‘Social media’ is inherently a selfish medium.

The Mirror and the Window

In the Greek myth, the beautiful youth Narcissus leans over a pool, falls in love with his own reflection and wastes away beside it, unable to look anywhere else. In August 2018, as floodwaters rose across Kerala, thousands of young people did something very different with a screen. They built spreadsheets of stranded families, shared the phone numbers of fishermen with boats and turned WhatsApp groups into control rooms that guided rescuers to rooftops. The same smartphone can be a pool in which we admire ourselves or a window through which we see a neighbour in danger. Social media magnifies the self because its business model rewards attention, yet it is not inherently selfish: the selfishness lies in its design and in our habits, both of which can be changed, while its capacity for solidarity is as real as its vanity.

To begin with, the word "inherently" deserves careful reading. To call something inherently selfish is to say that selfishness belongs to its very nature, that no use of it can escape it. A knife is inherently sharp; whether it cuts bread or a throat depends on the hand. The question, then, is whether social media is like the sharpness of the knife or like the hand that holds it. Marshall McLuhan argued in 1964 that the medium is the message, meaning that every medium shapes the habits of those who use it, regardless of content. That insight is the strongest argument for the statement, and it must be weighed honestly before it is answered.

The case for the statement begins with the structure of the platforms. Every profile is built around a single person; every post invites a count of likes, shares and followers. The sociologist Erving Goffman described social life as a stage on which we manage the impressions others form of us. Social media turns that occasional performance into a permanent one, a front stage with no backstage. The selfie, a word the Oxford Dictionaries chose as its word of the year in 2013, became the emblem of the age. Users learn quickly that curated holidays and flattering angles earn applause while doubt and failure earn silence. In such a setting the self becomes a brand, and other people become an audience to be won rather than persons to be known.

Moreover, the economics of the medium push in the same direction. Herbert Simon observed as early as 1971 that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Platforms sell that scarce attention to advertisers, so their algorithms learn to show each user whatever keeps him scrolling, usually content that confirms what he already believes or flatters what he already wants. The result is the filter bubble, a private universe arranged around one person's preferences. In 2021 the whistle-blower Frances Haugen made public Facebook's own internal research, which found that Instagram made body-image issues worse for a significant share of teenage girls. The psychologist Sherry Turkle's phrase for this condition is apt: we are "alone together", connected to many and attentive to few.

The selfishness also seeps into public life. Outrage travels faster than reason, and a person can gain followers by attacking others more easily than by helping them. In 2018 rumours of child-lifters, forwarded on WhatsApp, led mobs to lynch innocent strangers in several Indian states, including five men in Dhule district of Maharashtra. The Cambridge Analytica scandal of the same year revealed that the data of up to 87 million Facebook users had been harvested for political profiling. Even compassion can turn self-regarding: slacktivism, the habit of changing a profile picture in place of doing anything, lets people feel virtuous at no cost. On this evidence, the medium seems to reward the ego at the expense of the common good.

Yet the antithesis is equally strong, because the same medium has repeatedly carried acts of remarkable altruism. In the Arab Spring of 2011, young Egyptians used Facebook and Twitter to organise protests in Tahrir Square. The #MeToo movement of 2017 let women who had suffered in silence stand together, and it reached Indian newsrooms and film sets in 2018. During the second wave of COVID-19 in April and May 2021, Indian citizens with no official role spent sleepless nights verifying and amplifying requests for oxygen cylinders, hospital beds and plasma donors on Twitter and Instagram, saving lives that the overwhelmed system could not reach. In 2014 the Ice Bucket Challenge, often mocked as a vanity stunt, helped the ALS Association raise more than 100 million dollars in a few weeks for research into a rare disease.

Besides, human beings did not acquire selfishness with the smartphone. Aristotle called man a social animal, and the need to be seen and valued by others is as old as the village square. Gossip, boasting and the hunger for status existed in every court and caste council long before Facebook. What social media does is amplify existing impulses, the generous as much as the vain. A shy teenager from a small town finds a community that shares her love of poetry; a migrant worker in the Gulf sees his daughter's face each evening on a video call; a farmer learns about a new seed variety from a YouTube channel run by an agricultural scientist. None of these uses is selfish. Each is an act of connection that would have been impossible a generation ago.

The synthesis, then, is that social media is not inherently selfish but is commercially tilted towards the self. The tilt comes from choices: the like button, the infinite scroll, the autoplay and the recommendation engine were all designed by people to maximise engagement, and what is designed can be redesigned. After the Indian lynchings, WhatsApp limited message forwarding to five chats at a time, a small friction that slowed the spread of rumours. India's Information Technology Rules of 2021 require large platforms to appoint grievance officers, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 gives users rights over their own data. Australia went further in 2024 by legislating a minimum age of 16 for social media accounts. These are attempts to correct the tilt without destroying the medium.

The deeper remedy, however, lies with the user. Digital literacy must teach young people not only how to spot a fake video but also how to notice when a platform is shaping their moods. Families and schools can encourage the habit of using social media as a window, to learn and to help, rather than as a mirror, to be admired. Platforms can reward constructive engagement, as some have begun to do by labelling misleading posts and promoting verified public-health information. A civilisation that has always taught that the self is found by serving others, from the Gita's ideal of action without attachment to the Gandhian ideal of sarvodaya, the welfare of all, has the moral resources to tame a medium that tempts us towards vanity.

In the end, the pool in which Narcissus drowned was not selfish; it simply reflected whatever leaned over it. Social media too reflects and amplifies the people who use it and the incentives of the companies that build it. When it is designed only for attention and used only for display, it becomes a mirror of our vanity. When it is designed with care and used with conscience, it becomes the window through which Kerala's volunteers found the stranded and India's citizens found oxygen for strangers in 2021. The selfishness is real, but it is not destiny. The choice of whether we gaze at ourselves or look out at one another remains, as it always has, our own.