beings are engaged every single day in an activity that makes them at best frustrated, at worst repulsed, is quite astonishing. We’ve never as a species managed to create anything close to a meritocratic society, but what we have right now is particularly perverse: a system which favours those who are loudest, most extreme and, crucially, most gifted at self-promotion. So, what is the solution?