The Death of Social Media
2022 was the year I turned 40. Like many my age, I have used some form of online social communication platform for most of my life. I started with music forums and ordering bootleg cassettes through a dial-up modem. I caught the tail end of Myspace while Facebook was opened to University College London students while I was at grad school. I first engaged with Twitter to follow the unfolding Arab Spring in early 2011 and finally dragged myself to Instagram for a short lived stint selling t-shirts.
Lots of things change in one’s personal life in your 20’s and 30’s. Jobs, studies, relationships, the city you live, your values, priorities and the way you choose to live your life. Lots of things come and go and no longer suit the people we are now. With this in mind, I feel the singe of embarrassment when logging in to these platforms. Like I stayed too long at an event trying to have fun and not realising all the people I knew had left. Was it me who changed? Or them?
Like all things, my personal and professional relationship with social media declined slowly and then suddenly. The blow was not one, but instead a volley landing in quick succession. But the knockout was a recent paper studying the early days of Facebook, back when it was being rolled out to American college campuses one by one as thefacebook.com. This coincided with a regular series of surveys on mental health. The authors used this natural experiment to show that the introduction of the platform led to increased symptoms of poor mental health among students. Hard to argue with that.
The evidence had been quite foggy about the direct link between Facebook specifically and mental health, and many studies had shaky conclusions or contradicted each other. The use of social media had even been found to strengthen social capital leading to a better chance of survival in a natural disaster.
For a long time I clung to this positive end of the highly variable spectrum of influence that social platforms can have on different slices of society. While US college students might end up primarily saddened by the additional social pressure, I had seen first hand how displaced Syrians in Zaatari camp were quick to reconstruct shattered social connections in Turkey and Jordan through Facebook and WhatsApp groups. I had spent years studying the amazing things that people can do with internet mediated communication and its means to study human behaviour at scale. This was a time of great optimism and excitement about what these platforms could do; topple dictators? Predict the stock market?
I felt that to focus on the negative aspects of social media use was something a privileged person would do. Yet this was the first study to be able to make this causal link on a solid experimental foundation. A future looms on the horizon in which opening these apps in the presence of others is as much of a social faux-pas as stepping out for a cigarette at a dinner party.
Like all well marketed products, social media platforms all started with their own quirky angle or constraint. Hands up if you remember when your Facebook status had a hardcoded ‘is’? As in ‘Alex Rutherford is drinking coffee’. Instagram stubbornly held out for years allowing only square photos to be uploaded directly from your phone (not through the browser). Twitter constrained users to the 140 characters of an SMS, forcing them to find creative ways to compress their thoughts into a strictly time ordered stream of consciousness. These quirks invited fun and innovation; it was the users of Twitter themselves who begat Retweets by appending ‘RT’ before manually copying and pasting.
Yet, without exception, each one dropped their quirks and smoothed out the experience to become more palatable, relentlessly chasing engagement and growth. After rapaciously assimilating all rivals, each now represents some kind of convergent maxi-omniverse. Facebook entices me to place ads! Post a Story! Find info on COVID! Sell something on Marketplace! Look at memories! Donate money! Instagram has a labyrinth of posts, photos, Reels, videos and possibly other things that may or may not be mutually compatible.
The trajectory of rough and ready short clips commonly known as Stories thumbed through and autoplaying was basically as follows. Conceived by Snapchat as a disappearing medium before rapid Xeroxing by Instagram before spreading to Every Single Application on the Internet including YouTube, Spotify and shockingly Signal. Those of us long enough in the tooth will feel woozy echos of the past such as Twitter’s Vine in the short Tiktok videos syndicated to Instagram. When you remember that Facebook’s minimalist design(!) was originally a counter-point to Myspace noisiness, you again recall that everything is a cycle. And not an original one.
