The online-person encounters more ideas in an afternoon than a medieval scholar might in a lifetime. We are also becoming more rigid in how we perceive our own identities. How does the most abundant information environment ever built produce people who are less developed? And if the echo chamber isn’t the culprit, what is?
The Entombment of The Self
Popular critiques of social media are focused on social atomization, weakened attention spans, and political echo chambers. These are real problems, but they are symptoms of something deeper and less discussed, I think, because it is slightly philosophical and harder to pin down. This essay will attempt to do that.
The biggest problem with the current state of social media is not distraction or isolation. It is with identity development itself. The advanced algorithms behind your social media feeds are intensely optimized around “personalization”. Through continuous trial and error, they attempt to understand what interests you, what holds your attention, and what makes you engage. They spend billions of dollars attempting to model your interests and fears in order to maximize the time you spend on the platform.
But once the algorithm has refined its model of you, something else happens simultaneously. It begins filtering out ideas, people and content that don’t fit that model. Content that might challenge you, surprise you, or change you gets deprioritized. At this point the algorithm acts less like a fertilizer and more like a preservative. It doesn’t help you grow. It keeps you static, predictable, pigeonholed, and commoditized. As a nicely packaged and sorted collection of data points, you are easier to sell things to.
Why Being Frozen is Dangerous
The world is changing faster than at any previous point in history. We are one of the few generations in history that has little clue what life for our children may look like. In such an environment, the ability to adapt is more valuable than the stability of a fixed self. Clinging to who you were rather than who you need to become has never been a good strategy. It is becoming increasingly worse.
There is something legitimately dangerous about defining yourself too rigidly. It is one of the reasons I hesitate against the professional trend of personal branding. By defining your opinions, your history, your taste, your tribe, you are building a firm structure of identity. That structure will now need to change in order for you to adapt, should you need to. And change, when it threatens the architecture of the Self, often does not feel like growth. It feels like a small death.
Have you ever been asked by a friend or colleague how a hobby, job, or life goal is going and you had to explain to them how you no longer do that thing or care about that outcome? Sometimes you make excuses, sometimes you just say it wasn’t for you, or something else caught your attention. The reality is that it is completely fine to change your path, but you try to explain it through a narrative because there is a cognitive pain associated with changing. That is what I mean by small death.
This is where social media compounds the problem. The platforms don’t just show you content that mirrors who you are, they also ask you to perform and curate an identity outwards through what you share, follow and like. The result is a feedback loop. The platform reinforces an identity, you inhabit it more completely via your online behaviour, and the platform reinforces it further. Breaking out of that loop requires a kind of self-dissolution that is genuinely difficult because your algorithm is working against you every step of the way.
Slow Influence: Is The Algorithm Actually The Problem?
There are two implicit arguments within the sections above. The first is essentially that the algorithms are bad because they influence you and it is better to be self-developed. The second is that your online experience is filtered, starving you of the opportunity to see “other” perspectives and information. This filtering is dangerous because it keeps you in a personality stasis.
Viewed in this simple way, I can immediately see counterarguments to each. On the first claim, it is impossible to escape external influence. Social media is effective at shaping us precisely because we are social creatures, evolved over millennia to be influenced by those around us. Before social media, trends were set by TV, radio, and magazines. Before that, by whatever the aristocracy happened to be wearing. Even when we weren’t directly exposed, a proximal friend, sibling or colleague was, and they passed it along. Being influenced is not a flaw in human psychology. It is a feature. It is how cultures form, how in-groups signal safety, how ideas travel and evolve.
On the second claim, we were always starved of “other” perspectives. That is essentially the entire concept of bias. As a single individual, you have one perspective and that perspective is the result of your biological tendencies and environmental influences. This exists, in an arguably worse way, without social media. Without social media or the internet, we are more isolated from “other” perspectives, limited by the spatial and temporal distances of reality.
So the problem, in my view, is not that social media influences us. Everything influences us and always has. Nor is the problem that the filtering of information biases us. The critical distinction between how we were influenced historically and how we are influenced today is not the presence of influence, but its pace.
Today, the speed at which information is presented threatens your degree of agency over what you decide to do with that information. That agency, the ability to sit with, play with, and think about information is the key lever for becoming a person of depth and breadth, and it is being diminished.
The endless feed of frictionless content steals from you the opportunity to do something intellectually essential: digest. To sit with an idea, a sound or an aesthetic long enough to metabolize it. To filter it through your own experience, push back against it, integrate what resonates, and discard what does not. The information-digestion process is not something that can be done quickly, and more importantly, it is not passive. Like your stomach churning and breaking up a meal, digestion is an active process. It is where your actual self gets made and where slow, less painful, change occurs.
Think about what it means to spend three months, or six, listening to a single album front to back. Perhaps during your commute, or in the gym, or while you work. When you do that, the music becomes fused to that particular era of your life. It becomes cognitively associated with the relationships, the weather, the mood, the specific qualities that period of time offered. The lyrics and emotion don’t just pass through you. They become part of the texture of who you were then and therefore who you are now. Hearing it again a decade later doesn’t just remind you of the album, it transports you back to a previous version of yourself.
That is how influence becomes identity. Time, repetition, and the space to make something of what you have taken in. The algorithmic alternative of a new playlist every day, an endless scroll of content optimized for momentary engagement, never allows that process to begin. Influence arrives faster than it can be absorbed. Your feed passes through you without leaving a mark.
Identity Is A Process. A Process Can Break.
Biologically, organisms are better understood as a series of events rather than objects. Every cell in your body is continuously splitting, replicating, and dying. Your physical form is in a state of constant flux and stasis is unnatural. Your identity is subject to the same logic. It is not a fixed thing to be discovered and defined. It is a process that requires time, slow accumulation and the space to change.
Algorithmic entombment of the Self is real. Social media platforms are less profitable when you are still becoming. But it is not stealing your ability to think independently. That never existed in full. It is not starving you of diverse perspectives. Temporal and local constraints limit us all to personal experience regardless. What it puts pressure on is the time that identity formation requires.
A process cannot be rushed without ceasing to be a process. As the activity of information consumption accelerates, it fractures into exposure without integration. Without integration, personal development cannot occur.
There is no clean resolution to this. Social media is not going away. But understanding that it is not your opinions, nor your autonomy, that is being stolen is at least a more honest account of what’s happening. What’s being taken is your time to think. It is not a technical problem with a technical solution, but a more precise diagnosis gives us a better place to start.