Are our social media feeds hypnotising us?

“When I give the signal, you will turn to the person next to you, and make love to them,” said the man. Then he said “now”, and I launched myself upon the woman to my right, and began kissing her neck like it was an unconscious bather, and I was a lifesaver who had just dragged it from the sea.

This was a rare opportunity for me to kiss someone in a titillating context, because I was 15 years old and popping with hormones. Also, I was hypnotised. This was all going down in a show by a nationally renowned hypnotist at Port Elizabeth’s Opera House many years ago.

The lady in question was a gorgeous, dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties, way out of my league and age cohort, and someone I would never realistically get to engage with in any way that suggests romance. However, I was a highly sexed teenager, and those people take their opportunities where they find them.

Complicating the entire affair was the fact that I was there with my mom, seated to my left and seriously reconsidering her decision to bring me to the hypnotist show.

It must have been part of the plan of the hypnotist – one of South Africa’s most legendary – but I remember my public lovemaking experience quite clearly.

I remember the fragrant perfume of the woman, her smooth olive skin, her leather miniskirt, and the fact that I was plunging my tongue into her left earhole like a pumpjack on the Texan oilfields. She, too, retained some memory of the experience, because she smiled and winked at me on our way out of the Opera House later.

What were the ethics of that hypnotism stunt? Is it acceptable to induce a teenager to engage in physical, sex-adjacent behaviour with an adult in public? Were there, for instance, elsewhere in the audience teen girls flinging themselves bodily at grown men?

Perhaps hypnotism, as they say, enhances the subject’s susceptibility to suggestion, but cannot cause them to do things they would not ordinarily do. Maybe in my case “being hypnotised” provided a plausible cover story under which to live out my most illicit teenage fantasies, especially the one about snogging a woman not dissimilar to my Afrikaans teacher.

In the reverse case, was it ethical to subject people to physical harassment by hypnotised people only vaguely in control of their most primal urges?

These are weighty considerations, and evoke questions regarding similar manipulation of human urges. Is hypnosis similar to demagoguery, media strategy, PR, advocacy? When we manipulate the attention of people to influence their behaviour, is that in line with the principles of mutual respect and individual freedom?

When my Facebook feed shapes my beliefs, and I begin acting on them, have I been hypnotised to do so, in a sense? Am I still exercising free will, if I honesty believe I am acting in terms of my personal convictions, but those convictions have been shaped by someone else?

When I make provocative statements condemning other groups of people or – heaven forbid – commit acts of violence, am I using critical reasoning, or am I acting according to my programming? Am I making love to the lady next me, because the hypnotist bade me do it?

One can say that social media algorithms reflect and focus our attention on news that already appeals to us, and, in that way, simply reinforces our belief by creating a type of echo chamber where everything confirms what we think.

But this focus, this exclusion of competing views, may also be a form of hypnosis. It’s a manipulation of our minds. As such, it deserves as much ethical scrutiny as my experience at the PE Opera House in the 1980s.

While we wait for this scrutiny to be applied to social media, I have decided that mine would be a difficult hypnotism experience to top. Consider this column the official announcement of my retirement from getting hypnotised.

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