When social media sites like Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, etc. came out, I was ecstatic. As a web developer, I was excited to see a new incarnation of technological possibilities that could help my career. Over time, these platforms devolved from technology solutions and communication platforms to ad-centric spam hosts and spyware for marketing people. Worse yet much of the posts on these platforms have become low quality clickbait and irrelevant posts that no longer provide important updates about my friends.
I think Facebook more than anything has devolved the worst. Originally, it was useful in that it was a great way to reconnect and feel excited about the people you cared about. Instead, Facebook has evolved into a place where political, religious and internet wars are waged. If you manage to avoid those, then the other half of your posts are stupid links that people click on from posts with the social “like” currency in selling their soul unwittingly to these ad marketing platforms in exchange for misappropriated attention that gets shoved into your feed.
No longer do you truly see the absolute most important issues about your friends’ lives where it matters the most in Facebook. It’s not even a stream of consciousness but bad ad diarrhea that you have to swim through like an upstream sewer current before you see any truly engaging posts. And even those posts mostly are boring or serve some other nefarious means.
Part of my worry in the way social media is being abused is in part due to the immense amount of data mining going on. By using these platforms, your information becomes the currency that you exchange for being provided a “free” service. However, you have to wonder what kind of data mining is really happening? Yes, these systems understand your age, gender, probably ethnicity, interests, etc. But do they really make any good use at the end of the day when in truth the only ads that get served up are the ones that are bid upon by those with the highest dollar value?
Also, I think a huge issue is that there’s a massive fear in creating alienation when it comes to these platforms. This is especially true in Facebook because of how you are connected to those who actually know you. I’ve lost friends from Facebook due to inappropriate expectations on behavior on the platform. Facebook is incredibly indiscreet in how you show up. Let’s say you don’t want to talk to certain people for whatever reason. You’re not obligated to in this world. Yet someone sends you a message and the message mechanism instantly tells the other person that you’ve read it.
Another example is how your activities may show up on other peoples’ Walls. Let’s say you want to remain invisible to certain people but you still want to interact with individuals. There’s no way you can easily control what gets posted to whom and where. Instead, you walk through this mine field where you’re not 100% certain what shows up and where. In turn, the people whom you wanted to remain invisible to will think, “Son of a bitch fucking asshole is on Facebook and didn’t respond to me! Fuck him!”
Also, Facebook makes you feel like shit. While you’re alone or having a bad day, you’ll probably see only posts about people bragging about their lives. Remember that Facebook’s deadly sin is all about vanity. Since humans can’t stop their hubris/bragging, they’ll do whatever it takes to post about themselves to elevate their low self-esteem in this passive-aggressive mechanism. A friend of mine once posted a dark/black image and people asked him why. His response was that the average user only shows the good stuff in their life but not the bad. The dark/black image represented his loneliness at night. It really hit home for me since it shows once again what a piece of garbage Facebook is.
Lastly, Facebook’s constant and inconsistent handling of your privacy is something that disturbs me greatly. Even with maximum privacy settings, you don’t know exactly what gets seen by the public at large. I’m not talking about your friends. I’m talking about when friends tag you or the little moments that get exposed to search engines. There’s this constant fear that employers will utilize this information against you. And because the government doesn’t impose guaranteed protections for privacy, you’re pretty much fucked.
Now, you may ask, “Why not just unplug from Facebook?” The sad truth is that there are people I want to stay connected to who simply do not know better or who have invested too much time/energy to shift to a better platform. So in that sense, I’m forced to live with this horrible piece of shit until something better appears.
I mean, Facebook itself has its uses like comments for convenience, Facebook Connect, etc. But in the grand scheme of things, I’m at an end for Facebook personally. I do my best to minimize what I post and how much information I provide them.
With Twitter, I still enjoy it but I’m feeling burnt out on it too. One of my biggest pet peeves is that there’s no easy way to block all media on the web version of Twitter. Occasionally, I’ll see VERY offensive images that make me feel sick. On my phone, I’ve ensured that no media is shown because of this reason. I’ve been forced to unfollow/remove accounts from list just because I no longer can trust the content people are providing.
The other thing is that more than ever I see floods of useless information from Twitter. Too many large sized posts of deep levels of content that do not originate from the person’s account. Retweets of comments that are truthfully irrelevant ads. With the election, it’s even worse because all you read is the political nonsense. How can you block an entire topic when everyone is talking about it?
I suppose part of it is my fault in that I am addicted to information. I like seeing news and updates. I enjoy reading. These are personality faults of mine. The result is that I end up wasting more time than I should on these platforms. And the sadder part is that most of the information as I mentioned is pure garbage. It’s other peoples’ opinions with little relevance in the scheme of things. No personal growth just general stream of consciousness vomit.
Of course, there’s other platforms that I’ve already talked about. But I want to shift the topic over to what I see will happen. Japan already experienced a similar phenomenon with Mixi. The same demographics showed similar trends. Over time though, people simply got burnt out. Perhaps, it was information overload or perhaps people really didn’t want to know what other people were showing because that information provided to be wasteful in time. Either way, I feel that we might get there soon.
Although I doubt we’ll see the complete collapse of social media, the peak has been reached. What will become of it? I think we’ll still be sharing information. Instagram, as I mentioned in my previous post, seemed like the real platform that may emerge as the winner in the long run. But what about a tool like Slack? Maybe part of the future of social media will be closed, topical communities where people do not have to fear of being called out.
Facebook, while still a fairly closed off tool, remains open for everyone in a person’s social network to see. By chance if you write something offensive for one demographic of people, you end up risking friendship with others. With Twitter, you’re one of three types: passive read, moderate sized user with some followers and participant or celebrity level one sided conversationalist. People on either ends of the extreme are safe since there really aren’t any consequences for their actions. People in the middle trying to retain and build their communities are at perpetual risk and face the same type of alienation they may encounter on Facebook.
But I’ve tended to believe Jean-Jacques Rousseau understood social behavior very well in determining that small, intimate communities work best due to the general understanding of people within these groups. It’s like a tribe where the group attempts to ensure the survival of each other, knowing the biggest threat are outsiders who may attempt to demolish their idiom. I don’t know if we’ll truly see these types of social network platforms to arise since most companies tend to go after the big ideas as the VCs and Wallstreet only care about the largest numbers. For the overall picture though, social is great only when dealing with those that can truly appreciate what you contribute, which in my experience tends to be a very limited group of people at one time.