Just what are social media? The answer will determine what will happen to these influential platforms

Social media exploded onto the world stage like a barrage of fireworks: loud, colourful, shocking, and impossible to ignore. The sudden change — at the turn of the millennium no-one knew what it was, 20 years later half the world was posting to Facebook or tweeting — was utterly unprecedented.

But a fireworks show, once it is done, tends to leave one looking around, a little bit lost, asking one another: “Ok … now what?”

That is about where we are now.

Social media — they form a collective noun — as we knew it is in decline. Meta, parent company of Facebook, laid off 11,000 people as it faced serious headwinds, with its stock plunging 65 per cent in a year. Snapchat is somehow still losing money. Instagram is ceding cultural ground to TikTok, but even TikTok, itself, has missed revenue expectations.

Even the most generous reading of the mess that is Twitter can’t exactly inspire confidence: “Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn,” Elon Musk wrote in a memo to staff this week.

Whatever social media was for the past couple of decades, it appears this phase of it is coming to an end.

Major industries that become like utilities rarely flame out in spectacular fashion. Instead, like electricity, which was once transformative, they can persist in the background and become unremarkable. Perhaps they are supplanted but still linger, like linear TV, or they transmogrify just as cable TV has now emerged into a set of competing streaming services.

And, of course, they can, in fact, disappear, as home video did, because they simply aren’t useful any more.

 

Whether social media falls into one of these categories is a question of considerable debate, mostly because it’s not entirely clear what social media actually is.

Is it a place to connect with friends? Is it a place to broadcast to others? Is it a place to earn a living by promoting content or being an influencer? Is it a place in which to find an audience, or to engage in conversation?

Perhaps it’s a hard question to answer precisely because social media, in the collective sense, ostensibly was meant to erase those distinctions — that it essentially collapsed the once bright line between publishing and communication.

But there were a lot of consequences of turning how we socialize into a way to also broadcast — especially when you consider that, economically, it was necessarily a system that ran on ads.

You needed attention to make it all work. People wanted an audience and did whatever they could to find and foster one, whether through inflammatory content or the common approach of subject matter that represented the lowest common denominator. Quantity mattered more than quality; after all, you had to keep people engaged.

“We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad,” wrote Ian Bogost in The Atlantic this week.

The argument is that social media was less a declining business, than a world historical mistake.

The history of media has been one where normal human things — stories, communication, the desire for information — have been turned into external objects we can consume away from the people who made it.

Print turned spoken language into portable text. Radio turned human speech into a broadcast. TV and film turned story and theatre into shared culture.

And social media turned our socializing, voyeurism, and desire to let others know who we are into an online media phenomenon.

But now that social media is a core part of modern life, look at the bad things it has brought; polarization is rampant, and we believe the worst of those who don’t share our ideologies. Millions of people around the world believe that vaccines don’t work, and any other number of bizarre conspiracy theories.

Writing in Vice recently, Edward Ongweso Jr. made the argument more pointedly, writing that social media “are a series of communication networks interested in providing a paltry simulacrum of sociality in service of behaviour modification and profit maximization.”

 

Yet it would be foolish to dismiss social media in its entirety. It’s troubling and hard to unravel, but its flaws are also its strengths. It has given a voice to millions, particularly those who might not have otherwise had it. It is a lifeline among dissidents, the marginalized.

Perhaps, then, that means that if social emerges evolves, the economic model must change. Perhaps it means we must think of it in smaller terms, not as a gigantic global town square, but as an array of smaller, more local ones.

Perhaps we just need to demand something better.

There is a scene at the end of “Fight Club,” the quintessential 1990s film, which now seems a little more problematic than it did at the time, in which characters Tyler and Marla stand, holding hands, as they watch a skyscraper implode, taking with it the debt and consumer records of millions.

The hope is that something new and better will emerge from the rubble, something not so corrupted by the persistence and pervasiveness of capital.

 

As we watch whatever social media was slowly crumble and break apart, that is my hope for it, too.

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