The State of Social
Pt 1: A Personal Note
I’ve been fascinated by social media for years. I use it personally, I’ve studied it academically, and I’ve been paid to leverage it for brands.
I still remember getting onto social media for the first time. It was at the end of a summer camp back in 2007, and all of us teens were talking about how to stay in touch. I was hesitating between Facebook and Myspace and ultimately chose Facebook because that’s what my crush said he was going to use (key word here being “teen”). And thus began a 15+ love/hate relationship with social media.
When I think about what I’ve most loved about social media, I often think back to its earliest days and how weird and experimental things used to be. One of my friend groups once made a shared Facebook account for a stuffed animal hippopotamus that we named hippothalamus. In hindsight, super strange behavior. But at the time there were no social norms for this kind of thing, we just focused on having fun with it. I reconnected with friends on social media, maintained long-distance friendships, found roommates, got to know people I eventually dated, the list goes on.
One of the reasons I love social is because in its truest form, it fulfills an innate desire we all have as humans for connection. I don’t think that truest form is how it started out (Facebook started as a way for students to rate one another on college campuses), and I also don’t think it’s where it’s at in its current form (which is largely what this series will be about). But I believe that somewhere, lost in the matrix, lies social’s true capacity to fulfill a very human desire we have for connection.
My fascination with social took on another turn during the 2016 US Presidential election. I was living in Washington D.C. at the time and was working in International Development. Everyone around me was convinced Hillary Clinton was going to win, but I started noticing a growing polarization on my social feeds. That is because I sit at the intersection of communities who are very different from one another. Raised by christian missionaries to France, I have a lot of ties to american evangelical subcultures, many of whom were avidly posting on social media during this time. Meanwhile, I was raised in an extremely secular country, went to one of the most diverse/leftist/secular universities in all of Europe (London School of Economics), then moved to Washington D.C. and went through my own spiritual deconstruction/reconstruction of sorts. There’s lots more I could say about the journey involved in all of that, but the point I’m trying to make is that the types of people I have gotten to know and care about over the years span an extremely wide socio-political and cultural spectrum. This means that as things heated up politically in 2016, I started seeing widely different opinions shared online and became increasingly concerned by the spread of misinformation. The election season was a wake-up call. We were so polarized online, I started wondering if that was because of our technology, or because our lived realities were actually so different from one another that relating as fellow citizens felt impossible.
And so I made a decision that came out of left field for many and decided to move… to Arkansas. Not an expected move for someone who had lived in Paris, London, DC, etc. But I wanted to experience living somewhere where I would be in the perceived ‘minority group’ given my political beliefs. Over time I grew frustrated with coastal elites who would ask me if I was ok. Don’t get me wrong, I would pick NY, which is where I live now, over pretty much anywhere else in the world. But the question “are you ok” implies there is something lesser about another place. That projected otherness bothered me.
I believe all of these things are connected. Let’s wind it back:
We are physically divided. People with similar socio-political, religious and cultural views tend to live in physical proximity to one another. On the coasts people joke about “flyover states”. This division is one that exists in many other countries around the world and is one that is only growing. (For what it’s worth, it’s perfectly normal to want to live close to people who live and think like you, and I’m not trying to get into the ethics of this, I’m just stating a fact).
We are creating digital realities. When humans create, we do so based off what we know. To create is to offer a mirror to the world. This means that we can’t help but bring our physical divides into our digital spaces.
But these divides aren’t just brought into digital spaces, they are amplified in these digital spaces. Most of our views of the world are formed by cognitive biases. “Embodied cognition” basically states that our ability to take in information is limited by our bodily capacity to process information. We literally construct our realities based on what we perceive to be true, vs what actually is true. In the physical realm, the starting point is reality, which we then interpret cognitively. In the digital realm, the starting point itself is those interpretations - i.e., our cognitive beliefs. When you look at it from that perspective, what you can see is that our entire digital existence is already one step removed from reality as a baseline.
Platforms intentionally accelerate this phenomenon. To take it further, algorithms feed us information congruent with our views in order to keep us glued to platforms. This became evident in 2016 and has continued to be the case with this most recent election. It’s also a phenomenon that applies to the Internet at large - search companies do the same thing by tiering search results based on data they have about those looking for information (side-note: this is why we need entire new infrastructure rails for the information economy, not just social rails).
We intentionally accelerate this phenomenon. The most powerful emotions to illicit online are anger and fear. Creating divisive and polarizing content to illicit such emotions is a surefire way to gain visibility. And in the attention economy, standing out is the only way to survive. People who post divisive content get more views, and some willingly embrace this as a growth strategy.
Point being, we have created social platforms that increasingly tear us apart.
Social media changes how we communicate, what we communicate about, and maybe even who we are as people. There are so many things that fascinate me about it… The rise of influencer culture, how content creators should be compensated for their creations by social media platforms, who should own our data on social media, the role that advertising plays, how we build our online identities, social as the new town square, what happens/ should happen to our presence online after we die, the role of censorship online, you get the idea.
The purpose of this series is to give an overview of the current state of social. If social has the power to connect us in meaningful ways (I believe it does), why are we facing a loneliness epidemic? And if it has the capacity to lead to large scale coordination (I believe it does), how can we ensure platforms are accessible to all and won’t be taken over by any single entity? And if it has the ability to help us exchange valuable information (I believe it does), how can we ensure this information is verifiable and trustworthy?
Social tech is perhaps one of the hardest areas to build in - gaining market share in a crowded, monopolistic landscape is incredibly difficult. It can be a lonely journey, but new alternatives are needed. Let’s explore what that looks like together.
More to come.