Onus Probandi

Premise 1:  Most people regularly using social media engage in a process of self-marketing, selective sharing, and misinformation intended to present themselves in whatever light they find most favorable.  This applies to real world social interactions as well, but due to scarcity of information and the subject-provided nature of available information on social media, the effect is much more pronounced.  The result is an “online persona” that does not closely reflect reality, or at least not a wide view of reality.

Premise 2:  Most people regularly using social media receive most of their psychological payoff from the process of self-presentation and perhaps imagining how others may be assessing their “online persona”, as opposed to receiving the psychological payoff from assessing the “online personas” of others.  That is to say, it is an essentially narcissistic activity.

Premise 3:  The ubiquity of smartphones and the ability to use these devices to access social media via cell phone networks has resulted in more distractions to persons operating vehicles in public, thereby making driving/riding in a vehicle a significantly more dangerous proposition than it was immediately before the propagation of smartphones.

Conclusion:  People take much higher risk on themselves, and impose higher risk on others, when participating in social media while driving.  The risk versus reward equation is perverse, as the reward for participating is either to increase your consumption of inaccurate or misleading information about others (not what we traditionally think of as rewarding behavior) or else to receive the psychological payoff of an activity entirely narcissistic (i.e. grooming and presenting your “online persona”).  Such narcissism is not illogical as an incentive for increasing one’s risk, however the increased risk to others means that we ought not tolerate such behavior as a society. 

To clarify this last point: if people were causing more car accidents because they were constantly looking in handheld mirrors in order to admire their own physical reflections, we would probably agree that this is unacceptable.  If people were utilizing smartphones to cure disease while driving, and this productivity would otherwise be lost, we may decide that the added risk of car accidents is justified.

Thoughts? Criticisms?

I may not realize my errors in reasoning without feedback.

Something I was thinking about

When comparing the merits and shortfalls of capitalism and Marxism, the criterion for judgment that is most often used is efficiency of production.  GDP.  This is a fine, sensible way to evaluate capitalism, as it is a system which is designed to be the most competitive and most efficient.  If capitalism is also just or compassionate, this is a secondary effect, or unintentional side effect.  Marxism on the other hand, much maligned for the dearth of successful Marxist economies in the world, makes no claims as to efficiency or competitive strength.  It is the ideology founded on social justice and humanity.  A Marxist economy will be far less productive than a capitalist economy, and also far more just and humane.

In the United States we have been indoctrinated with the quasi-religious propaganda of capitalism to such a frightening extent that we, quite sincerely, reject Marxism because it loses to capitalism in the only contest in which we have thought to enter it, namely efficiency of production.  But this is like placing a whale and a thoroughbred on a racetrack and telling them to race for the finish line.  That the thoroughbred will win is assured; he has been bred and trained for just such a contest.  But his breeding will not help him if the two are cast in the ocean and told to hold their breath and dive.

So if we are forced to choose between pure capitalism and pure Marxism for an economic model, it makes more sense to first determine whether we prefer a system which produces the most goods or a system which is the most just and humane.  We cannot, at least in this country, speak from experience as to how a Marxist economy succeeds or fails in its goals, and how the goals of social justice and humanity themselves impact our lives.  But one thing is clear to me.  Under our hybridized capitalist system, we have become so much more productive than previous generations could have guessed, and yet I submit that beyond a certain threshold of material and nutritional prosperity, more GDP does not translate to better lives.  In fact, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to attribute our obesity and diabetes epidemics to an overabundance of cheap nutrition.  In closing, I would like to point out to those who reflexively dismiss Marxism as inherently inferior to capitalism that if productivity was truly the most sacred end of an economic system, then our society would not have put in place all of the regulations and restrictions which make our society more equal, more safe, and more fair, and less purely capitalistic.