Putting The Social Back In Media
It’s telling that people turn the volume down on the negative flood of data that can pour in through social media. Attempts are made to game the algorithm into trending cats, baby pictures, and flowers. It runs against the common narrative that bad news sells.
When new alternatives come along that offer the same or similar functionality but less noise and more signal, people run to try it out. Ello staggered memberships to control the influx of new people, and Vero, recently launched, got a little swamped with inundation of new people wanting something momentarily perceived as less broken and negative.
Unfortunately Facebook has built something that it more robust than most of these other platforms, and it is still the place where most people are, so if you want to pack up and leave you have to comb through the list of friends and find alternative ways to contact them. In some ways this is easy enough if you are just using it as a private individual, but as a business a Facebook account is a good thing to have.
Zuckerberg addressed the perceived problems with his company, and things have changed already, but whether or not the current status of things actually engenders more social interaction is questionable. Limiting functionality in terms of what you can share from outside Facebook is not helpful for a lot of people. Google also, if you believe the predictions is going to try to keep you within the Google experience rather than referring you out as well. So, do you want to be part of a walled garden society? I think while the social media giants want this, I don’t think that is what people are looking for — the echo chambers and the bubbles that people have been existing in haven’t been working — in order to effect any kind of change you need to speak to people outside your group and convince them.
In some way, what we need to have built is something in a virtual space that fosters real world interactions, where online groups are mere analogues of the real thing. Clicktivism needs to be a mirror to real activism. Social media basically needs to be a tool and not the channel that everything runs through, and it has functioned in that way before — perhaps when it was more of a message board than the receptacle for every thought that came out of people’s heads.
If you look at the marches and the real world results of things happening on line at the moment perhaps the shift is actually underway, and if you are central to the action you are more aware of it. Kids use the internet in a different way to those who never had while young, and grew with it as it developed. Perhaps it never went away, but the majority were using it differently, and now they are starting to see the problems with that.
For the social to gain traction in a space with shallow engagement, some of the automatic nature of the environment needs to be dialed back. When you find a post that seems to have the full intention of the poster to communicate with people it has a different quality to just another piece of click-bait. If we can get this feeling back then the value of the platforms is going to increase, if they continue to disappear down the rabbit hole of being managed by some complex mathematical formula they may go the way of other already expired or semi-expired platforms.
There has always been a lot of potential there, and some have used it and continue to use it, and for the rest of us it is something that, if the giants really are listening, it might be rekindled. I recall how Myspace was when it first started to become a big thing, and it was a platform for creatives, and I remember when it changed, and the disappointment that supplanted that.
Facebook has gone through many different iterations, and a lot of other platforms have come and gone, and a I know a lot of people are feeling more than a little burned out by the whole thing. Maybe blogging will come back — less people looking but better interaction? If it feels real, or realer, then that’s good right? We want a social media that is social.
