The End of Social Media
It’s not the first article I’ve read with this sentiment, and I’m sure it won’t be the last: “It seems increasingly likely that our society will one day view our infatuation with Twitter, Facebook, and the like as a passing, often destructive fad.”
It feels a little like the predicted death of blogging. They keep telling me that blogs are dead, yet I keep writing one so I know that at least one is still alive.
Articles like these make me sad. It’s not the promise that everyone will abandon ship soon, but because they focus only on the negative aspects of the platforms. Are there negative aspects, yes. Absolutely. Beyond a doubt. But there are also positive aspects that are being dismissed because they don’t fit the narrative.
Before I started blogging, I knew other infertile women in my area and we talked about our family building failures, but it wasn’t the same as when I found all of you online. I could read your stories and feel part of something different. Not different in the bad sense, but just… different. Like there were people who conceived easily and those who didn’t, and I was part of the didn’t crowd and other people were part of the easy crowd. Finding so many other infertile people made me feel like I wasn’t a little dot of different in a same world. It changed the narrative.
I met people online that I would never have gotten to meet in the offline world because we lived too far apart for our lives to intersect. There is always someone out there, ready for a conversation. Always someone out there with advice or an answer when I ask a question. That is social media, too.
Tonight is Christmas Eve. Not my holiday, but I feel a part of it because of social media. I’m not just driving by houses, seeing lights on the outside. I’m opening up Facebook and being invited into meal preparation and decorations and funny moments in someone else’s family. That is social media as well.
I’m staying. Hope you are, too.
7 comments
I can’t imagine that the connectivity we have will go away. It will likely mutate into other forms, but the benefits have been so great that I doubt it will disappear.
Yeah, there are definitely negatives and positives. I think it comes down to whether people are using social media for positive reasons. People are capable of good and bad as we know! Also it’s important to keep in perspective what the advantages and disadvantages are. Social media is really bad for some things. And then there is the fact that these inventions change us and our society in ways we can’t predict.Using any invention means adopting a set of assumptions about reality. You can’t have the tool without the assumptions about reality. Maybe you like how things change for you when you adopt those assumptions, maybe you don’t. But it’s wise to be aware of them.
Blogging is different than social media in that the content is written and directed by the author of the blog, generally with limited noise (less ads, no pop-up notifications as distractions). It was here before facebook and instagram and I think it will outlast them too, even though those platforms lasted longer than I expected because they keep evoloving. Neither of them serve the same purpose they used to when they first started.
If blogs don’t evolve they get stale. It makes me sad when bloggers drop off the face of the blogosphere. I see it happen all the time with infertility blogs when people end up succeeding and having children. It’s understandable that the outlet no longer serves the same purpose, and that people’s time is channeled differently and taken up mostly by parenting. Still, it’s hard to see those relationships fizzle out.
I do hope that we find a way to moderate ourselves with these relatively new toys. We (I) have gone in whole hog, which is too much.
Like you and A and other ALI bloggers, I have benefited so much from the connectivity — more so in the early days of blogging/social media. But now I am noticing in myself what the article mentions — the addiction to the buzz. I fear I sometimes allow FB to be the master rather than the servant.
I was/would be happy with message boards and blogs….never been on FB, seems it’s just getting worse. Twitter can go away too. Instagram etc also…just seem like time sucks/outlets for egos
I agree with Jivf. I think Blogging is a very different platform than FB, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. With blogging, posts are usually longer, requiring some thought and effort to put them together. Granted, there are highs that come from comments and seeing blog traffic, but it’s not as instant.
And I think that’s where we start going down the rabbit hole of connectivity and the main criticism is that instant positive gratification. We all require a certain amount of positive feedback in order to function, but the toxicity comes in seeking it at all costs. The bloggers who last all have a similar trait of not relying on that instant gratification of likes and high stats.
I personally don’t think social media will go away. I think it will evolve given all the negative things we are now learning about it and that is a very good thing because it’s overdue to be recognizing social media addiction and how there needs to be rules about mobile phone use (I.e. equate texting while driving to drunk driving). But those who believe we will completely do away with social media remind me a lot of the mindset of prohibitionists from the early 20th century.
I’m smiling at all these thoughtful comments. Because even comments on a blog are often more thoughtful than social media posts, let alone the thought that goes into the average blog post. The two are so different, but like you I get a little annoyed at articles that only focus on the negative.
For example, I often hear media types scoffing about blogs, when there are informed and very intelligent blogs that give any journalist a run for their money … and there are those which aren’t.
Likewise, the focus on the negatives of social media. Whereas I have hardly ever seen anything negative on Fb. Maybe it’s that my friends are sensible, that they befriend sensible or at least restrained people who don’t blurt out every unkind thought that pops into their head. In other words, the social niceties of normal conversation generally play out on Fb. I’m less enamoured of Instagram, but enjoy seeing photos of other’s lives.
Blogging and social media has, as you say, given me a much wider network of friends – friends-not-yet-met as I say (I started a blog series on these friends but it’s stalled recently), as well as those I’m gradually meeting as I travel. And it’s enabled me to stay in touch with friends I met overseas when we were all 17-18 years old on a student exchange, with family who live overseas, or in other parts of the country. I think it would be terrible to lose those connections.