Social Media Isn’t Social Anymore

I’m old enough to remember MySpace and the birth of social media. (I’m old enough to remember Pong, but that’s not the point.) I remember beginning to connect with people and built friendships over social media. Many of those friendships are still going strong today.

I’m in introvert that has a hard time making friends, so social media became a place where I was able to make friends despite by neurodivergence, despite being an introvert.

In the infancy of social media, the Internet was still a Wild West. It wasn’t the critical tool for everyday life it is today and instead was still very much ‘optional’ I remember starting my first blog on Blogger years ago when it was still owned by Evan Williams and crew before it was sold to Google. One of the big communities I was in at the time was MetaFilter; it was filled with people who were just posting fun things and asking questions.

Over time, social media expanded and evolved. MySpace was born. Tumblr. Things expanded. Eventually, out of Harvard came Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Why did people love Facebook over MySpace? Many people have theories, but mine is that it was the sanitized version of MySpace. You couldn’t do a lot of customization, there were no funky widgets, and there wasn’t background music. It was like a suburban MySpace; spacious but devoid of personality. The Olive Garden of social media.

On the other side of the social fence, Evan Williams teamed up with Jack Dorsey to found Twitter which in its infancy was just SMS posted to the web. That’s why tweets were so short, it was predicated by the limitation with SMS.

My best times with social media are probably between 2015-2017 when I built most of the relationships I have today. I met my fiancé on a Facebook group. I connected with tons of people through the Nerd Fitness Facebook group. I started connecting with fitness folks on Instagram. I was building connections; not just superfluous ones, but deep ones where there are people I haven’t ever met in person but chat with on a near daily basis even to this day. The mid-10’s are what I would consider peak social media. It had its rough moments but was generally a positive experience.

After the 2016 election in the US, things took a turn hard sideways. Lines were drawn and the ‘culture war’ started by conservatives angry that their way of life was being seen less and less as ‘default’ was being threatened; not them personally, but the belief that everyone should conform. The economy began to falter as the warnings of wealth inequality weren’t heeded. Wages stagnated and the housing crises got worse and worse. People were fighting more and more on social media, but there was also a positive influence as well still remaining though dwindling.

A few years later, COVID arrived. It was rough for everyone, particularly as we went into lockdown mode to save lives. TikTok boomed as we enjoyed stupid dance numbers, cooking videos, and silly things dogs, platypuses, and capybaras were doing. Then the fire nation attacked, and by fire nation I mean the hate-filled people who propagated Facebook. They came in droves. They spread election and vaccine misinformation. They spread hatred as they did with other social media platforms, hating on those who were different and dared to embrace being different.

More and more you’d see fights breaking out, virtual arguments with people type-shouting over each other and nothing meaningful being said. Social media gave voice to people who spread hate, flamed both by their supporters and their detractors. Instead of starving them of oxygen by not interacting, people instead chose to interact and argue, fanning the flames further.

In present day, I’ve realized that these types of arguments are only good with one thing… raising my blood pressure. There is a subset of people whose minds will never be changed. No matter what facts you present, no matter how much evidence you show, it’s always the same… “I have alternative facts,” a phrase coined by Kelly Conway, persists today. If your argument is that every government, educational institution, and corporation is ‘in on it’ then what’s left are YouTube videos of barefoot and shirtless ‘influencers’ in Publix screaming at salad dressing bottles.

It reminds me of the Barney Frank quote during the ACA debate…

“Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table.”

Having arguments on social media isn’t productive for society. It doesn’t move the needle. All it does is damage our own mental health in immeasurable ways. I believe in scientists, educators, chemists, and trained experts. Some of these people on social media believe fluoride is a government conspiracy, the Earth is flat, and we didn’t actually land on the moon. We’re too far apart to have any meaningful conversation.

So where does that leave us? Well, for me I’ve made some decisions about my social media consumption. I already deleted by Twitter accounts when Elon Musk took over the company (and based on the dumpster fire it’s been, probably the right decision.) I’ve now deactivated my Facebook, but left Messenger on for now. I’ve left Instagram up, because in my experience what I see there are people I’ve purposefully followed as well as fitness and animal stuff. TikTok I’ve scaled back on dramatically and if something is political I am swiping past it to teach the algorithm I don’t want that.

I’m not going to engage people who make remarks about how “being gay is wrong” because my 100 character comment isn’t going to change their minds. Instead I’m going to focus on more positive content and go after positive ideas. See what works, what doesn’t, and go from there.

I mentioned above how I made a lot of friends in the mid-10s online. I haven’t done that in recent years, because the level of vitriol has gotten so bad it’s become impossible to connect with people in a meaningful way. We end up in silos, and unfortunately that may be how it is for now. After all, a lot of people have purposefully created their own silos for decades now called the ‘suburbs’ and that’s exactly what they’ve always wanted.

So I seek out like minded people through other avenues and hobbies, like gaming. Refocusing on the things I enjoy and finding those that share those interests. Politics shouldn’t be your sole personality trait, and because so many people just want to ‘burn the libs’ that’s what social media has turned into.