Social media is the problem none of us can get enough of, a digital realm where one man’s repoast is another man’s ifunny catch of the day. But somehow none of us can resist diving in, again and again, into that ever rotating flurry of hot takes, fresh memes, easy puns, and Milhouse advocacy — all equal parts entertaining and pointless. So open a new tab and let’s reassess our subconcious assumptions about web-based sociability.
Enjoy!
Misnomer Media
It’s become cliché, but true nonetheless, to say we pack an incredible amount of assumptions into our language, which in turn can shape our perception of reality. A common example of this is ‘livestock’, which implies a normative state of animals being an inventory item rather than living beings with emotions, five senses, and maybe even souls. The human equivalent for being referred to purely by economic utility rather than biological or philosophical parameters would be ‘consumer’.
These linguistic shifts are usually just attempts to streamline communication by removing the need to repeat basic assumptions. But the term ‘social media’ is an exaggerated case of these sort of built-in linguistic assumptions.
The term was first popularized in the 1990’s as early web developers theorized and later began to implement the modern internet, evolving it from simple selection pages into a space in which users could interact and communicate with one another. It's worth noting that the term wasn't developed from extensive hands-on use, but instead was a proposed descriptor for what was at that point a theoretical experience. However the title 'social media' would stick, being established early on with the public and making for a great bit of marketing — there’s a vivid sense of action to it, and who would want to left out of something social? Losers, surely.
But does the term ‘social media’ aptly describe the technology that actually materialized in the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and their fellows whose use now makes up a substantial portion of our days?
Enter the Matrix
At a pixel-on-the-screen level, most 'social media' really boils down to an infinitely scrollable grid of cells containing text and/or multimedia from clearly labeled users that you can then respond to directly or with some form of approval flag, most often called a 'like'.
These two features — an infinity scroll which will lead you into an ever widening gyre of posts, and a reactive approval flag — are the cornerstones of social media's ability to stimulate our brains. The endless matrix of semi-randomized opinions immediately contrasts themselves against one another and provide a Skinner-box reward system built out of confirmation bias and schadenfreude, a reward system only magnified by the ability to bestow and receive social credibility transferred by tokenized approval via 'likes'. Every single statement empowers you as it is presented as a Caesar-like pollice verso judgment, to doom or redeem your fellow digital gladiator of the social media empire with a thumbs up or down.
Words are exchanged but whatever these interactions are they are certainly not perfect analogs for traditional in-the-flesh socializing. The topics discussed are broad and topical rather than personal and familial since you are talking to a theoretically global audience. Crucially, relationships tend to be briefer since these abstracted (often parasocial) virtual relationships tend to have an inherent extremeness, vacillating quickly from infatuation to hate, due to limited information exchange and lack of mutual reliance.
Unlike someone standing in front of you, from whom you can receive an enormous amount of nonverbal communication regarding wealth, intelligence, social obligations, and general personality traits in an instant, personal information in the digital space is limited at a sensory level since most communication between participants is text based since there is a high level of effort required to develop audio and visual posts. This creates an abundance of textual information divorced from any greater context, and a slow drip feed of edited content. While in a political disagreement with a neighbor you may have some reference for his personal situation (the state of his yard, the nature of his relationship with his spouse, his facial expression and posture), in the digital space you have only the user’s professed beliefs and an avatar .jpeg to guide you in the judgment of an entire human being. And judgement is only further encouraged by the ever present decision to bestow or withhold your thumbs-up.
Another contributor to instability in web mediated interactions is the lack of mutual reliance between users (part of a broader societal trend). You are likely at some point to need your neighbor to pick up your mail while you’re on vacation (or at the very least not let his dog shit on your yard), but you can never expect the virtual ‘friend’ to support you in such a physical way. Instead, the abstracted ‘friend’ is useful so long as they praise good things and speak in opposition to bad things (actual lived reality of their behaviors does not technically matter, the appearance does). Due to this lack of mutual labor value, any virtual interaction should always be seen as transactional.
