"The Liberian Peninsula"
Spain and Portugal on “the Liberian Peninsula?” Honest to God, you can’t make this stuff up. Maybe if people took the time to actually read, social media wouldn’t be such a stupid place.
By John G. Stamos
Read? Are you kidding?
“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
Nicholas Carr (Author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains)
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If you do happen to read my stuff on a somewhat regular basis, you’ll know that I’ve been on a moderately sustained and very minor rant about the generalized stupidity quotient encountered on social media platforms. A litany of only-half-joking allegations and lukewarm indictments manifest lately throughout my writing as I’ve lamented, among other things, the higher-functioning parts of people’s brains completely shutting down when they see photos of flowers (or other types of anti-edifying, oooh-and-aaah-inspiring pics – especially those generated by AI), and social media “influencers” supplying – in their ostensible efforts to achieve the nugatory goal of amassing more followers – copious amounts of their own brands of inanity (frequently in the form of said imagery accompanied by The Cat in The Hat Learns to Spell meets the Journal of Scientific Exploration-style juxtaposition of their own vacuous, infantile micro-phraseology and plagiarized snippets of legitimate, correctly-written material) and killing off even more brain cells in an ever-growing number of social media-surfing brains.
“What’s this guy bitching about? Why’s he even bothering looking at half-witted influencer-spew in the first place? And what’s the deal picking on people who like flowers?” Maybe you want answers, and maybe you don’t. Well, compadre, you’re gonna get them anyway. For one thing, a little justifiably targeted derision is better for dropping blood pressure numbers than an ACE inhibitor, and it doesn’t have the side effects. For another thing, even though I might be a low-reaching kind of guy, I’m no bully, because the phenomenon of innocent shrinking violet types mentally flatlining over flower pics on social media isn’t the low-hanging fruit you might think it is. Trust me, these aren’t the wavelets of a teacup’s tempest I’m riding here. Social media is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, proving itself one of Human Stupidity’s greatest proponents.
I’m routinely disappointed to see so many of my favorite writers – legit, supremely talented, and pedigreed columnists, j-school grads, essayists, poets, authors, scientists, educators, historians, etc. – scoring abysmally low numbers of likes (often in the single digits) of their X/Twitter posts that include links to their wonderful written work. But I’m even more disappointed when, often in the same feed, I see some influencer’s shimmery-glimmery image and associated grammatical duodenal chyme garnering hundreds of likes. Is my disappointment born of a vintage of unpalatable sour grapes? Nope. I’m disappointed because it underscores a simple, pathetic reality: A hefty percentage of users on platforms like X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. clearly and routinely demonstrate the fact that they simply don’t or won’t read, and cerebrally stultifying social media influencers, as you’ll soon read, are at the vanguard of this seriously disturbing phenomenon. Across any given social media platform, ignorance spreads like the latest COVID variant, and these so-called “influencers” not only aren’t masking up, they’re hacking up gobbets of viral dumbness and spraying them all over the room.
The Theorem: Do flower pictures, a handful of misspelled words, and a few lines of crappy grammar wipe out your mind?
Looks like it. Evidently, being blitzed by visually impactful content like GIFs, short vids, or, yes, photos (of flowers or otherwise), and bursts of likes and/or vapid short comments that accompany them in social media posts, can jar your brain into a state of malfunction. Or, at the very least, a state of dysfunction. Sensory input along these lines energizes the kind of brain activity that devours immediate gratification and simultaneously deadens the impetus behind any potential info mining along more cerebrally engaging, esoteric lines, i.e. reading, researching, etc. In the study “Modern Day High: The Neurocognitive Impact of Social Media Usage”, published in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central, researchers summarize their findings:
…extended Beta and Gamma activity having the potential to interfere with emotional regulation and attention. These neurophysiological consequences, especially delayed Alpha recovery and increased Delta activity, could bring to the fore new concerns regarding digital fatigue and mental health.
Social media usage in and of itself would seem to be rife with enough neurochemical/neuro-electrical pitfalls to lay mental waste to huge numbers of people. But social media influencers, who by conventional definition are users that’ve managed to accrue not insignificant numbers of followers by way of flashy but nonsensical, mind-numbing blurbs, are, sadly, in a unique position to amplify social media’s damaging cognitive effects.
In “Social Media Makes AI Dumb”, published in Medium, Immanuel Sanka references an article in Northeastern Global News by Tanner Stening when he writes that the most dangerous part of social media usage is
…something often referred to as Brain Rot. This can be described as the deterioration of mental or intellectual faculties caused by over consuming trivial and unchallenging material, particularly low quality online content like short social media posts.
