Virtually everybody is complaining about social media. Facebook is under fire for disseminating false information and censoring true information. Even Elon Musk can’t seem to fix Twitter. TikTok is controlled by the Chinese Communists, reportedly to gain information about Americans and apparently to make Americans stupider. They are all criticized for viciousness, harming their users mentally, inciting a mob mentality, and promoting social conformity.
Ian Bogost in The Atlantic (behind a paywall) has written about the woes of the social media platforms in his article The Age of Social Media Is Ending.
He points out that originally, the platforms were for social networking, letting you connect with people–family members, old friends, business contacts–and allowing you to form webs of acquaintance. Then arose a focus on content and communicating your thoughts with everyone in your network. Then came the ability to pass along links and material written by other people across your network and the network of everyone in your network. Whereupon, the rest of the internet became dependent on social media to generate traffic, so that a website post that “goes viral” on social media can earn lots of money from advertisers who pay on the basis of “hits” and page views. This latter stage, he says, is where the problems began to multiply.
Now, he concludes, the fate of social media is uncertain, with regulation from various governments, consumer revolt, and new alternatives threatening to kill it.
What I’d like to discuss this weekend is social media as you are using it and thinking about it. Are you still on social media or have you sworn off? Are you still using it the way you used to, or has your use changed? How do you handle “friends,” disinformation, censorship, virtual social pressure, and other problems? Do you think social media is doomed, or can it be reformed?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In