Between its brilliant contributions to culture, I have already attended to the subject of social media’s aptitude to connect its users to violence and death-based content, which can be reviewed here.
But social media’s troubling truths have not yet been exhausted, for it is evident that the technology is also capable of touching the sensibilities of those who use it in other ways.
It was reported in the media recently that, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the #borg TikTok trend was linked to “a significant number of alcohol intoxication cases.”
The “borgs,” which students were seen carrying, consist of plastic gallon containers filled with large quantities of alcohol.
As reported by Fortune, “These containers, also known as ‘blackout rage gallons,’ contain a mix of alcohol, water, and electrolytes. The #borg TikTok trend, which has accumulated over 82 million views, depicts people dumping out about half of the gallon’s water and filling it up with alcohol, typically a liquor like vodka, along with juice or electrolytes.”
Officials said that there were so many calls for ambulances for student alcohol intoxication that neighboring agencies were requested to provide aid.
“The phenomenon has been fueled by recent viral videos featuring college students on TikTok making and drinking the concoction (though some videos referencing the drink date back to 2020),” Insider reported. “The viral drink has spawned borg tutorials, borg challenges, and borg skits.” As by Dr. George F. Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health, to CBS News, “Consuming this much alcohol would be fatal for the vast majority of people, even if spread out over a full day."
Steady readers will recall a chief principal that I have long taken pains to advance- that technology always carries with it a clouded mixture of both benefits and disadvantages. In recognizing this, one must not forego mentioning social media’s pleasant contributions to culture, as the clear majority of Americans already have already come to realize.
But what is usually not conjectured beforehand is how technology might come to drive change through society.
Of course, my aim in bringing up the borg trend that has been popularized through TikTok is not to suggest that this sort of demeanor is to be solely attributed to the influence of social media, for we know that college students, athletes, military personnel, and many others, have not required the technology in order to fulfill such aims.
But those who pay mind to these sorts of cultural inclinations accompanied by social media are aware of how the technology carries with it the ability to impress the human mind, for it enables users to not only connect with other people and information but also unconventional mindsets and pathways.
The point, I fear, is that most in culture are rarely conscious of our culture’s joyful haste to construct new technologies that might leave their users vulnerable.
Whereas the printing press created a new information environment around the world, restored literacy in culture, functioned as a needful co-partner to a sense of manners and a well-developed sense of shame in children, and birthed the concept known as childhood in culture, it is clear to see that the medium of communication known as social media has done its part to inspire change, alterations in communication, and its own set of consequences.
Should we be tasked with stating a primordial American custom, I do not think it would go too far to forward their capacity to overlook the effects generated by our culture’s mediums of communication.
Such a state of affairs calls to my mind the words of author Marshall McLuhan, who, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, remarked that, “It is one of the ironies of Western man that he has never felt any concern about invention as a threat to his way of life.”1
As observed by author Sherry Turkle, in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, “In online intimacies, we hope for compassion but often get the cruelty of strangers.” The psychologist further notes that, “These days, cultural norms are rapidly shifting… These days always-on connection leads us to reconsider the virtues of a more collaborative self.”2
She also says that, among adolescents in the Digital Age, that we can see a “new sensibility unfolding.”
In continuing this line of thought, it can be useful to examine the many challenges presented to social media users.
In one example, the “Devious Licks” challenge went viral on TikTok, which inspired teens to steal toilets and other items from education facilities, in addition to damaging property. CBS2 reported that in Connecticut, some school administrators joined Senator Richard Blumenthal at the state capitol to demand the social network ban users who participated in the trend. According to Blumenthal, there were over 94,000 of these viral videos circulating nationally in the span of just a couple of months. “Theft and vandalism are glorified, literally,” noted Blumenthal, to the news outlet. “The viral videos depict as heroes the students who are stealing.”
And because it is clear to see that some have been persuaded to consider abusing themselves or others through its utility, we might say that the unremitting command of social media can, in certain instances, also help to lead to mental and physical jeopardy in culture.
Indeed, for though although another TikTok trend would vitalize students to slap their teacher in schools nationwide, it is worth specifying that this destructive social sway is by no means novel.
As The Washington Post reminds us: “Internet challenges are not limited to TikTok. Before the video app exploded in popularity over the past several years, young people recorded themselves wandering outside of their homes blindfolded, swallowing laundry detergent pods and lighting themselves on fire, all for social media clout. But TikTok, now one of the most used and downloaded apps with about 1 billion monthly active users, has become home to some of the most viral — and dangerous — challenges. Multiple children have died this year after attempting the ‘blackout challenge,’ in which participants strangle themselves. A 15-year-old girl died in August 2020 after taking an excessive amount of over-the-counter allergy medicine in the ‘Benadryl challenge.’”
Yet another destructive mindset promoted by our “social” technologies is the “Skull Breaker Challenge,” an online dare which consists of three people lining up to jump, to which the two people on the outside kick the middle person’s legs out from under them. As a result of the stunt, which originated on the media app TikTok, one student at Southeast Arkansas Preparatory High School suffered a concussion, reported NBC affiliate KARK.
There is also the Blue Whale Challenge, which calls upon participants to complete a series of tasks before taking their own lives. Suicides in Russia, Brazil and a half dozen other countries were reportedly linked to the challenge in cases that, as reported by CBS News, usually involve teenagers or young adults.
Parents say that teens reach out to game administrators called curators through various social media platforms, who then guide the players through fifty days of challenges including watching scary movie clips, cutting symbols into their arms and legs, and taking pictures of themselves in dangerous positions, such as on the edge of a roof or on train tracks.