I further posit that social media influencers and wannabe influencers, in their efforts to attract platform followers, need to first zombify them. As discussed, this process requires the use of quick and dirty posts. Flashy colors, AI generated pastiches, and keyboard/keypad offal are the key ingredients. The imagery, though often vivid, is banal, and the words convey little beyond the fact that their wielders are uninformed, unoriginal, grammatically inept, and often unethical. Good fortune, however, is on the side of the influencer, because by the time some poor sap has jumped on the bandwagon and followed him or her, the social media platform itself, with its proliferation of low quality content (photographic, written, or otherwise), has already done much of the job of zombifying said new follower. And since that new follower certainly isn’t going to read anything beyond the stupidity-perpetuating nonsense that’s included in the post right in front of his or her eyes, the influencer must simply stay the course and keep the insipidity coming. And, for that influencer, the good news continues, because there’s no strategic planning needed for generating fast and dirty zombifying social media burbles. Influencers require no special knowledge of human brain neurotransmitters or the neuro-electrical properties of brain waves. They need no expertise in psychology or in psychological profiling, which is a good thing, because if they did have it, they’d likely realize that they themselves are just as zombified as their followers. Really, besides not infrequently demonstrating generalized ethical paucity, all a social media influencer needs to do in order to be a social media influencer is be his or her catatonic self. Easy peasy.
In this way, it would seem that the influencer is both a victim and a perpetrator of social media usage’s cognitive ravages. The only question that remains is one of percentages with respect to the origin of the influencer’s own zombification. How much of it happened as a result of imprudent social media usage? To what degree was the influencer pre-zombified when he or she first appeared on the social media scene (the facility with which social media influencers immerse themselves in the stream of digital vacuity and so naturally marshal the anti-tumult of its tepid headwaters might indicate that perhaps there’s an atavism at work here)? Was it a combination of the two? These questions bear further research, and you, dear reader, as evidenced by the fact that you’ve made it this far in the article, clearly possess the curiosity, comprehension, and cognitive skills to perform it. Go get ‘em, tiger!
The Proof: “The Liberian Peninsula”
“Additionally, platforms like Facebook and Twitter may contribute to societal “structural stupidity,” where the quality of public discourse deteriorates due to superficial engagement.”
Dan Sodergren (In “Are we getting stupider because of #SocialMedia?”, published in Medium)
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Honest to God, you just can’t make this stuff up…
Earlier this month, I was on my phone, screwing around on X/Twitter and thinking that maybe I’d drop my blood pressure by a few ticks and do a guilt ridden, nasty “influencer crawl.” Even though it’s funny as hell to see what some of these nincompoops are spreading around, I expect to never find anything of value or of interest, and I’m never disappointed.
But this time I was.
What I found in one particular influencer’s one single post (and its accompanying replies) was irrefutable proof of my theorizing that 1) Lots of people cruising for mindless gratification on social media don’t read, 2) Lots of people mentally zero out when they’re looking at shiny-bright flower pictures on social media, and 3) Social media influencers themselves engage in actions that are stupid, irresponsible, and, by virtue of their role as disseminators of baseless information, injurious to the brain function of those that follow them.
Evidently, the influencer in question had been watching the July 6th World Cup soccer match between Portugal and Spain, and had divined from the broadcast that the match was being called the “Battle of Liberia.” She elaborated and explained, for the edification and benefit of her followers, that Spain and Portugal were “the counties (sic) in Liberian Peninsula of Europe.” Included with this bit of world geography expertise was (you guessed it) an image collage made up of a bunch of pics of pretty flowers. Additionally, a profusion of inane hashtags was present.
(If you’ve gotten this far in your reading of this article, I’m assuming that your personal reading predilections and intellectual curiosity – or at the very minimum, your grade school geography class – have long ago armed you with the knowledge that Liberia is a country in Africa and NOT the European land mass known as the Iberian Peninsula, which is, in fact, the geographical location of the countries of Portugal and Spain. And further, with respect to the continent of Africa, you’ll be familiar with the fact that there exists no known “Liberian Peninsula.”)
The proof that people don’t read, are rendered incapable of rational thought by images of bright and shiny objects (in this case flowers), or a combination of the two was delivered in the form of comments offered in response to this odious post. The only thing I could see were a bunch of ooohs and aaahs over the beauty of the flowers. Nowhere could I find a single diplomatic correction of, or reference to, the influencer’s obvious and shameless blunder. The optimist in me likes to think (and hope) that her followers were just being polite, but the pessimist (realist) in me must entertain a far more ominous possibility: these innocent social media users have been rendered insensate by the proliferation of utter nonsense (a huge and heaping helping, incidentally, present in the form of this particular influencer’s digital providence) with which they’re bombarded while cruising the X/Twitter platform.
Immediately downstream of the “Liberian Peninsula” post in this particular influencer’s string of subsequent proclamations are findings that prompt me to ask a question: Can an individual so painfully ignorant of world geography demonstrate genuine, organic, accredited botanist-level knowledge of plant anatomy/physiology/evolution and genuine, organic, accredited entomologist-level knowledge of the physiology of the sight organs of pollinating insects? The answer not only seems obvious, it seems to also indicate that the conclusion I further draw of influencers (at least of this particular influencer and others like her) as, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, as plagiarizers is inescapable.
Before anyone gets a bee in their bonnet over what I’ve written here today, I just want to mention a couple of things. On one level, I’m just sort of fucking around. If you can’t poke fun at your fellow social media surfers, who can you poke fun at?
