I’ve been thinking a lot, in the last couple of weeks, about social media.
This is, I suppose, not an unusual state of affairs. As is true for lots of people in North America, social media went over the years from something I had vaguely heard of, to something I was suspicious of and reluctant to join, to something I enthusiastically (if idiosyncratically) participated in for both work and pleasure reasons, to something I no longer really enjoy and don’t find terribly useful but can’t leave. In part, this is because my work depends to a significant extent on taking in knowledge about the world produced by other people, and then on writing or making media related to the world and circulating that to others. Social media isn’t the only way these things happen – books are still a vital way of learning about the world, for instance, and even though I don’t do nearly as many interviews as I used to, I still also learn about the world by just asking people questions – but it is a pretty important way. I definitely have moments of kind of hating social media, but I use it a lot, and I think about it a lot.
A pervasive element of the experience of social media (and, for lots of us, a central source of our moments of hating it) is the phenomenon so fittingly christened “enshittification” by Cory Doctorow. In short, this is the idea that online platforms (including but not only social media) will, past a certain point in their life cycle, inevitably and predictably get worse in ways tightly tied to the relentless drive to profit that governs the corporations that own them. This means that all social media platforms, as well as everything from Google to Amazon, are less useful and less enjoyable than they used to be, and it is foolish to expect anything else in the context of current institutional realities.
There are also all kinds of other concerns about social media that are a step or two removed from the experience of using it. It turns our practices and, through them, our desires into data, which it then harvests and makes available to corporations and governments, who then use this information to manipulate our practices and desires. There is periodically much sturm and drang about this, and occasionally a few very minimal measures are promised to address a narrow slice of the most flagrant abuses, but the basic logic remains fundamental to how social media works and it is why, at the level of capitalist institutions, social media exists at all. As well, social media seems to have become a core constitutive element of an information system which is particularly susceptible to misinformation and disinformation – though I think popular accounts of this phenomenon often overestimate the role of the technology per se and underestimate the role of other factors, and also (in their nostalgia for Walter Cronkite and vibrant daily newspapers) seriously underestimate the problems inherent to the liberal capitalist information system as it existed in the decades prior to social media. And smartphones and associated practices, including social media, do seem to have played some role in accelerating the social fragmentation and loneliness that had already been growing for a long time thanks to the dynamics of capitalism, but I think a fair bit of what gets written about the role of phones in this process boils down to moral panic and cringey middle-aged fretting about ‘kids today.’
My thinking in the last couple of weeks has been less about that big picture stuff, though, and more focused on the experiential level. As is true of lots of people in the tech-saturated imperial core, I’m just not happy with my experience of social media. A couple of weeks back, I posted, “I’ve felt for some time now that I need a new way of orienting myself to social media – not just this platform, but in general; and not just new practices, but a new set of principles from which to derive practices. But I have no idea what that should look like.”
After this recent flurry of reflection, I still don’t have any answers that feel like they are even remotely adequate to what I need. But one thing that I have done that has felt at least somewhat useful is pay really close attention as I am making decisions about and actually using social media. What is motivating those decisions? What am I getting out of it, at the level of experience or in terms of anticipated benefits down the road?
As a consumer of social media, I use it for the kind of loose, weak interpersonal pseudo-connection with people I already know that was where social media started for many of us, way back when; I use it for what you might describe as self-soothing or emotional regulation – taking in content that passes the time and keeps our brains calm but does little else; and I use it for learning. I think others also use it for active community-building or for engaging in dialogue with both like-minded people and those they disagree with, but I have rare used it in those ways. And as a maker of social media – well, that also plays a role in those loose interpersonal pseudo-connections; it can be a sort of low-investment/low-return practice for amplifying political or values-based projects in the broader world that you agree with; and it can be a way to circulate things that you’ve made yourself. I use it in all three of those ways.