The participants, as detailed by the news outlet, are required to take pictures of themselves completing their challenges, in addition to sharing them before being directed to end their lives on the fiftieth day. CBS News further detailed that a search of related hashtags on Instagram showed users posting pictures of scars and cuts or memes that depict suicide, while a similar Twitter search showed users reaching out for curators to lead them through the game.
“It's a reminder of one of the many dangers and vulnerabilities that children face using various social media and apps online every day," stated agent Michelle Lee, of the FBI’s San Antonio, Texas office, to CBS News. "Parents must remain vigilant and monitor their child's usage of the internet.”
In July, 2017, Texas teen Isaiah Gonzalez was found hanging in his bedroom closet, an incident in which video footage recorded his death by way of his cellphone propped up against a shoe. Isaiah’s sister Alexis told WOAI-TV that someone behind the challenge had gathered personal information from him and had threatened to harm their family.
One Georgia woman told CNN in the same month that her 16-year-old daughter killed herself as part of the challenge.
On March 22, 2021, a twelve-year-old boy from Colorado was found unconscious after choking himself while participating in TikTok’s “Blackout Challenge,” and later died after being on life support. According to the family’s GoFundMe page, they urged the community to “spread awareness” about “the real risks involved in not having knowledge of what kinds of activities children are involved in."
USA Today reported that a twelve-year-old boy in Oklahoma met the same fate. “Social media challenges,” remarked the news outlet, “are especially attractive to adolescents, who look to their peers for cues about what's cool, crave positive reinforcement from their friends and social networks, and are more prone to risk-taking behaviors, particularly when they know they're being observed by those whose approval they covet.”
In May, 2022, the family of a ten-year-old girl who chocked herself to death as part of a TikTok challenge sued the video platform for negligence and having a “defective design.”
“The 'algorithm determined that the deadly blackout challenge was well-tailored and likely to be of interest to 10-year-old Nylah Anderson and she died as a result,' the lawsuit states,” the Daily Mail reported. “It cites a number of other dangerous challenges, including the 'Orbeez challenge,' which encourages viewers to shoot the plastic pellets at people…Another one is the 'Nyquil Chicken Challenge,' which 'involves soaking chicken breast in cough medicine like Nyquil and cooking it, boiling off the water and alcohol in it and leaving the chicken saturated with a highly concentrated amount of drugs in the meat,' according to court documents. Tawainna Anderson's product liability and negligence lawsuit 'seeks to hold TikTok responsible for their role as designers, programers manufacturers sellers and distributors of their dangerously defective social media products and for their own independent acts of negligence.'”
By citing the aforementioned instances of “social” influence, I am not suggesting that potentially troubling challenges or trends furthered by social media is solely a deficiency of the technology, or that such unwise decisions have failed to penetrate the consciousness of people before social media’s assent in culture.
I mean only that social media makes it easier for those who use it to behold potentially perplexing mindsets, that it is a mistake to believe that all of social media’s tasks are not unoffending, that our culture’s image-based mediums are capable of transmitting worrying suggestions more effectively than orality and the written word, that social media carries with it a partiality towards entertainment instead of a prepossession towards learning and reason, and that the ills of concerning content are not acknowledged as often as its entertaining qualities in an image-based culture.
In a concise manner, I have tried to show how social media can connect its users not only to so-called friends, but also new mindsets. And though this fact remains true for much of technology’s offerings, the topic of social media merits our attention because of its broad reach in culture. For though it appears to have certainly captivated the attention of a generation, the application of its more disquieting attributes in culture are seem to be viewed with a less-developed sense of relevance for many.
In the face of all this, several questions remain— why are most in culture indifferent to social media’s alterations? Are our culture’s youth any more susceptible to being moved by the sway of image-based mediums than the superannuated? Why are these challenges, trends and mindsets more easily promoted through social media than through the communication mediums of orality, writing or printing? Why do The Oscars garner more publicity than the social harm proffered by social media? Why are so few concerned with how culture might come to be impacted through social networks? Why does social media-induced suicide generate less media headlines than news of the latest chatbot?
My expectation is that our society might soon find use in finding answers to these questions.
And though there are no effortless solutions to our culture’s apparent unwillingness to examine social media networks with a hostile eye, and while those who do seek remedies to this situation will find no individual reply that will be embraced by every family, context, circumstance and society, it may yet be useful to remember the observations of Harold Innis, who was once who noticed how alterations in communication technology ultimately carry with them three kinds of effects: They alter the structure of interests (the things thought about), the character of symbols (the things thought with), and the nature of community (the area in which thoughts develop).3
Postman, in making a distinction between a technology and a medium, put things this way: “We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology, in other words, is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates. Of course, like the brain itself, every technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral.”4
As I have already said, there are other sides to this great refashioning of rationality, of which social media only plays a role.
But in comprehending this, it can be hoped, then, that our culture’s collective understanding of how the changes proffered by how it communicates might be carried to greater heights.
And for those who comprehend the benefits of lessening their assimilation of social media, it is well to remember that such a course of action is merely a first step towards regaining a measure of control over their technologies, a departure from our culture’s current course of permitting technology to control ourselves.
For any mind games produced through social media, or any other technology, can carry with it little governance in the lives of those who decline to play along.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, P. 237
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, P. 169
As summarized by James Carey, Dean, School of Communication, University of Illinois, in an unpublished essay, “Canadian Communication Theory: Extensions and Interpretations of Harold Innis.”
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness, P. 84