Future.Social
Deliberating the social media of tomorrow
Social media has been an inevitable fabric of my (more or less) 20-year personal online journey. From the moment I literally dialed into the world wide web, I’ve had the fascinating privilege of participating in the overarching social media experiment.
Internet access as a privilege and social media as an experiment are two discussions that deserve individual attention altogether, but for now my thoughts have been stolen by the curious potential of social media’s future.
What will the social media of the future look like? How will it work? Will it still operate under the same social rules that guide our online lives today?
To entertain the possibilities of future social media, we have to keep several things in mind:
- the advancement of tech (both technological developments and growth of the tech space)
- AI (progress, social consequence, antiquity of the laws of robotics)
- the “heat map” of world culture: our international priorities as a global society
- digital needs of people across disciplines
At some point, I’d love to follow this up with a more in-depth contemplation of the four bullet points mentioned above. In the interim, pin them to your mind as the virtual cornerstones of this speculative jaunt into the possibilities of tomorrow’s social media.
Currently, when I hear the term social media I immediately picture a handful of apps: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok — you know, the “usuals” (okay, admittedly TikTok took a little slower than the others to materialize in my brain, but it’s the new kid at school so that’s understandable). Modern UI and UX trends such as share modals and social login also come to mind.
Working as a social media professional at numerous companies of various shapes, sizes and flavors throughout the past 10 ½ years, I’m able to survey the wild journey that social networks have collectively embarked on—from a technological and anthropological viewpoint—for the better part of a decade.
Having observed social media at large from its beginnings up to now, predicting what lies ahead feels only natural:
What if we fast-forward to 10 years from now? 30 years? Further still?
I envision social media moving beyond the constraint of mobile and desktop apps, beyond the web browser (today’s web browser as we know it will undergo a drastic evolution as general access to the internet continues to spread across more areas of the world). Updating the world will feel less tasking.
Pulling out your phone, typing out a tweet or caption for your latest Instagram Story, tapping send? This process will somehow feel archaic — in the same way that folding a letter and inserting it into an envelope, licking the adhesive strip to seal it shut and fixing a stamp to its corner feels antiquated now.
Future social media will move toward a seamless user experience.
S-UX? Hmm, we might need to rethink the acronym but you get the picture.
Perhaps social moves toward intelligent automation. Not fully automated — because that wouldn’t be very social at all — but something closer to what you might call “smart social media.” It’ll be data-driven as always, but more proactive so that passive users are cleverly shepherded into being more participative. Maybe this means that social media gains the same sort of autocomplete feature that search has had for awhile.
Maybe it doesn’t wait for you to pull up the composer. Maybe future social gets suggestive, prompting you to post when certain real-life triggers are activated.
Just walked out of a movie theater? The Netflix app notifies your reading glasses with a slightly transparent prompt above your left cheek:
“What did you think of the film? Let your friends know and curate a new watchlist based on your review by saying ‘Hey Netflix…’ In the meantime, we’ll highlight your map with a list of local businesses who are in some way connected to the movie you just watched, either directly or thematically. Agree to receive continued updates by tapping on the right corner of your eyeglass frames now!”
The notification fades away as quickly as it arrived, stealthily invading your routine stroll from the theater restrooms to the hyper-elevator, which you ride up to the 22nd floor (future society has unimaginatively dealt with overpopulation by expanding vertically) where your electric car is parked and charging via accelerated solar powered parking spots.
Before this turns into a sci-fi short story, I’d like to point out that current technological explorations aren’t very far from this scenario at all.
With their patented Glass eyewear, Google has already shown us the potential of smart HUD (head-up display) applications across several industries such as logistics and healthcare. Just the other day some of my coworkers and I were chatting about BMW’s windshield HUD technology and how much progress the automotive industry has made in this aspect of the driving experience.
Enterprising network expansions, increasingly connected lifestyles, the resurgence of AR and VR, continued interest in wearables, the normalization of IoT, rising investment in robotics — the evolution of tech, and with it social media, has shown no signs of fatigue.
The future is closer than we think.
Speaking of fatigue, let’s for a minute entertain the possibility of the future approaching digital exhaustion. It’s conceivable that instead of growing increasingly tech-oriented and internet-dependent, society reaches a tipping point with our unavoidably online lives. We get tired of the relentless connectivity. Perhaps in this scenario social media slams on the proverbial brakes, shifting instead into reverse gear in a renaissance return to the analog experience.
After all, things weren’t so bad in the time before the dawn of the internet, were they?
In this timeline, future social media is journaling instead of blogging (maybe on something other than paper, since trees will be so scarce that logging and paper production will no longer be a viable industry). Instead of tweeting, it’s self-publishing an opinion column in a friend’s zine made of recycled clothes. It’s leaving voicemails instead of direct messaging.
In TH1NKBLENDER: Speculating Spaces for Future Transdisciplinary Practices and the Spontaneous Encounters of Transdisciplinary Minds, Dawn Faelnar writes about the prospect of people physically embodying [inter]social networks in the future.
Human beings as socially collaborative vessels with the built-in readiness to network beyond the limitations of technology?
Maybe we already know what the future holds because we’ve been there once, or are living it now in rare and random instances.
Dawn’s theory is something I’m excited to dive deeper into in the near future, as I share the same excitement for a transdisciplinary future — something that social media will undoubtedly play a role in.
Whichever path humanity leans into, some things will remain consistent despite our technological inclination. Privacy will continue to shove its way into the front row of the grand show, regardless of whether we send emails or postmarked letters. Data protection, zero tolerance for manipulative propaganda, net neutrality.
These four priorities will never fade into obscurity, and thus they are the only four points that I can guarantee will be elements of the future latticework of social media.
Where do you think social media is headed in the future?
I’d love to know.
Tag me on Twitter, DM me, send me some snail mail. Let’s connect! I’d like to think that is the entire premise. ;)
