Lunchroom Law

The Dividing, Cliquish Nature of Social Media and the Growing Empathy Gap

I was one of the lucky ones in High School. Despite attending in Hollywood, a city practically bred to keep TMZ gossip columnists employed, I managed to find a friend group who was as drama-free as any 12-18 year old could ask for. Still, like everyone during that wonderfully messy time, I was acutely aware of the social dynamics and clique hierarchies that plagued the halls. That, paired with junk food and rom com-fueled sleepovers, would shape and inform my understanding of my adolescent relationships in my developing, status-obsessed brain.

Even as “drama free” as we were, my friends and I had our allies and adversaries, just as everyone else did. Broadcasting a devout commitment to my own friend group, I remember automatically labeling acquaintances and “outsiders” I hardly knew with the overconfidence of a college essay and the lazy imagination of a modern-day Tinder bio. Cool kids, nerds, jocks, druggies, theatre kids—the classics. I organized them in my mind into large groups and interacted accordingly, favoring those I deemed as “allies” and ignoring, often belittling those remaining. Like clockwork, my clique would gather around our table at lunchtime, eager for the daily dish.

At that time, the only social media of importance was Facebook. We used it to calculate our popularity through our walls’ birthday messages and stalk our revolving crushes and their enigmatic “outside of school” friends—nothing crazy. Today’s kids must wade through a deeper sea of apps, like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Snapchat, and Pinterest. I often hear people older than me express how happy they feel to not have gone through adolescence with social media. But, to believe they’ve escaped unscathed because of their age is a gross delusion. We may have graduated, but that doesn’t mean we’ve grown up—comment sections are the new cafeterias.

Social media encourages the same surface-level popularity contests and status obsessions that defined so much of our high school growing pains. Only this time, it’s infiltrated our work, social lives, and politics. Surely, hierarchies and cliques exist in every facet of life, that is an expression of human nature. Competition motivates us to strive for better. The problem exists when engagement itself is entirely dependent on those hierarchical games. We as users might get that steady dopamine kick every time our “influence” grows, but in reality it’s our innate dread over becoming unpopular which keeps us faithfully hooked to our online social status—all 3.8 billion of us. That’s what keeps us swiping. As Jaron Lanier, author of “10 Arguments For Quitting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now”, explains, “This constant dosing of social anxiety only gets people more glued in. Deep mechanisms in the social parts of our brains monitor our social standing, making us terrified to be left behind, like a runt sacrificed to predators on the savannah.”  App designers have taken a protective mechanism of our evolution and eerily exploited it. 

Fear of missing out, or FOMO, drives engagement—not the connective dogma companies promote. From a business standpoint, connection is merely a mask. Below optimistic buzzwords lie mysterious algorithms that only care to maximize surface-level engagement. And the best way to maximize engagement? By designing algorithms that exploit human nature’s proclivity towards outrageous, eye-catching, and dividing content. We are most sensitive to highly-charged negative emotions, and our clicks and comments reflect that.  But, as far as the algorithm knows, it’s simply giving us more of what we “want”.  Biologist Edward O. Wilson described this stalemate perfectly: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”  The “most attention worthy” content placed craftily at the top of my feeds was indeed eye-catching, but often would elicit feelings of lack, anger, fear, and jealousy in me. It was a slow-boiling anger soup AKA engagement.

Through high school and beyond, it’s normal to feel jealous and inadequate—we all become that green-eyed monster sometimes. Those are natural symptoms of the shortcomings we all feel through adolescence, and those that we try to face further in adulthood. The problem is that social media is designed to exploit these natural human emotions.

For example, back in 2016, Facebook introduced the extended variety of “Reaction” emojis, enabling commenters to better express themselves on posts with heart-eyes, anger, laughter, etc. This move was received extremely well, as it did open up a whole new avenue in digital social signaling. At the same time, though, Facebook could now quantify which emotions elicited the highest responses (and the most engaged eyeballs, in turn). We’re convinced we’re simply expressing ourselves better, but in reality our clicks help them identify and prioritize the most controversial, “stickiest” posts—a win win for the app. 

Not only does social media mess with our emotions, it complicates our politics in astonishing ways. In a study done by Northeastern University, USC, and Upturn, they showed that it costs three times as much to purchase a Facebook ad that reaches users of the opposing party. This sets our democracy up for failure when it’s literally more cost effective to only preach to those who already agree with you. Back in high school it was comfortable to stay in your clique. Platforms have now added an economic incentive.

In the lunch room these clique divisions took up much of my time and energy. I was constantly concerned about my place in the hierarchy, as I simultaneously made uninformed judgements about fellow classmates based on nothing more than gossip and movie-made stereotypes. It didn’t help that my developing adolescent brain was biologically attuned to my social status. Still, even in our teens, we could go home at the end of the day and forget about the hierarchies, if only for a while. Social media takes the popularity contests to a whole new level. It isn’t designed to give you a break from the lunchroom chatter—it’s there to facilitate and profit from it.

A phenomenon that experts are calling the growing “empathy gap “ extends its roots through social media, as well.  We are all fed a certain soup on social media which, for the most part, confirms our biases and intensifies our antipathy. Lack of context for what other people’s eyeballs may be glued onto in cities, states, and countries far away from our own creates an illusion that our view is the only view. We’ve become algorithmically impaired, making it hard to see and feel another’s perspective. When we do reach for understanding, context is often blurred or omitted completely. As a fired-up audience member for Facebook comment section arguments, I would go as far as checking a few of the previous comments to gather the least amount of information I could to make an “informed” decision on the logic of each opponent. Facebook would say I was “connected”. Really, I was just scrolling for my daily dose of outrage. Mostly I would look for F-bombs and one-liners, the Facebook flamethrower equivalent.  Eager for school yard brawls, we gather round chanting “fight, fight, fight!” while both sides only throw sucker punches. 

We’re all sitting at our designated lunch tables, surrounded by the same friends, strengthening the same alliances, shit-talking the same strangers, echoing the same outrage. If you do risk switching tables for the day and challenging another clique’s beliefs, be prepared to be ganged up on by swarms of like-minded sidekicks bent on bullying and blocking you into silence. We are losing civil discourse, and dipping closer and closer to toxic tribalism. We “other” each other like we did in high school with ill-informed, surface-level judgements. And now, our alliances are driven by algorithms. The sad part is, chances are we could be making many more friends, both in the cafeteria and on the computer, if not for our dead-set devotion to our own cliques.

Hierarchies color every corner of social media, but I’m convinced it’s impossible for 99% of the online population to ever truly feel like part of the “cool kids”. When we base our identities on followers and “like” counts—these junk values—we’re being programmed to feel inadequate. As it goes with social media, I was always competing with Planet Earth, and I always ended up feeling like a loser. Not the kind of loser that fails at a very specialized task with judges and a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. Rather, it was feeling like a loser with an unexplainable vagueness, a stubborn certainty, no matter what I did. Yet, I was forever determined to compete for prom court.

High school can sting, no matter how many friends you have. Even queen bees have bad days. Though many of us cherish the memories, after graduation we’re eager to expand our circles. Lucky for us, we learn the world has so much more to offer. The food gets way better, too. We crave a fresh start, but social media impedes our ability to truly leave this phase behind us. Platforms pack us a lunchbox full of sweet treats and empty calories in hopes that we’ll stay 17 and status-hungry forever.