The glory and pitfalls of social media
I have had the privilege of discovering the internet in the ancient days of the EPIC BROWSER WARS. And yes, I’m talking about Netscape vs Internet Explorer, the former long dead, the latter orphaned and dying in slow agony (it still has a 1.36% global market share as of June 2020, according to StatCounter Global Stats).
Being an Ancient One on the internet gives me a perspective most people can barely fathom: I have known the internet before the advent of social media and automatically-curated content.
How anyone shared anything before social media
For anyone growing up or getting online in the age of social media, sharing something online is a simple matter of clicking a few conveniently placed buttons. Some content providers will even try to bribe you into clicking said buttons (looking at you, free-to-play game developers).
But see, sharing was a much more time-consuming endeavor back in the day. There were no share buttons. What we had was e-mail, newsgroups (the venerable ancestor of forums), newsletters, some fledgling forums, and (for those with the skills, means, and time) personal web pages.
Whenever you wanted to share something, you had to first find the people to share it with. It was messy and inefficient in many ways, but it allowed you to frame whatever message or content you were sharing in a way that targeted the precise audience it would likely reach.
You could absolutely present the same piece of content differently to different groups of people. Of course, that could allow for inconsistency and even outright hypocrisy, but it would also let you provide each group with the relevant context they might be missing. You wouldn’t explain the idea of gravity the same way to a middle schooler and to a physics Ph.D., right? Well, the old internet would let you adapt your message to your target audience, precisely because you had to do all the heavy lifting of finding that audience.
There is another side to this old coin. The consumer side.
How anyone followed anyone before social media
In the days before social media, there were no followers. You could not click a button to tell a platform “I am interested in this account’s content and want to see more of it.” If you liked, disliked, or were otherwise interested in some person or group’s content, you had to do the hard work of manually bookmarking their websites and regularly checking back on them to see if they had posted anything new. Not to mention manually maintain your bookmarks when they moved their websites around (which happened a hell of a lot back then).
It was a LOT of work.
The absolutely terrible part of it was that it required a level of tech skills that is impossible to ask of everybody. It’s getting hard to remember how inaccessible content used to be for anyone but the geekiest of tech-savvy people at the time.
The not entirely terrible part of it was that it required a high level of motivation. You wouldn’t go through the trouble of manually following people and groups unless you really felt like you had to (for any reason, including bad ones, admittedly).
There simply were no casual followers. Someone stumbling upon your content with no idea who you are and what you’ve done before or since would most likely never come back. In fact, most consumers never did, even when they liked the piece of content they stumbled upon.
There was still outrage and controversy and trolling and harassment back then… but, for better and for worse, it was much more personal. People and groups got in heated wars, but those wars spanned weeks, months, or years of messages and content. Random strangers would not join sides in those wars, because it took way too much time and energy to find and follow up on the happenings.
Those kinds of personalized wars are still raging today via e-mail chains, forums, chat rooms, and, of course, private messages. They can get very heated and even dangerous when they involve truly disturbed individuals… but it used to be much easier to retreat from those wars in the days where it was super hard to follow someone online against their will.
Alas, it is now so easy, thanks not only to social media but also the major advances made by search engines.
How anyone found anything back when search engines sucked
Let us not get mired into the search engines war here. Let’s just say search engines, as a rule, have made great leaps since the olden times of the 1.0 web.
Nowadays, you can ask search engines anything and they’ll always find something. Rarely what you were looking for, unless you have some mad SEO skills, but still. They find things. Lots of things.
Back in the old days when the <blink> HTML tag was cool, search engines mostly failed at retrieving anything.
If you recited the exact magical formula, i.e. the precise sequence of keywords associated with a web page, you would summon the content. Failed rituals most often lead to “Sorry, no results” sad trombone moments.
Of course, we had other roundabout ways of finding relevant content. Web page owners would spend a LOT of time linking to other web pages. Practically every personal website would feature a “Links” page to provide their audience with more things to check out. But, as a consumer, you had to go deep into the network, bookmark everything you found interesting, and discard the rest. It felt like dungeon-crawling the web itself.
