I’ve had enough!

Are people fed up with social media?

I’m reading a lot of articles lately on how much the web has changed — is changing — without solving any of our problems.

We go online after we wake up every morning and receive the first bits of information provided by any of the tricky algorithms that rule social networks. We are obliged to go through social media to share our posts or whatever — otherwise they wouldn’t have any chance of visibility — and we use social networks to keep up with our friends, who are as fed up as we are with these selections. A never-ending loop of complaints about how these algorithms work, how difficult it is to survive as a brand in this jungle of cute kittens and self-help quotations that now come in the form of shareable pictures. We try to like all of our friends’ stuff as we digest the last listicle, while at the same time we update our status with another moan about how tired of all these stories we are.

Maybe the time has come to say enough is enough.

Are we ready for a change? And, more importantly, what’s this change about?

As these thoughts come to my mind, I start thinking of a TEDEd talk I watched the other day. It was about re-designing schools and education, but the words from the speaker, Graham Brown-Martin, could have been easily applied to those giants of the internet that are trying to lead us towards their funnel:

“What’s the purpose of education? Is it about enlightenment? Or is it indoctrination? Education is just another superstructure like religion, or politics, or mass media, or the judicial system, designed to maintain and reinforce the status quo.”

If we change ‘education’ for ‘social media’, don’t you feel like we are kind of trapped in a maze? We can’t escape from any of the superstructures around us; we can’t escape from social media either.

I’ve always said — and I don’t know why I think this way — social media, as we know them, are not going to last forever. Things on the internet go so fast that if we consider how we were doing things two or three years ago, we wouldn’t believe it. Some of the networks aren’t hyped anymore, and will probably die; some others have actually died. The ones that are on top of the world right now will probably fail as soon as another hype hits the smartphones of unpredictable millennials around the world.

Statistics are stubborn. Youngsters don’t like Facebook or Twitter anymore because they are full of “oldish” people. (Ahem!) These companies are trying to skirt this little issue by purchasing all the trendy startups around (we can see examples of this in the purchases of Instagram or WhatsApp, to point out just two.)

What they mean by old people is me, for instance, or anyone over 30 years old. We, who lived through the first incarnation of the web (remember those animated gifs, those sparkles, those colors?), who enjoyed creating and reading long texts that linked to other texts that linked to other texts…. I remember those times of permanent discovery that are now over.

Social media are burying us in a trap of copy-pasting.

Even people who now live in the social media ecosystem realize this. Some of my friends who work in the social media world as strategists, community managers, consultants, and marketers, who are always talking about social media (and not always positively), are complaining about how everything works. We are living in eternal feedback, in déjà vu, in a prison cell.

But it is on us to change how this works. No matter the algorithms, no matter the millennials, social media are about people and about connecting to each other, and we are able to create spaces of freedom with others outside the hype jungle.

It’s on us to stop complaining and start creating cool things again.

If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed.

What are we waiting for?