Social Media, Not Music, Moves Communities

For years I heard from musical friends that music is the decisive social force. Get the right music — the 1960s, the blues, whatever the speaker happened to love — and everyone catches the good vibe, and that is what shifts a culture.

I was always sceptical, and the scepticism was hard to defend. It is difficult to argue against a claim about a diffuse influence on a whole society. There was no control group and no measurement.

Then social media arrived and drove everyone insane, and the question was settled by accident.

What the Comparison Shows

We now have something close to a natural experiment. A new communication technology reached most of humanity in about fifteen years, and the effects on political alignment, social trust, mental health, and the structure of public argument are large, measurable, and largely undisputed as to direction.

Set that beside the claimed effects of music. The sixties happened, the music was extraordinary, and the culture changed — but disentangling the music from the war, the pill, the economy, and the demographic bulge has defeated every serious attempt.

On the comparison, social media has at least an order of magnitude more influence on human communities than music ever had. Probably more.

Why I Was Right for the Wrong Reason

My original scepticism was not principled. It was mostly that I did not enjoy having a claim made at me that I could not evaluate.

But the thing that settled it points at something I should have seen. Music is broadcast; social media is a network. Music transmits an emotional state from one source to many receivers, and the receivers do not talk back. Social media rearranges who talks to whom, which is a change to the structure of the society rather than to its mood.

Structure beats mood. It was always going to.

The Deflationary Note

There is a further conclusion here that musicians will not like, and I say it as someone who cares about music.

If music's social influence is much smaller than claimed, then a great deal of what is said about its importance is a professional community overstating its own significance — which is entirely normal, and every field does it.

Music is not thereby diminished. It does not have to move societies to be worth doing. The claim that it does was always a bit of a defensive move, and defensive moves are usually unnecessary.