DEMOCRACY DISCONNECTED: SOCIAL MEDIA’S CAUSTIC INFLUENCE ON SOUTHEAST ASIA’S FRAGILE REPUBLICS are limited to what they can see on the internet, those individuals from higher socioeconomic classes who can afford to pay for data enjoy unfettered access to information and, by extension, a privileged position from which to engage in political debate.21 The potential dangers associated with restricting one’s knowledge of the world to the information garnered through social media should be all too apparent. In recent years, stories about the increasingly contemptible state of online discourse have dominated international news, as have headlines about how various online platforms have been weaponized in an effort to sway election outcomes.22 The anonymity afforded to social media users has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. While it has, at times, provided a relatively safe space for pro-democracy advocates to organize outside the gaze of an omniscient authoritarian regime, it also obscures the veracity of the information shared online by concealing its source. This issue is further compounded when taking into account the problem that social media lends itself to the creation of echo chambers because of the self-selective nature of the medium. Nevertheless, despite the perils of this modern form of communication, many of which are well known to its users, it maintains a seemingly irresistible allure. In order to fully appreciate the magnitude of social media’s sway, it’s worth taking a moment to examine the psychological and societal influences that lend the medium its influence. SOCIAL MEDIA’S PERSUASIVE POWER The sheer volume of information that social media exposes individuals to may form the basis of its polarizing effects. To better understand why, consider how changes in the broader information environment have affected human psychology from an evolutionary perspective. For most of the time that we humans have inhabited the Earth, our exposure to knowledge has been relatively limited. In fact, written language, arguably one of humankind’s most important inventions, only began to emerge some 5,000 years ago.23 Even then, the mass circulation of written materials was not possible until the development of the printing press within the last millennium. It was only in the first half of the 20th century that mass communication in the form of broadcast media began to emerge. Technological developments, particularly in the form of satellite communications and fiber optics, were the principal catalysts responsible for the acceleration of information flows that have since become the hallmark of our modern era. Whereas the news that people received for much of human history was hyperlocal in scope, it is only within the last half-century that the near-instantaneous transmission of information has put the world at our fingertips. We now find ourselves inundated with a veritable flood of data that we are cognitively illequipped to process. The author Alvin Toffler famously forewarned of such a predicament in his 1970 book Future Shock, in which he popularized the phrase “information overload” to describe how a glut of data can overwhelm our relatively limited cognitive processing capacity.24 In recent years, a number of enterprising technological firms have arisen to profit from our human craving for knowledge and social connection. However, 21 Rajat Agrawal, “Why India Rejected Facebook’s ‘Free’ Version of the Internet,” Mashable, February 9, 2016, https://mashable.com/2016/02/09/why-facebook-free-basics-failed-india/#7Ar1KFyXmuqU. 22 Yasmeen Serhan, “Italy Scrambles to Fight Misinformation Ahead of Its Elections,” The Atlantic, February 24, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/europe-fake-news/551972/. 23 Heather Whipps, “How Writing Changed the World,” Live Science, February 10, 2008, https://www.livescience. com/2283-writing-changed-world.html. 24 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). Foreign Policy at Brookings | 7