Like A Lamb to the Slaughter

Let's go with the analogy

There’s a short story by Roald Dahl called ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’. First published in 1953 this short piece tells the story of a woman who after finding out her husband wants to leave her, hits him over the head with the frozen leg of lamb, and kills him. To cover up her crime and convince the investigating officers she’s a nice and innocent person, she roasts the lamb and feeds it to them for dinner. Thus, destroying the evidence.

It's a great story and one I’ve been thinking of recently as it seems to speak to our relationship with social media.

Now, it is hard to talk about the perils of social media without being somewhat dystopian and alarmist. However, I have been planning the next outcome to teach my year 12s and much of it focuses on how individuals, businesses and governments use media to influence so the topic is very much on my mind.

If we are to take the above story and apply it to our lives, we can imagine that the social media companies are the frozen lamb wielding murderers, the creators (and audiences) are being hit over the head, and creators and audiences gobble it up for dinner, satisfied with their full bellies. And doing away with any wrongdoing in the process.

The thing is, we think we are getting enough out of social media to ignore the massive amount of data that is being discovered about each of us. And by participating and enjoying our feeling of connectedness and serotonin and attention, we excuse the somewhat dodgy behaviour that is happening at our expense.

The Social Dilemma, a documentary on Netflix was released in 2020, and there are some elements that are quite cheesy and don’t do it any favours. Again, it is hard to talk about social media without sounding paranoid. Yet, even a few years later, I still think about a line in the film which essentially says, if you are not paying for the product, you are not the customer. Some of us may be aware of this and not care, many of the young people I teach start to tune out when I talk like this, and perhaps you are too.

Yet what is increasingly fascinating about social media is the gravitas which we as humans give it. If we are to take it for what it is, an application that we can dip in and out of, we remove all its power. However, by allowing ourselves to believe that someone is more successful, their business is doing better, their house is cleaner, the number of followers makes them more worthy of jobs etc. we give up our own power. And from this, it feels like the issue is that social media can be a business for people and a very lucrative one at that. And as I type this I think, ‘well shit, the people who made Instagram are really rich so why shouldn’t other people get in on that?’. But because we have allowed people to measure their success (financially and in likes) and essentially make something of themselves on a platform which gives most of its users nothing, we are in this situation.

This newsletter has often spoken about the commodification of the every day. It is a sentiment closely related to the idea that you can be successful by simply being yourself (or releasing a sex tape). There are whispers of influencer fatigue. I see it on Substack notes, I receive emails about it from marketing companies. The internet moves on faster than we have the thought to label things. It feels that influencers have been trying to do away with this label for years, suggesting that it doesn’t fully capture what they do, yet the often-used substitute phrase content creator seems at odds with the language used by audiences, and the brands that are paying them.

I think about all these people often, those who have built their nest egg on someone else’s house. The influencers whose main business is posting on Instagram. We are all victims to the algorithm but some of us have different things to lose. I have noticed a shift on Substack lately too. Being in its infancy as it is, there is a real ‘ah this is so lovely and unspoilt by the internet like other social media is’. And yes, there is a sense of that. But lately I have become completely overwhelmed with the gear change I have seen in this space. People using notes like its twitter, the sharing of subscriber numbers etc. and there is something lovely about this and something that I am unsure about because I don’t know if it’s what I signed up for.

Initially the media was seen as the Fourth Estate something that would keep an eye on the big business, big operators etc. Now we rely on the idea of the Fifth Estate, not only a news magazine and TV series about Julian Assange, the Fifth Estate seeks to unify the people working outside the mainstream media. It is said these people provide alternate viewpoints, but I want someone to be watching the media. Because whilst we are too busy eating our dinner, they are taking advantage of creators and getting us to dispose of the weapon.