Social Media is a Tapestry of Humanity
When we understand what social media is, the good and the bad, we can see it as the tapestry we weave in the meaning of being human.
A little while ago, humans figured out how to make fire, and that cooking meat on a fire made it taste rather delicious. While the steak was sizzling we realized it was a good time to tell stories. To perhaps sing some songs as well.
We later figured out how to create drawings on cave walls in such a way as to have them move when torch light flickered over the walls. Today we ask a machine to make images that move. Telling stories through words, art and music are at the core to what it means to be human. A part of culture.
A little while later, we replaced the fireside chatter with the internet and because we love to tell stories, we created social media. Lots of horrible things happened. But also lots of wonderful things. We forget that and we shouldn’t. Because what is wonderful about social media is also what is wonderful about humans.
For a very long time it took stories a while to spread around the world. Because it took so long, ideas, innovations, religious beliefs and the stories that informed is about how to live, how to cooperate and how to survive, evolved us very slowly.
As communications and transportation technologies developed, stories spread a lot faster. Sometimes we didn’t like one another’s stories, especially one large society to another. We would reject other societies outright and fight over those stories. More often than not however, we absorbed the bits we did like, made some changes to each others stories. We evolved immense narratives that shaped religions, ideas and societies in ever bigger ways.
The first communications technology to connect the world was the telegraph. For the first time, stories didn’t need to move at the pace of transportation, be it horses or ships. Ever faster did we connect to one another and ever faster became the communications technologies.
While we tend to think much of the internet is beamed down to us from satellites, it isn’t. About 99% of the internet travels through slivers of glass stretched out like a web under our oceans and across the land. Over $10 trillion a day zips around the world.
Trillions more stories about us flitter through these slivers every day too. And that is ever more valuable than any form of money might be. For as stories shaped our past, so they shape our present and our future.
The good and the bad parts of social media are the greatest fabric for the telling of what it means to be human. While the dark side of humanity is there too, social media is enabling us to see them. And as we have always done as a species, we figure out those bad elements and we evolve ways to overcome them.
Over the relatively short time social media has been around, we’ve begun to tell stories in new ways that we couldn’t before. Now, anyone with a phone can bring together pictures, moving and still, words, moving and still, music, art. And tell a story. For some a story may be silly, for others deeply meaningful or bursting with a belly of laughter.
Social media is in its nascent days still. Some may hail the metric of how fast this or that platform got big numbers of followers. That is meaningless in the context of culture. Like much data, it never tells you why someone did something. Data never tells the because. It does not have a story arch of life and the true meaning of being human.
We became enchanted with the numbers, dazzled with the data. How many followers one has falls away in the face of the beauty of the stories we tell to one another, about one another. Of how we are beginning to imagine a world where we are telling stories more about how we want to create realities together than we do about tearing realities down.
This is not a story of the delusion of a utopia, but rather an evolving story of us. Social media gives us a canvas almost finite, that we’ve never had before as a species. We are not at the beginning of the story of humanity, we are nowhere near the end. Where exactly we are in our story as a species is unknowable. That too, is enchanting.
We can only evolve as a species when we are able to tell stories. The more stories we can tell, the more experiences we share. Sometimes they are sad and painful, sometimes filled with laughter and joy. That is our human experience.
When we understand that social media stories are weaving the tapestry of what it means to be human, we can better understand it as a reflection of us. When we see ourselves, we can know ourselves. And weave ever more stories into the tapestry of who we are.