Social Media is a Like a Distortion Pedal

“our collective sound was becoming almost too big for that tiny little space”

Announcement. Ahem … *taps mic*

I’ve decided that social media is like a Distortion DS-1 Pedal.

Boss Distortion Pedals for Electric Guitar

The word “grooming” has been brought up a lot in the past year when referencing introducing sexual content to children, but I wonder if we are all being socially groomed to behave unlike ourselves.

As technology grabs our attention even more so than just a decade ago, I am left to wonder if this technological embracement has made us more vulnerable to being hypnotized into translating the world around us in the most pessimistic way possible. — Adam B. Coleman, Bad News, The Epoch Times

It's metaphorically significant, I suspect, that the old Greek myth has Cadmus, who brought the alphabet to man, sowing dragon's teeth that sprang up from the earth as armed men. Whenever the dragon's teeth of technological change are sown, we reap a whirlwind of violence. — Marshall McLuhan, Interview with Playboy Magazine, 1969

---

Coleman writes about our comfortable pit of nihilism in his Epoch Times article. I wonder—does social media draw out our innate nihilistic tendencies and does it act on them as a force multiplier? When McLuhan coined his famous line the medium is the message, he meant that media itself (not just its content but the form of medium that transmits the content) alters our perception. He meant any media created with and from a new technology inevitably transforms the scale of communication we traverse, and hence transforms us as individuals from the inside out, and consequently, society. This all sounds abstract. What does this mean, practically? What does that look or feel or sound like?

It looks like Figure 1 below. It feels like Nirvana riffs. It sounds like Smells Like Teenage Spirit.

Figure 1 :: From How to Mix with Distortions at Waves [dot] com by Mike Levine

Allow me to demonstrate by using the science of a guitar distortion pedal as an allegory. Figure 1 shows a sound wave from an electric guitar in a sound engineering DAW (digital audio workspace). You can see the baseline waveform and then you can see the clipping of the waveform, the effect of the sound travelling through the distortion pedal. Clipping refers to the fact that the pedal itself clips the waveform via compression — crudely put, it has to do with funneling a big sound through a small passageway. As you can see in Figure 1, the DS-1 pedal adds texture by applying extreme compression to the waveform. The DS-1 pedal creates the auditory perception of loudness and a crisp fuzziness to the guitar chords. What if a similar transformation process happens to our thoughts + ideas + other social information we communicate to each other via social media? What if disseminating our ideas through social media looks and feels a lot like playing an electric guitar through a DS-1 pedal or some kind of similar fuzz pedal?

For those who sew, the visual of a thread fraying and becoming gnarled when you try to pass it through the eye of a needle provides you with a relatable visual metaphor. What if social media acts like distortion or a fuzz pedal to our ideas, thoughts, messages? What if sometimes our thoughts become like that thick fray-ended thread we try to pass through a tiny eye of a needle when we try to process them through social media? What if we could explain Coleman’s reference to being groomed to be unlike ourselves by understanding social media as a kind of distortion or fuzz pedal for our brains? Or some kind of unfamiliar compression force that has a fraying or decompressing + expanding effect on the ideas we share as a collective?

What if social media sometimes makes the collective sound of society’s thoughts too big for this space?

“I could always tell when a chorus was coming by watching Kurt’s dirty Converse sneaker as it moved closer and closer to the distortion pedal, and just before he stomped on the button, I would blast into a single-stroke snare roll with all of my might, like a fuse burning fast into the heart of a bomb, signalling the change. The subsequent eruption would often send chills up my neck, as the undeniable power of our collective sound was becoming almost too big for that tiny little space.” — Dave Grohl