This autumn I finally let go of Twitter. I was immensely proud of the professional social capital I had built up there. For years I had my own wonderfully self-curated brain candy; Middle East experts, scientists, bloggers, local recommendations and historical photos of my favourite parts of New York. At any time of day I would have a stream of fascinating content from somewhere in the world. On Twitter I would find jobs, point out links and articles to others and share my side projects.
Twitter nowadays feels like drinking too many beers on a flight, falling asleep and waking up 45 minutes later. Tweets arrive in random order, making it all but impossible to follow the fast moving political crises that used to characterise the platform. ‘She’s gone!’ arriving before ‘Liz Truss to give a press conference in 2h’. The same tweets reappear after a few scrolls downwards. Strange new recommended accounts pop up ‘based on my retweets’. Not only is my feed a different place than it was, the world is a different place and no-one left working at Twitter bothers to actually try using the platform any more.
This is to ignore the discourse itself; endless long threads with sneaky clickbait lead tweets and hysterical commentary. But the fallout of Elon Musk’s takeover took this to a new level; the whole of Twitter talking about Twitter. Or worse, talking about leaving Twitter, on Twitter.
As Cal Newport noted, the response of the legacy platforms, to an exodus of users who you know to interact with online, is to cut out the people you know to interact with. Tiktok’s supposed genius is to rely on ‘The Algorithm’ to feed you content; less Social Network and more… more what exactly?
One of the stealthy trends technology platforms have pursued is extreme personalisation. Social media was once a communal experience; we had a well defined social group and it was simply augmented online. Then we all began to splinter off into private groups and siloed pages, before our feeds became ever more out of our hands. The TikTok algorithm-driven stream of content is the logical conclusion of this and we shouldn’t underestimate the significance. Instead of all users experiencing some reflection of a lived social reality through our smartphones, we are now together alone. We are all still glued to our devices, but now imbibing personalised experiences that give us little in common with others once we have put them down. Do all my friends also get the same fun Reels roasting bonkers cooking shows? Or is that personalised and pushed just to me? Will they even know what I am talking about?
In time we will come to look back at the legacy platforms and their success over the last 20 years with disbelief. Disbelief at the vacuum a small number of platforms grew into and monopolised, the societal assimilation of the massive social costs of social media and our illiteracy in data privacy and the data economy. This perspective will take time to fully crystalise; as always the short term dramas obscure the really significant trends.
What happens next? Some strong prevailing trends in this period are drawing to a close: the steady and stealthy assimilation of competing platforms (check out the bulging list of Alphabet acquisitions and Meta acquisitions over 20 years) and regulatory authorities barely able to understand that social media is in a different class to telephones.
But these boom years of 00’s and 10’s have been primarily a story of increasingly cheap data and devices more capable of making and rendering high quality visual content. The introduction of images was a logical extension of text based content, courtesy of the iPhone’s groundbreaking camera. From there, the Pivot to Video followed, along with live streaming and real time filters boosted by snazzy mobile chips.
It is tempting to see the looming Metaverse as a continuation of this trajectory from 2-D into 3-D, but that is to miss something critical. A virtual world immerses us into an ecosystem of humans and machines, interpreted broadly to include bots, generative algorithms and algorithmically enabled humans and a menagerie of others. All participants in the Metaverse are, to some extent, artificial. So we can expect more immersion in mixed human-bot environments in which non-human participants interact in otherwise human groups. For example, one of my whackiest papers of 2022 showed that humans can be swapped out for bots that push human groups to more carefully consider minority opinions when making predictions, leading to increased accuracy. This will lead to increasing comfort with interactions with entities that are not fully human, whether explicit or deceptive.
This possible future seems fuzzy right now, but technology has a habit of popping up in the social spaces that we leave open. We are still processing immense social changes wrought by COVID and conflicted about the tradeoffs that technology brings. In time, we will see new applications and hardware spring up. Will the New Social Media be a direct reflection of our existing offline social structures or something unrecogniseable? How will our new hybrid online neighbours populate and shape these new social structures? Stay tuned in 2023 to find out!
