Posted by So you know, this whole internet thing, I think about it a lot, in case it wasn’t obvious from my previous blog posts. My internet social commentary and totally-just-a-small-side-project, to be exact.
Today, let’s pick apart this exciting experiment we call “social media,” as it just so happens that I’m (glances up) trying to take cues from X, formerly known as Twitter, in trying to design and implement a worthy successor. As one does.
Think of this as a brainstorming session.
Social media, this amorphous blob of content that lays claim to a substantial chunk of our collective attention span, it really is the thing the entire internet represents to many a fellow man. It doesn’t take much homework to come to the conclusion that social media is not exactly seen… positively. Not the least due to the way algorithms are suspected to work, the way content is incentivized and consumed, and, especially, the way we use it.
So, how does one “social media”?
Open up X, formerly known as Twitter, and if you hadn’t made the effort to carefully curate your feed, you’re presented with a whole amalgamation of topics taken from disparate spheres of interests. Political takes (both hot and shitty) are juxtaposed with quality artwork from your favorite artists, not to be confused with actual top-tier artwork (cough, memes), all of which, in turn, perforate a chain of niche takes about a niche entertainment topic from people you’ve only been following because they happened to be interested in another niche topic you were also interested in at some point in time, or at least, that’s what you think got you to follow them in the first place. …Or was it? Anyway, what was the question again?
To really answer the question, you’d have to dig deeper. You’d have to examine what are the kinds of social media activities that the corporate masterminds behind Facebook and X are currently incentivizing. We all know the name of the game. “Engagement.” What’s being prioritized isn’t so much the quality of time you spend scrolling through posts – it’s the quantity. The longer your eyes are on a feed, the more ads they will see.
And therein likes the major incongruity between what social media represents for us, and what it actually is. Upon conception, social media was as groundbreaking as it was so commonly touted – the newly-anointed champion of the internet’s branded purpose: connecting us all. Just listen to the talks made by the visionaries of today’s major platforms. You’d assume that the transformations happening in Silicon Valley workstations have brought about a new era – the era of the global family – where all problems of alienation, misunderstanding, and loneliness are rendered a thing of the past. Looking out into the barren landscape of today’s social media, one can’t help but wonder what was it exactly that went awry.
Maybe it’d be helpful to delve into the psyche of a social media user. Particularly, of someone about to make a post, whether it be on Discord or X.
Why make a post at all?
And why specifically that post at that moment? Behind every post is, well, a bid for attention. Easy, right? Ok, maybe that’s a bit too reductive – it’s a bid for a specific kind of attention, which differs post by post, and the kinds of interactions sought after with each post also differs post by post. You yourself are responsible for what you get out of your social media experience, and thus are forced to play a game of chess to tailor your posts in such a way that fits your specific needs – factoring in things like who your audience is, your audience’s tolerance for TMI, your audience’s tolerance for the mundane, and what role you see yourself occupying in the mind of your audience, to finally arrive at whether something is worth posting or not. Needless to say, the role of social media when it comes to people with different social needs is different. Whatever mixed bag of incentives we end up with, you can’t really say that it’s working out well in a holistic sense.
An investigation of a phenomenon such as social media isn’t complete without looking at the humble beginnings. As someone existing in 2023, I can say that, after some Googling, the Twitter and Facebook of the aughts were… strange. Remember when “poking” was a thing on Facebook? (Fellow millennials, I know you’re out there.) Somehow, being notified that someone, unsolicited, did the metaphorical equivalent of pressing their index finger against your shoulder through the internet, was normal. Or, at least, thought of as normal by Facebook’s early designers. Over in Twitter’s corner, a different prompt governed the input field – “What are you doing?” The predecessor of today’s “What is happening?” The original devs intended Twitter to be used for something much more personal and impromptu. The megaphone was used just as much for blaring out what you’re having for breakfast as for the culmination of your latest personal project that you spent the last year working on. In a sense, the social media back in the day was geared towards people rather than happenings. Posts back then, despite being personal, were still largely accessible to a general audience. You were interested in reading updates (and getting poked) from someone because you were interested in the person themself, rather than because their post happens to be interesting to you. When the network was small, interest in one another was easy to reciprocate. You weren’t inundated by a sea of updates that spread your attention thin. Despite all that, one still needed to strike a good balance between being interesting and simply being their plain self.
Anyway, time went on, and our online social activity branched out into two categories. Personally, I would categorize them as “microblogs” and “communities.” Each of them are tailor-suited for specific needs, but with their own drawbacks.
