The Tragic Lives of Trolls
“My, wasn’t life awful — and wonderful?”
That’s what Mrs. Soames, a character in Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Our Town” muses, after she’s died, to her fellow decedents in the Grover’s Corners graveyard in Act III of the play.
While good ol’ TW probably couldn’t have conceived of social media, even in his wild, bespectacled dreams, I imagine that’s what he’d have a character say about it were he alive and kicking and writing today. As a mental health and suicide awareness advocate, I am constantly assaulted with headlines in this publication or that decrying social media’s deleterious impact on us, particularly on young people. I see Instagram and TikTok, in particular, vilified with unsubstantiated fear-mongering, I see stories about politicians (almost always conservative ones) suing, or gearing up to sue, social media companies for allegedly fueling a “teen mental health crisis” in America. I have yet to see anybody define what, exactly, this “crisis” is, how it’s quantified or qualified or who makes the determination about how and when something like this is a crisis, or if it’s just, if enough people say it enough times, then it is, de-facto, true.
However, I feel like Thornton Wilder would probably take a more nuanced, skeptical, thoughtful view of social media, most likely treating it the way he, in “Our Town”…