I was conversing with @outwars about social media interactions and how the algorithms provide highlights of people's lives, but not much else. Even if interacting with them on a particular post, the format is made for topic, not for natural conversation.
I am from an older generation (Gen-X is now very old) and when I was a kid, there were "slide nights" where people would actually meet to talk about a trip, show pictures - eat, have a glass of wine, talk about the world. Even just prior to social media, when people went on significant holidays, it was common to get close friends together to show a bit of what was seen and experienced.
While social media has claimed to be social, it doesn't actually facilitate natural conversations between people, as it siloes the conversations and doesn't allow for the random tangents that are commonplace in face to face interactions. In a normal conversation between friends, there are a whole lot of topics covered, many of which are clarifying questions, or reference to shared times or people. The conversations become varied, storied, dynamic. It isn't an advertisement with a target market, it is a tapestry of shared experience.
We have taken out the richness of the conversation.
I hadn't really thought too much about this, but I am considering if this is one of the reasons that I notice that younger people aren't able to connect the dots as well as older generations. I put it down to personal experience, but maybe it is because of the interactive experience they have. A natural conversation is free-flowing, but social media interactions are engineered through the platform.
The platform are designed to maximize ad revenue, and they do this through being able to target users through collecting data on their interest areas, on the topics and people they engage with. And, it is far easier to target when the topics are held in silos and don't cross too many boundaries. Essentially, social media largely works like this, where it gathers people together to interact on a specific topic, and then move onto another specific topic that is unrelated to the first.
The endless scroll.
It is becoming increasingly researched and documented how much affect social media and constant screen usage is having on kids and adults alike, with shortened attention spans, depression, and a whole lot of antisocial behaviors. And I think that one of the effects it is having on us is our social abilities, including the way we are able to read faces and social cues. This affects our real-world relationships in many ways, as well as the quality and depth of the relationships we are able to maintain - if we have the attention span to create and maintain them that is.
And the inability to connect the dots, to see how things are related to each other, or predict what might happen when A interacts with B, might also affect the way we are able to identify situations, or judge the value of something. A lot of the conversations that younger generations engage with now are polarized and lacking nuance, which is how the platforms and media like it, but also, perhaps that is what people have been conditioned to like - even if it is not in our best interest.
I think that at some point, social media enablement is going to be seen like the tobacco industry, where the harm was known, but it was swept under the rug in preference of profits. They knew it caused cancer, but not only kept selling, but actively campaigned to shift the narrative for decades. We are now in the third decade of social media, and we are starting to see the cancerous growths emerging.
I feel that despite the greatest access for the greatest number of people to information the world has ever seen, we are getting stupider. As I was talking to my daughter today about money being a tool, everything we have is a tool in some way, and they can be used to improve our lives, or diminish our lives. It seems, that when a tool is made for profit first, it is going to ultimately diminish our lives as consumers.
While looking at it from the societal view is important, it is also good to consider us as an individual and what brings quality to our lives. I have a strong suspicion that if average users really took a step back to reflect on at what the platforms provide, they would quickly realize that like smoking not actually relaxing people, they will see that all that time spent, isn't getting them what they need. They are looking for connection through an alternative that mimics the emotional response of it, but doesn't actually provide anything meaningful, or lasting.
We owe ourselves better.
And the more we seem to use it, the larger our social debt becomes. We are losing the richness of our conversations, the richness of our diversity, the richness of our relationships, and the richness of our lives.
We are in a debt trap.
The cost is our potential.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
