Social Media Gave Us a World with Highways but no Residential Streets
Are Current Platforms too Globalized for the COVID-19 Era?
As the coronavirus ravages our communities, the pillars of our nation have been sorely tested. With the number of infected and unemployed growing each day, fissures have appeared in our healthcare and economic infrastructures, already heavily criticized in the antepestem era.
But beyond the food bank lines and the crowded hospitals, another aspect of modern society has proven itself insufficient to meet the demands of the current crisis. It seems strange to say it about some of the world’s most advanced corporations, but the way that companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube provide us with content may become a relic of a less tumultuous past.
First off, let me caveat the previous statement by acknowledging the leap in communication pioneered by Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and others. As the world became more interconnected in the 21st century, social media allowed everyone to participate in the process of globalization.
What all of these companies share in their success formula is that they project universal themes to the largest audience possible. It’s a strategy which attributes its viral success to our more primal instincts. Scroll through any newsfeed today, and the same content that was popular pre-pandemic continues to proliferate: attractive people, humor, and fake news. In short, the same memes that our primate ancestors were splashing on cave walls eons ago.
We’ve created a communications network comprised almost exclusively of digital highways where it’s easy for people to connect across far distances, but without residential roads that link us to our immediate surroundings. Big tech has played a part in this decline, as the rise of social media has been accompanied by the slow death of local journalism.
Social media algorithms seem insistent on continuing to provide answers to questions that no one is really asking anymore. Most people have become preoccupied with questions about basic essentials of life:
- “When can I go back to work?”
- “When will the grocery store be open so that I can feed my family?”
- “Will the local pharmacy be receiving a new shipment of PPE soon?”
- “Who needs help in my neighborhood and how can I get involved?”
In today’s crisis situation, we’ve tumbled down Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (see below), shifting our priorities from intangibles like self-actualization and social status to basic needs such as safety and nourishment. This is not the environment that social media was originally designed for, where access to the largest audience possible allowed for status acquisition via mass approval. Welcome to the desert of the real.
In light of these new priorities, the world of social media influencers seems decadent, but that’s what the platforms continue to feed us. It’s not what we need, however — the issues that keep people up at night are now intensely local in nature.
Just take a look at the geographic variance in the impact of the coronavirus in this excellent map of US cases. In my home of King County, the infection rate is quite high, at >300 cases per hundred thousand residents. In neighboring Kitsap county, however, the ratio is only a fraction of that, at 57.8/100,000. Due to this, the people of King and Kitsap counties will have to make very different decisions about reintegrating people into society.
As states like Indiana have figured out, the decisions about when and how quickly to return to the new normal will happen community-by-community. At the same time, information will need to be available in real time so that citizens can navigate a safe return to public life. The problem is that despite their access to more data than pretty much anyone, a platform like Facebook is too fully invested in promoting content that will appeal to the largest swathe of users possible. That’s a direct conflict of interest with the need to provide smaller subsets of users with information that is localized as well as personalized. The solution can certainly be developed by Facebook or Twitter, but it cannot be hosted on Facebook or Twitter.
New times call for new platforms. In the previous conflicts experienced by my generation, the battlefield was something that happened to someone else very far away, in places with unfamiliar names like Fallujah and Kandahar. Now that every home has become a frontline in the fight against the coronavirus, it’s time to build tools that will strengthen our communities for the fight. These tools would have to focus on the following key features:
- Follow Places, Not People: Features like geofencing and content curation algorithms can be redeployed so that users can choose to be informed about happenings at a specific location (like their grocery store) or in a geographic area (their neighborhood).
- Connect Businesses to their Closest Customers: There will be a surge in promotions, advertising campaigns, and hiring as small businesses start to reopen. Focusing on local content makes it much easier for business owners to organically connect with the customers who will help them get back on their feet.
- Build Local Trust: It is much harder for bad actors to infiltrate a small town than a large kingdom. In a system where every post is tied to a physical location, be it a park or a restaurant, it becomes difficult for third parties to spike the conversation with fake news. When your newsfeed only sources from what’s within driving distance, it’s easy for users to verify information with a short trip.
- Deploy Volunteers Where They’re Needed: Right now, local volunteer movements trying to get the word out have to fight for precious newsfeed space with viral content ranging from memes to national stories. With geofenced posting, people can find out exactly where they can lend their time and resources in their hometowns.
In the fight against COVID-19, we need a new generation of social media that will help build the “little platoons” of society that the philosopher Edmund Burke saw as essential to human fulfillment. These small communities built on common trust will then serve as the building blocks of a healthier nation.
Thus, whoever is able to shift social media’s center of mass from virality to locality will unlock an immense business opportunity while also providing a critical public good. With just slight tweaks to the current paradigm, we can help reconnect people that have grown accustomed to keeping six feet apart.