It was way harder to find what you wanted to find, but on the flip side, it was oh so much easier to stay away from things that would offend, outrage, or trigger you.
How social media changed the rules of engagement
Because it is irrelevant to my current topic, I will not get into how social media was invented and how they became mainstream. Let me pretend, for the purpose of this post, that, on some fateful day, social media got born. POOF.
The ability for providers to share content short-circuited the hard job of targeting precise audiences.
The ability for consumers to follow accounts short-circuited the hard job of curating one’s own sources of content.
What really changed the rules of engagement is machine learning-based recommendation engines.
Nowadays, no human being is involved in the choice of which content to show to which user. Sure, you can choose who to follow or unfollow, but the algorithms will pick what they show you from the accounts you follow… or from related accounts… or from accounts that interacted with accounts related to the accounts you follow… or from accounts that at some point used hashtags or keywords or tags that were also used by accounts you follow… you get the idea.
Given that everyone and everything is connected by only a few steps (even fewer steps if you include negative interactions), almost the entire platform's worth of content is at the algorithm’s fingertips when it tries to curate content for you.
But then, what criteria do those recommendation engines use to pick content for you?
Why everyone seems so angry and hateful all the time
Most successful social media platforms are for-profit businesses. Wouldn’t it be nice if their business was finding some content you will like and/or benefit from and keeping you away from any content you will hate and/or be harmed by?
Unfortunately, in the real world, their business is to get you to see a maximum of ads, to collect a maximum of data about you to target ads and occasionally to sell aggregated data to third parties.
From the viewpoint of such a for-profit business, the best thing that can happen is for a user to become addicted to their platform and keep interacting with it all the time. The worst thing is for a user to disengage and stop using the platform altogether or use it so sparingly it provides very little info about them and minuscule ad revenue.
The recommendation engines have thus been handed a straightforward task: find the content with the highest likelihood of user engagement.
In other words, the algorithms that pick what you see on social media could not care less about your (or anyone else’s) well-being, what they want from you is interaction. They want you to like, dislike, comment, reply, and scroll for more.
It is an unfortunate fact about human nature that anger and fear are generally much more effective activators than other less harmful emotions.
By watching the intensity of engagement over millions of interactions, machines have learned that most people are more likely to react if they are outraged. And the more you use a platform, the better the recommendation will get at guessing what will tick you off.
Why everyone is a target for vitriol
“What if I choose not to engage with content that I hate?” says my imaginary friend.
That should theoretically prevent your own curated content from filling up with content you hate. Sooner or later, the engine should learn that it is no use showing you things you hate if you are never interacting with them.
Of course, that course of action means you will be left with no way to stand up for your ideas or be an ally to other people who get unfairly targeted and badly treated online: the algorithm will not care what intentions you had when you interacted with the content, only how much you interacted with it.
And even if you’re ready to try to stay stubbornly positive and non-reactive to the point of never being able to stand up for anything or anyone, I have bad news for you: everyone is a content provider on social media.
While you can (theoretically) train the engine to only show you content you enjoy, you cannot train it not to pick some of your messages and content and purposely show them out of context to the worst audience possible: people who will fly off the handle, not bother to find out anything about the context or about you and just RAMPAGE. Note that they won’t do so because they are inherently deranged or ill-intentioned. The algorithm will send them your message or piece of content precisely because it has learned how likely it is that they will react forcefully.
The only way to mitigate that is to spend less and less time thinking about what you want to say and how to say it… and invest that time instead into solving the impossible equation of:
How can I prevent a complete stranger from reading my message, completely misinterpret it, take it as a personal slight and make it their mission to correct or destroy me?
The short answer is: you cannot.
Of course, you will find countless misguided helpful bystanders ready to provide you with tips on how you might have phrased your message better, how you could have improved its tone to make it less likely to hurt people. Full disclosure: I’ve been one of them on too many occasions in the past and I am sorry for everyone on the receiving end of my misguided good intentions.
While some restraint in how aggressive and offensive you phrase your messages sure is good, it is ultimately impossible to prevent everyone from getting offended.
