This topic has been on my mind recently, so I am going to use this space to clear some of my thoughts around the topic.
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
TikTok, home to dancing cats and a song of which lyrics consist of “Oh no”, is likely to be banned in the USA. It would be disingenuous to say that I didn’t see this coming; one of the reasons that I chose to start a blog as opposed to a static resume site was because I saw some of my other favorite websites headed towards a dumpster.
When Tumblr was sold to Yahoo and eventually Verizon, the site lost a portion of userbase each time it changed owners. When Twitter was sold, when Reddit went public, I felt as though there was something significant happening that I had not yet put my finger on. Meta launched Threads, while Mastodon and BlueSky are trying to replace the giant blue bird. “Enshittification” was trending, and the age of social media ended, at least for me.
JUST QUIT?
I don’t think it is terribly controversial to say that people think that social media is bad for you. Just about every study into the matter says that social media is linked to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and all sorts of other issues. So, the obvious question arises – why don’t people quit?
It doesn’t help that some of the best minds on the planet are directly invested in commodifying your attention span – either through a relentless stream of looping videos or multi-hour talk shows littered with ad breaks and sponsorships for chalk dust masquerading as “alpha-brain pills”. We know the end goal. Sell something, sell anything, via advertising, via sponsorships, via mere exposure. (Of course, I am struck by the irony of self-promotion.) Social media can draw us in once we take the bait, then what is the initial draw?
I can point to FOMO as a primary motivator for myself. While everyone was moving on from texting into integrated apps, I was still trying to keep group projects on track via email. When I finally got my hands on a smart phone, the first thing I did was download almost a dozen social media apps and messengers and make accounts for all of them. It didn’t help too much by then, but it does illustrate the main draw – the “social” part of “social media”. You don’t join in because you wanted to join in, you join in because everyone else is already there.
The real allure of social media is hardwired into us as social creatures – the reason some social networks are so compelling and hard to disengage with is because they are built as communities we inherently want. In turn, this social networking makes it incredibly hard to leave a system that is designed to hold social connections together. Without the users, a network is a hollow framework, but after it reaches critical mass, each additional user is another part of the glue that makes quitting social media even harder. Replacing a website is easy, meeting a friend somewhere new is difficult, recreating a community is nigh impossible.
IT FRAGMENTS …
The unfortunate reality of social media platforms is that they are invaluable resources as digital spaces for people to meet and communicate. While it is nothing like a “town square” it is absolutely a stand in for a street corner and a soap box. That aspect that social media is also at the behest of a corporation that needs to turn the attention of its users into cash. Attention is a limited resource, not an infinite money glitch. To get attention, you have to take it. Cue half a million nearly identical apps, sites, and everything in between.
In my own experience, whenever some new social media site is created, communities are going to be fragmented. Each time, users migrate to a new site, reform some of the communities that previously existed within the prior site, and eventually form communities and social bonds that are unique to the new site. In a sense, fragmentation is inevitable as each new company peels away from the others, and the remaining users spread across whichever sites that satisfy their own social connections. So social media is created, groups and people are broken up into tiny cliques and scattered across thousands of websites and just as many apps. (This is a rant for another time.)
I would argue that part of the reason that nothing “goes viral” anymore is in part due to this fragmentation of websites. When things do go viral within a platform, the spread is stymied by the site’s own design – no matter how good something is, it is limited to a single platform and built for a specific audience. If something does manage to breach containment (4chan), it is usually in the form of screenshots; this in turn makes anyone viewing the image a spectator, rather than a participant. Helpful, in this case, less so with anything else.
I have a bit of a confession to make – I didn’t quit social media, hypocrite that I am. I didn’t have a computer when MySpace ruled the internet. By the time I got to college, Facebook was for the “old” people. I never experienced any golden age of social media where everyone was in the same place at the same time. Sometimes I doubt that it ever existed.
HERE WE ARE AGAIN
While this website started out, I realized that if I wanted any internet presence, I had to maintain it myself. I can’t trust someone else to build some platform that won’t eventually be rug-pulled from underneath me. The nice thing about my own space is the lack of urgency to make content while I disappear for weeks at a time. There is no fickle and amorphous audience to entertain, no metric to meet, no ad revenue to entice me to continue. No one shall reduce my thoughts into “content”; free from the algorithm, I can do anything.
Yet, to claim that disconnecting is the solution is an egregious oversimplification. In exchange for freedom, very few people will encounter my thoughts compared to if I had put it in a more visible place. My freedom from those outside influences is paradoxically a self-imposed isolation. Constraints give way to creativity; open ended writing gives way to decision paralysis. I would say that this is a reasonable tradeoff, but now Shinji is stuck in a void and complaining.
“Social Media” can be everything, but I have neither the time or patience anymore. You can read my lukewarm opinions here and nowhere else.