Plato’s Cave and Our Modern-Day Social Media
I’m not sure how it’s felt for you, but it seems almost impossible to find someone who is not currently weighed down or, at the very least, significantly affected by social media today. The endless flow of information, oftentimes negative, heartbreaking, and perhaps most frequently, enraging, is endlessly cycled into our feeds, influencing the way we see the world, the way we see others, and the way we see ourselves. The collective burden of each story weighing on our mind and our nervous systems, sending us into near-constant fluctuating states of hyperarousal and hypo arousal.
It may feel like a stretch to imagine that a work by Plato, a Greek philosopher born in Athens in the 5th century BC, could lend insight into our modern lives. But like many timeless works that are passed down through the years, it contains elements of truth relevant to today.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave depicts a group of individuals, shackled together inside an underground cave as prisoners. The prisoners sit with their backs against a low wall, behind which is a fire on a raised platform. Moving figures (between the prisoners and the fire) cast shadows of objects onto the wall in front of the prisoners. The chained prisoners, unable to look behind them, see the shadows cast onto the wall, and see them as real things themselves, instead of real objects that are being cast onto the wall through shadow by others. The shadows, or projections by others, are their only experience of the world. The allegory ponders what would happen if the prisoners tried to leave the cave and discovered the outside world.
You may already see the parallels between the cave and our modern-day social media, and be thinking “ok, but that’s much different,” and you would be right to say so. But I think in our lives we have become similarly blinded and unaware of just how influenced we are by news outlets, influencers, and social media’s projection of reality onto our own cave walls. It’s exceedingly easy to point out the distorted and shadowy projections of the side or opinions we don’t agree with, but it’s significantly more difficult to point out the distorted projections, that are oftentimes meant to enrage us, by the side we tend to agree with more. The collective consequence of this? Maybe becoming more resentful towards others, more hopeless about the state of the world, and more assured of the veracity of our own stances and opinions, bolstered by our algorithms.
As an enthusiast for history, I sometimes wonder what social media would have done to us if it was available during the 20th century’s many tumultuous events. Two world wars, the Holocaust, the great depression, the Korean and Vietnam war, the cold war, the civil rights movement, political assassinations and riots, loss of trust in the government, the list goes on. I wonder what the world would look like if they were being constantly inundated with that information as it was happening the way we are today, I suspect it would not have been positive.
The sense I get as I talk with clients is that the less time they spend on social media, and the more they are engaged with their concrete lives in front of them (people, places, causes), the happier and more fulfilled they are. I believe it’s important to be informed and engaged with the world. However, how we do that is worth thinking through. How might we venture outside of our own caves, and begin by engaging with what’s in front of us while remaining vigilante and informed about the world?