But on an entirely different level, I’m genuinely concerned. As someone who makes a living as a writer, it’s disturbing and disheartening to see people eschewing, en masse, social media posts (whether they’re mine or those of the many really excellent and talented writers, scholars, etc. that use social media platforms to share their work) that serve simply as invitations to people to read. The links to some incredibly wonderful, interesting, edifying reading material are right there in those posts. But those posts are ignored in favor of low quality, tertiary content. I’m concerned for the well-being (both the emotional and the potentially financial) of my fellow writers – it’s a multi-leveled kick in the pants when nobody wants to read your stuff. But I’m also concerned for the emotional and intellectual well-being of those conditioned by social media’s cognitive assaults, particularly when the amplitude and frequency of those assaults are modulated by brainless influencers.
Social media can be a remarkable resource, as any given platform offers its navigators any number of content-laden paths to choose. One of those paths offers access to amazing written material – whether creative, academic, journalistic, or otherwise – from a huge variety of amazing writers and from a huge variety of amazing sources, free of charge, and only a click away. But another of those paths, in fact, many of those paths, subjects its users to blatant, obtuse, and brain damaging ocular assaults – effectively, digital head strikes whose effects are cumulative and intellectually paralyzing.
Social media users, I implore you: Choose your path wisely.
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“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community… but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”
Umberto Eco (Novelist & Social Critic)
“‘The Liberian Peninsula'” ©2026. John G. Stamos and The Renaissance Garden Guy
John Stamos is a writer and is co-publisher of The Renaissance Garden Guy. His work has appeared in a number of publications including, most recently, A Man for Some Seasons, Splice Today, and, of course, The Renaissance Garden Guy. He is married to his multitalented sweetheart, the mycologist and writer Ann Simpson-Stamos.
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Good ‘fucking around’ points, John. I take writing seriously. In many cases it is much easier for me to get my points across by writing them down to the person/people I want to communicate with. Downside, a letter, email, text sometimes take on a long life of their own; i.e. potential blackmail. Lol Paranoia is on of my attributes.
So, I mainly rely on true communication with my homies by spoken word. That said, I am sickened by the weakening of our language and the ability to use it properly in writing. The ability to cite actual facts correctly. The ability to use a broad vocabulary to illustrate one’s meaning. Let alone the ability to spell! Dire straits, indeed. All of my kids (Gkids too) have felt the forceful push to read, to read and comprehend, from me. They are all still a bit young to get the online exposure of idiotic missives. However, I find the loose approach to writing that is exemplified on socials to be spilling over into spoken language on the playground. Unplugged our language is still in danger. I’m not against slang. I am against it overtaking known and comprehensive language. That’s why eleven years ago I started a book club, Read Between the Vines. It is a pleasure to get offline and embrace a book choice by a fellow reader. Not all choices are my particular cup of tea. I do read them. Then we discuss. What? Discuss???
Anyway, this is a long ramble hope it makes sense. At least I don’t think anyone will plagiarize me. Thank you for your in depth writing.
Lane
Damn, Lane, this is brilliant! And it’s not a ramble – every single point is right on the money. First of all, getting your grandkids into the habit of reading is so admirable and so vitally important. As a result of your efforts, their minds/brains will possess functional and anatomical (I’m convinced) advantages over those kids whose minds continue to be conditioned solely by trivial, meaningless, digitized imagery and short snorts of digitized nonsensical, poorly written babble. I find it difficult to dispute that new generations, if not given the opportunity to engage in the process of not only learning to read, but also in the process of learning to enjoy reading, will possess brains of an entirely different and functionally inferior architecture. The honing of so many complex cognitive processes – taking place in microseconds and at the neuronal level – is actuated when the human mind undertakes the process of translating the miraculous code of letters and words into concepts, ideas, and, ultimately, imagery. Imagination is fomented by reading, and NOT by staring at digital images and scribbled slop. And I agree with you about the use of slang. Slang is important because its juxtaposition with well-executed phraseology – both written AND spoken – serves only to undercore its user’s grammatical adroitness. Between the Vines is an amazing institution – the twin arts of reading and conversation have found their champion there. Brava! Thanks for reading this one, Lane, and thank you SO much for your excellent thoughts.
So frustratingly true! Many good points here, John! Maybe the pendulum will swing back to more meaningful content at some point! One can hope.
I really worry that this is becoming more and more an issue of evolving brain architecture. Some of the linked research in the piece was fascinating, but in a really frightening way. And, just based on what the trend away from reading is showing, it seems that the inclination (and ability?) of the average human mind to undertake the actual unconscious but neurologically complex act of the interpretation of written symbols (letters/words) involved in reading is steadily declining. It’s terrifying to think that today’s average social media user derives the same intellectual and/or emotional satisfaction from a GIF as you or I might get out of a leisurely read of Wuthering Heights. Mind warping, actually. Thanks so much for reading the piece, Lisa, and for your kind and thoughtful comments.