One must always be careful, when complaining about technology. It is not difficult to find historical examples of concerns that have poorly withstood the test of time. For example, reading is now generally considered a worthy and productive pastime for youth, but more than a few once feared reading books would result in indolence, deviance, and criminality. In the same vein, for as long as media has existed society has feared that youth will be unable to distinguish between stories and reality (e.g., the longstanding debate over whether video games cause violence).
The long and short of it is that when you complain about technology, there is always a risk that in a decade or two your complaints will make you seem like an amusing curmudgeon, just one more opponent of progress.
Now, having properly positioned myself as a luddite, I am going to complain about social media. To start, I would like to list the first ten items in my Facebook feed:
A post about how TicToc users designed a pill bottle for Alzheimer’s medication.
A ‘suggested for you’ list of ‘Absent-Minded Oopsies in Movies that Ruin Everything’.
A photo of a horse shared by my aunt.
A ‘suggested for you’ list of ‘The Internet Shares Massive Lies they Spun to get what they want.’
A screenshot of a tweet about capitalism.
A list of TicToc style short videos
A Star Wars ad
A ‘suggested for you’ list of ‘45 Instances Graphics Designers Didn’t Think Through Their Work’
A post from a friend about a show they attended
A ‘suggested for you’ list of ‘19 LOTR Reactions to Orcs in the Amazon Prime Series’
This, my friend, is garbage. Only 4 of these 10 items are actually theoretically content I’m interested in, and 2 of those 4 are probably reshares of ‘suggested for you’ content from my friends’ feeds. And yet, I find this ‘suggested for you’ content very challenging to resist. There is, I am ashamed to say, some part of me that is drawn to find out which ‘absent-minded oopsies’ ruined movies, or to dully scroll through bad graphic design.
Video reels, such as those found on Instagram and TicToc, are even worse. More than once I have unwisely opened my phone late in the evening and watched dozens of short videos, too tired to consume fulsome content, too weak to just go to sleep.
There is nothing inherently wrong with consuming junk content. Like the occasional bag of chips or marvel movie, sometimes you just need a break. The problem is that, at least for me, the best way to resist chips is simply not to have them. Junk social media content, in contrast, is ubiquitously available as long as you have internet access.
As you have likely heard before, for social media companies we are ultimately their product. The more time we spend ‘engaged’ with social media, the more time they have to present us with advertisements. Initially, platforms such as Facebook bought our attention by allowing us to easily share content with friends and family. However, as the industry has matured their methods have gotten more insidious. For example, ultra-short-form-video-content such as that available on TicTok and Instagram can easily steal away more attention than we intend.
More and more, social media is not content to trade for our attention, but rather seeks to steal it away. Platforms whittle away at our finite willpower, until we finally succumb to the siren call of junk content, cheaply produced and dearly sold. In dribs and drabs we feed social media the dark corners of our lives, time in which we used to drift and dream and feel. We are no longer even voyeurs into the lives of friends and family, but instead drown in influencers and pyramid schemes and stupid internet lists.
In conclusion, fuck off Facebook. I am no longer willing to trade my time for lists of this week’s funniest tweets. I’m deactivating my account.
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