What's social media anyway?
Human beings are social, by nature. We live complicated, fairly long lives (compared, say, to a bee) and we enjoy hanging out with other human beings and sharing information (bees do that, too). Even casual social contact is satisfying: every morning I make it a point to smile and greet my bus driver, a thing that bees do not do.
Sometimes I even smile at strangers at the bus stop. Not in a creepy way, but in a neighbourly way, a tiny tilt of the head, a slight lifting of the lips at the corners. And more often than not, I get a smile back, and I feel like the day has become a little better.
I think that’s what social media was intended for: another way for us to connect with other people. Early social media was a bit of an experiment: early blogging was fairly self-referential. People posted about their lives, and commented on the lives of others. Facebook had pokes, an utterly meaningless mechanism which nevertheless resulted in people trading pokes (and eventually superpokes) with one another.
We didn’t know what to do with it, you see, so we mostly used it to connect. Clumsily, maybe, but in those days that clumsy connection sometimes (often) bled into the real world. “I’m having a barbecue and drinks” someone would post, "and you’re all welcome” and so we’d go.
These days, social media isn’t about being social any more. Social media is an ENDEAVOUR.
Instagram may have been a simple photo sharing app at one point, but that changed long ago. Today, it’s a platform for Content. Why post a photo when you can turn it into an opportunity for engagement? Instagram wants us all to imagine ourselves as the content creators of our own little lives, prompting our followers to like, comment, and subscribe. You want to post a picture of your kid at the beach and add a song to play alongside it? Fine, I love that for you. I’d rather not personally, but that hasn’t stopped Instagram from shoving its app full of these opportunities to adorn your photos in the name of engagement. - Allison Johnson, “Instagram wants me to make content - I just want to post a photo”, The Verge.
This is largely because social media is driven by profit-seeking companies who want to capture and monetise our attention, rather than by bumbling human beings looking to make friends. Better to convince everyone to make content, because it is important to commoditise what is produced. The people producing the stuff? Might as well be machines: if they have any agency or identity at all, then they’ll want compensation.
One could go on, but the unalterable fact is that there is little that is social left in social media.
It’s all platforms and content and a thousand different words and ways to rob users of social media of any kind of humanity. It’s all about clicks and eyeballs and bait bait bait - spend any time at all on TikTok, for example, and you’ll see how much of the material there is designed to trick users into watching and responding to absolutely nothing at all, because the creators of it benefit from the clicks and couldn’t care less where or who they come from.
Even newsletters aren’t safe. It seems futile for me to keep beating the "don't use Substack" drum because I don’t like that Substack platforms hate speech of various sorts when some people who are the targets of said hate speech continue to use it.
I won’t name names: for them, there is no moral quandary or contradiction. This is also monopoly at work. Substack is the biggest, best-known and probably the easiest newsletter platform to use and even has a snazzy app that makes it easy to read and follow newsletters on it. Wouldn’t you like instant brandname recognition (“I have a Substack”) and know that your readers have a nice app to use?
Newsletters are the closest thing to blogging that’s left (well, aside from actual blogging) and at least they’re mostly free from advertising although you will find that the writers of newsletters will occasionally implore you to please, please subscribe. Substack does use part of its profits to pay people to write for it, and another part to promote the hate-filled ramblings of Nazis, but people seem to want content delivered directly to their email inboxes, so everyone wins.
There is some excellent content on Substack, and my stupid ethics prevent me from reading it. I am constantly tempted to sign up. I could subscribe to them in the app and read them all in the one place. I could even start a Substack of my own. I still might.
But for the moment, I will stick to my very infrequent Buttondown newsletter and cross-post it here and there, so hopefully people will see and read it and come to love me, because the currency of the modern age is how liked and popular you are. Maybe some might even subscribe!
(The quote in the photo? It's from "Why I left Substack", by Max Gladstone. Naturally, Gladstone has other, better reasons than mine, which is purely ideological. I didn’t know, for example, that Substack now includes microblogging.)
Reading matter:
Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning With My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans Person