In contrast, genuine social relationships are defined by extensive negotiating over time and precious resources. Who gives a damn if Trump or Biden won the debate if nobody went to the grocery store all week and all the dishes are filthy? Enduring relationships are formed by sharing these burdens, benefits, and the shared suffering of absences. A holy bond is formed by deciding where to set the thermostat, where to go out for dinner, and enduring farts with the car windows rolled up.
In Erik Hoel’s recent article ‘Stop trying to make a "good" social media site’ he points out that many social media start-ups set out with a mission to reform social media into something more positive, but after an initial honeymoon they all fall into the same familiar negative behavior patterns of factional dogpiling and screeching witch hunts, where growth is obtained through bloodsports and putting people into virtual stockades. But observing social media at a structural level, as a constantly flowing matrix of contrasting opinions just begging for response, this result is obviously the natural outcome of the incentive structure.
The Quest for a New Word
It may be tempting at this point to dismiss all online interactions as fake, but this trivializes one the most powerful forces of the 21st century. Ignoring for a moment the addictive aspect of these websites, there are obviously immense benefits to online networking: an ocean of value propositions in terms of access to specialty knowledge, dissident opinions, and self selected matching for in-person socializing. Without geographical limits this has allowed for the formation of digital ideological tribes that I suspect will have outsized influences on the future.
But in reiterating my thoughts here, I still feel no closer to a more accurate title for ‘social media'. It is a series of paradoxes: an unparalleled communication tool that doesn't build social relationships, a godly matchmaker that incentivizes argument, an instantaneously searchable catalogue of humanity that should save you years of effort that has been tailor made to waste your time typing out angry replies to blue-wave bots.
Some replacement terms I have seen thrown around already have all fallen into the same pitfalls of analogizing digital interactions to actual social formation by calling groups ‘online communities’, or fellow users as ‘frens’. It may be that I am still hewing too close to traditional social relations terminology and that some completely out of the box thinking is needed; after all, if the Inuit have dozens of words for the types of snow then it would only be natural that web-natives would have a similar subcategories of ‘online relationship’.
For the moment the best solution I can offer is to conceptualize ‘social media’ sites as persona engagement platforms where abstracted identities, ideas, and a lot of addictive stimulation are thrown about in an attempt to earn the in-house casino chips. Web denizens are to be treated like famous authors, each offering performances on the digital page for me to enjoy, but all of them remote and permanently apart from me. As such, my emotions towards them should always be near indifference. I believe I can begin forcing this frame of thought over my own social media use.
This is my hope (cope) for the moment at least. But to use a technology evolved to draw out your engagement with indifference for any sustained period is likely a pipe dream.
I recently read a Slate piece where a mommy influencer admitted that there was extreme incentive to write negatively about parenting because that's the only thing that really got any attention. There was also a Daily Mail article about how supposedly, women were breaking up with their boyfriends because those guys didn't like Barbie. This was all based on a single Reddit r/AITA post and a TikTok that only got 2k views, which even I know is miniscule by TikTok standards. A couple of years ago, I saw a popular Indian American female comedian tweet out that she tweets disproportionately about her sexual encounters and relationships with white men because that's the only way she remains relevant (likely by getting a lot of angry responses).
Social media is extremely good at exploiting interpersonal issues (which is why things like parenting and dating are sources of eternal wars) and making everyone feel personally targeted and talked at/down to, even though most of the time, the OP was probably thinking of one specific individual but then over-generalizing to seem more relatable.
I wrote a bit about it here: https://salieriredemption.substack.com/p/de-online-detox-dying-on-the-jonah
This was a refreshing read. I’ve found myself thinking similarly over the years. I remember in college we used to joke about how now having social media is just a different style of having social media at this point.
The spooky thing is that many people have no awareness of the person/avatar. It’s sad when you’re not doing it on purpose. This whole thing makes me think about that part in Infinite Jest about the digital masks.
I have no idea what Substack is but I’m glad I found your page.