Enshittification means that most platforms are worse for most of these things than they used to be. In general, most platforms aren’t much use for those interpersonal pseudo-connections any more, because they show you less from people you actually know and more sponsored content. Most platforms are worse for learning about the world. Most are somewhat worse than they used to be as sites for sharing material to support some sort of larger political project, again because fewer people see any given post from an ordinary, non-paying user. And, similarly, most are pretty terrible as avenues for sharing things you’ve made yourself and for trying to build an audience. The one area where some of them do more, often much more, than they used to is in terms of offering options for self-soothing, emotional regulation, and other sorts of mindless scrolling, because that content not only keeps users coming back but is generally a source of income for them.
So, for instance, take Facebook. I still get a little bit from it in terms of hearing about the lives of people I already know, though much less than was true years ago. There are a few people I’m connected with who post commentary that I learn from, but particularly with Meta’s capitalist temper tantrum that prevents people in Canada from posting news content, it’s almost useless for learning about the world. Most of the content that Facebook pushes into people’s feeds seems to be vapid and soothing-oriented, but at least to me most of it isn’t very interesting even for its intended purpose – there are lots of sites I like better if I want mindless scrolling. It is not particularly good for circulating things you’ve made even to people you already know, and it’s terrible for circulating it to a broader audience unless you pay substantial amounts of money. It isn’t pointless to post, say, a petition or a notice of an upcoming demonstration, just because it takes so little effort to do. But as with everything else, expect minimal circulation. So Facebook is of just barely enough use to stay on as a consumer and as someone who posts in a personal way, and pretty much (but not quite) entirely useless for posting in a professional way.
Twitter is a different sort of thing. I follow some people I know, but I have never used it to stay connected with them – for me, it has always been a way to learn about the world. Compared to the pre-Elon days, it is a much less pleasant experience to be on the platform, and it isn’t nearly as good as it used to be for learning about the world. The problem is, it is still better than most other platforms when it comes to that sort of learning, though it is increasingly looking like Bluesky is offering some serious competition in that regard. And Twitter has never been great for circulating things you’ve made, but under Elon, it has become almost useless. And it used to be possible to very gradually build an audience, but that’s just not true any more.
I use Instagram in a limited way – a little bit for keeping up with people I know, a little bit for mindless scrolling. I know other people use it to learn about the world, but I have never done that, and I don’t enjoy it. I used to use it to circulate things I made – I had an account for Talking Radical Radio and a bookish account – but I only very rarely use those these days.
TikTok is an interesting one. I don’t use it to connect with people I know in other ways, but I find it both soothing and educational. But it is a different sort of learning than Twitter – it is a bit farther from the churning edge of the news. My algorithm gives me a mix of politically relevant learning – stuff about Palestine, some left commentary on US, Canadian, or Ontario politics, a bit about the climate crisis, though often in all of those areas it’s things that I’ve already learned elsewhere – with more general interest learning that I enjoy but that is not particularly relevant to my work. Though it too has gotten worse in recent years, I think it still has more scope than any other major social media platform for building an audience. The trick with TikTok, though, is that it pretty much has to be content that you have custom made for TikTok – the algorithm is not friendly to efforts to channel people’s attention to other sites. And making even simple TikTok videos takes quite a bit of work. Oh, and then there’s elites in the US, and probably soon enough in other Western countries, taking the fact that TikTok does exactly the same things to people’s data as every other social media platform but does them while being owned by Chinese people as an excuse to ban it, so it is feeling less and less like there is a point in investing energy into building an audience there.
And…well, I have accounts on Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon. I haven’t spent enough time on any of them to know for sure, but at the moment Bluesky seems to be the frontrunner for becoming a serious challenge to Twitter – a platform where you can learn about the world, but hopefully not want to claw your own eyes out as you do so.
I have no grand conclusion to all of this. In light of these reflections and others, I’ve made some modest changes in how I engage with specific platforms and with social media in general. It does feel like those changes are going to stick, which is encouraging, but their nature and scale don’t approach the sort of fundamental re-orientation that feels necessary. So I will continue to think about social media.