Microblogs are embodied by X, Facebook, Instagram, and the likes – any platform that offers the freedom of, what I would call, screaming into the ether and knowing that you are heard somewhere, by someone. Not typically something you would do in a “community” lest you step on someone’s toes. Microblogs offer a lot of freedom not only in the type of conduct you can adopt, but also in the way the platform can be structured. You’ve got short-form videos, message posts, and art galleries. You can like, reply, repost, block, mute, categorize, see trending, and search keywords. What’s missing now is what used to exist in early Twitter and Facebook – a general focus in strengthening interpersonal bonds. Gone are the tendencies to do casual personal updates, the ability to hold interest in another person’s casual personal updates, and the license to be “just like everyone else.”
On the other hand, communities are, what I would call, iterations on the age-old concept of a chatroom. Taking Discord as the prime example, the advantages of a community are that you can choose who to associate with, and (if you’re a mod) define the boundaries that the interactions under your responsibility are permitted within. Communities are where the atmosphere is very much like early social media – the focus is on people rather than on happenings. The community essence is what distinguishes a Discord argument from a Twitter argument. If done right, it can kind of work out pretty well. That being said, much like real life communities, there are some caveats. Becoming a community member takes actual effort because attention in an online community needs to be earned – it doesn’t come prepackaged. It’s easy to be as good as anonymous if there isn’t a specific niche for you to occupy within a group, and being anonymous would subject you to the same drawbacks as spending time on a microblog. Ultimately, the perks of being in a community benefit the most vocal and qualified voices, as well as the most clout-heavy voices the most, so I hesitate to call this an all-encompassing solution to today’s social media problems.
By now, I think I might be able to delineate what to strive for here.
Connections between people, whether online or offline, aren’t forged simply by virtue of there being the means to make them.
They need to be incentivized. What if we had something that allows for the same microblog-style freedom of expression, as well as the community-style human-level interactions in the same package? I made this allusion in a previous post but, say, imagine you’re a kid in a schoolyard on your first day of school – an anonymous face in a sea of anonymous faces. A few more recesses later, you start to recognize some faces, some that you like, some not quite so much. Before you know it, you and everyone else (save a few unlucky souls) are part of a clique. You do not consider the possibility that perhaps one or two of the people in your tiny little circle will be your lifelong friends, decades down the line. This is how human connections are built – through accidental, prolonged exposure – no matter what stage of life you’re in. Exposure isn’t as simple as tapping “Like” on a post before your finger instinctively scrolls it past the viewframe. Social media as it exists now isn’t built with an effective kind of exposure in mind. The current landscape has made it easy to tailor our contact with others so much so that it never becomes “accidental.”
I’ll admit, online accidental prolonged exposure does sound like a wacky concept, especially since the internet’s infrastructure as it stands isn’t geared for this purpose.
This kind of exposure needs to be engineered.
To that end, there has to be a way to incentivize the kind of social media posts that have the same essence as the schoolyard. Think of the early days of Facebook and Twitter, where people were just… poking each other? and obnoxiously rattling out their day-to-day happenings to a captive audience? Maybe the software engineers of 2005 were onto something. After all is said, I think there is one step worth considering if we want to better incentivize connections between people.
Embrace the mundane.
The need to stand out has poisoned the online psyche of too many a subject. Eliminate the shame in posting about something that might elicit apathy on the part of someone who you wish knew you better – make your posts while confidently knowing that only those who have a meaningful relationship with you indulge in it. Do your part in indulging in the mundaneness of someone else’s post – even a stranger’s! – provided that you have a vested interest in this particular person rather than the subject matter of their posts. In fact, let’s have mundaneness itself built into our post templates – how we feel, what we eat, how we dress, where we’re traveling, what we’re celebrating, what’s got us down. Perhaps this is the kind of interaction the next evolution of social media is meant to be designed around.
As we revamp “the algorithm,” it would do well to keep in mind that the number of connections you can consider to be “close” can be counted on one hand. Reading the patterns of who and what you interact with on social media, the algorithm would, over time, determine which people are the lucky few that you would likely be interested in interacting with over a prolonged period of time. The lucky few that it should strengthen the bonds for. Once-foreign handles will be slowly engraved into your memory, and you and your online buddies end up with bonds that actually last. Of course, you would have a hand in deciding who to disassociate from if need be.
Will it be a dream? Or a reality? Either way, it’s fun to think about, or, dare I say, work to bring about. Until then, I’ll keep dreaming.
@ me here.