I’ve recently come upon one of those misguided helpful bystanders, happily giving out advice along the lines of: “If you couldn’t tell it to someone’s face, don’t say it.”
That sounds nice, but makes no sense whatsoever.
Whether or not someone could say something to someone else depends SO MUCH on who they are and what their relationship is and SO LITTLE on the actual message. Even very asinine messages like “I can’t live without my grandma’s meatloaf” could be seen as purposely hurtful if, for instance, they appear in some unsuspecting vegan’s feed. (Please note that this is just an illustrative example. I have nothing against grandmothers, meatloaf, or vegans.)
Since it’s an algorithm that picks your interlocutors for you, you have absolutely no way of checking whether you would say it to their faces. Chances are you wouldn’t, but the algorithm does not know and does not care.
There is no surefire way to avoid any of your pieces of content or messages to be sent to the wrong audience, for that audience to disregard the context, misconstrue your intent, and amplify their outrage in echo chambers.
It is not your fault. You can do your best to be as unambiguous and as considerate as is humanly possible, you will still be a potential target for vitriol. Nobody is safe from this today.
This cloud’s silver lining
Enough about pitfalls. Time for glory.
Thankfully, not everything deteriorated with the advent of social media. Some things progressed in spectacularly good ways.
Content has never been so accessible to people around the world, even the most computer-illiterate. Things you enjoy and things you need are but a click away. It has never been so easy to find vital information, learning resources, practice tools, well-being tips, and feedback for your own content. Things could stand to be improved further, to make things more accessible to the poorest people and to people with disabilities. But I see no reason to despair just yet: things have been progressing in the right direction so far, let us keep pushing. (Fun fact: just trying to write helpful alternative texts for all the pictures I used in this post was quite the challenge.)
Virtually anyone can find a voice. Sure, it takes either a lot of luck or a lot of skill and dedication (most often both) to get a substantial following, and the playing field is unfortunately still skewing towards the already rich and famous, but so many of today’s rich and famous have gotten their start (or rebirth) thanks to social media platforms. So keep trying to show your work and say your piece. You might not become the next viral star, but you will find receptive people eventually.
You are not alone. It does not matter what you think, feel, or have been through, there are people somewhere who share that idea/feeling/experience with you. It was always true, of course, but it has never been so easy to find those people.
In conclusion, despite all the pitfalls associated with social media and all the nostalgia I feel for the good old days, I still wouldn’t want the internet to go back to a time before share and follow buttons.
May the algorithms not pick you as a target for any viral outrage campaign and may you find your own tribes and allies.
Stay safe.
Credits for the images (from top to bottom):
- Holy Browser Wars!, by Morgan Eaton, Web Design And Publishing, July 23rd, 2012
- Share Icon uploaded on Pixabay by mohamed_hassan
- Pixel Cells Pedagogy uploaded on Pixabay by manfredsteger
- Part of The Truth Behind Obnoxious Assholes, by Winston Rowntree, originally published on Cracked, on April 12th, 2009, still available on Cracked’s Pinterest account (cleaned up part lifted from tvtropes.org)
- web 1.0, uploaded on Pinterest by luca zaza
- Original, Badass Zelda Art By Katsuya Terada, uploaded on Pinterest by kotaku.com
- Machine Learning illustration lifted from ionos.fr
- Cover art for The Six Degrees of Separation theory, by Arpit Mishra, published on hackerearth.com on February 1st, 2017
- Social Media Addiction illustration lifted from addictioncenter.com
- See No Evil Say No Evil Hear No Evil Gargoyles, uploaded on Pixabay by SamuelStone
- Part of the poster from Are You Trying Too Hard to Please Everyone? by Frank Sonnenberg, published on franksonnenbergonline.com on August 28th, 2018
- Covert art for Why we’re addicted to online outrage, by Michael Brendan Dougherty, published on The Week on March 13th, 2014
- Cover art for In Search of Silver Linings… by Penelope Waller, published on 4D Human Being on June 25th, 2019
