What the heck happened to “social” media?

Kinda long rant ahead. Excuse the informality and the semi-incoherence.

It occurred to me just now how much the landscape of social media has changed over the years. I started using Facebook some time in 2008, Instagram in 2012, never really got on the Twitter train, and still actively avoid TikTok like the plague (pardon my ignoring the other platforms; some of them are unfortunately irrelevant today while some fall into a different category for me, which I’ll explain soon). Any observations I make in this rant apply to these particular social media sites, informed by my experience (or lack thereof) with them.

For years now social scientists have pointed out the negative impacts of social media on its users. The whole existence of these websites could potentially trigger a mass-scale transition in social norms, psychological and cultural behaviors, and even political practices. I remember thinking of my Facebook or MySpace feeds as mere adolescent playgrounds which I would eventually grow out of since no adult around me was taking them seriously. Instagram in its infancy was plainly ridiculous, with the corny filters (that somehow mimicked “art” to the naive eyes of the young users) and just the whole absurdity and unseriousness of the hyper-zoomed-in “selfie” (remember those pouty duckfaces?) Today we have people unironically considering Twitter their main and sufficiently trustworthy access to the news, Facebook hosting echo-chambers that would normally only exist in the most closed-off, preachy environments like a cult or something like that, and young kids learning to self-edit and exaggerate on a daily basis on their social media profiles. What great conditions for a healthy, thriving society!

Even without fancy statistics quantifying these damages in peer-reviewed studies, users of social media intuitively recognize their own struggles with these social media platforms: how these sites affect their moods, self-image, attention span, and ability to experience reality. One paradoxical consequence is how social media either fails its inherent “social” feature of a service, or has perhaps redefined it. Using Facebook or Instagram to get updates from your “friends” (to use this word very loosely) is in essence being “social” (as opposed to being a hermit dodging all interactions with the outside world I guess?), yet having eyes and fingers glued to the screens are not at all conducive to IRL conversations. So today being “social” isn’t restricted to making direct contact with people anymore, and has gradually shifted to include the “faux”, superficial socializing in the forms of the casual, one-click “likes” or “reactions”. I, like everyone else, am guilty of engaging in this sort of interaction. I attribute this new behavior in our culture to the inundation and excess of information on the Internet (how can we single out the key moments of our friends’ lives when we’re constantly bombarded with even the pictures of mundane meals people have every 8 hours?), but that’s a topic for a whole other blog post.

Now, what I have come to declare in this post is that with the trajectory in which social media today is evolving, it is even weirder to still keep that “social” half of the term. Don’t mind the fact that we have normalized the “social” interactions of liking and tagging and mentioning and whatnot. Sure, for some of us that suffices as being social, especially with the whole “social distancing” of the past two and a half years. These days social media companies are desperately turning their platforms to something that deserves to be labeled as “media” only, with the “social” aspect completely absent from the picture. Let’s take the aging Facebook (thank god it’s on a decline). If I spontaneously take a trip down the “newsfeed” of Facebook, I don’t even see updates from my friends anymore. What I get are a bunch of paid advertisements and promoted posts that are honestly so far removed from what I want to see (I know they track my usage and record my interests but I’m sorry to say even in that regard they fail big time). I have to swim through at least 10-20 random advertisements to see one thing my friends have posted, which is why to me the newsfeed is dead (I believe the website has also stopped calling it the “newsfeed” because how more ironic can you be to have 80% of the “news” be advertisements?) TikTok in essence isn’t even for social interactions with friends. You get “contents” from strangers, curated by a hidden algorithm that targets spiraling interests to keep you on the app for as long as possible. Instagram is slowly emulating this practice, with paid ads for products being inserted among your friends’ posts for a dosage of consumerism powered by the attention economy.

Personally I’m getting tired of this trajectory. I started being active on some of these sites last year after a long period of avoiding them, since I did miss being in the loop for my friends’ important life updates and want to ease the efforts of staying in touch (if you had at one point tried to send an email to my very old email address, you, my friend, are the real winner). If all the benefits that drew me back to these platforms start making way for the frustrating, irrelevant ads and sponsorships, I’m more than tempted to make my exit again. I know this thought amounts to nothing at all besides some very isolated rants like this one. Many users have been conditioned to think we are deeply reliant on the existence of these sites and would have to ingest whatever changes they force feed us. I still want to voice my frustration in case anyone else shares the same opinions and sentiments. And more importantly, I want to begin to challenge the notion that these “social” media sites are desperately trying to sell to us: that what they serve is a “social” life for each and everyone of their users, but in reality they are taking advantage of our needs of companionship and social contact to advance their own agenda for more profits. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the label “social media” and whether these sites are worth our time if they are selling us false advertisements of themselves.

There are a few other platforms that fall under the “social media” umbrella but I have for a long time excluded them in my own categorization. YouTube for example exists as a streaming/video sharing site (first for the low-cost DIY videos in its earlier years and now for virtually any video-format contents out there – except pornography I suppose), and it does not truly adhere to the label of a “social” site. Most folks don’t use YouTube to keep in contact with friends, so it is a “media” site more than a “social media” one. Alternatively, messaging platforms like the Facebook baby Messenger and the adopted child WhatsApp are also considered social media. These are, I believe, the only platforms that truly embrace the “social” aspect as promised. I cannot say I appreciate the Facebook-owned Messenger giving me ads for toilet paper just because I had a conversation about needing to resupply, but at least its socializing function is fully granted and not a misleading half-truth. The rest of the “social media” sites and apps out there which claim to do their job keeping you social and not friendless are most likely clouding your perception of these benefits while slowly growing their money making algorithm to earn even more profits off of the ceaseless chains of ads and paid contents that come your way.