Society Actually Likes Social Media
It may seem counterintuitive to say this, but we do find social media valuable to our societies. Now we are remaking social media.
It may seem odd to write an article that people, broader societies, like social media at a time when there’s so much seeming disappointment with it, anger, frustration and increasing disillusionment. When lawsuits are flying and governments reacting. But we do like social media.
It’s not the technology itself, although the technology often gets the blame. No technology is neutral, all are a double-edged sword and all have unintended consequences. These are a result of how a technology is designed, the intended purpose and the purpose to which it is actually put.
The aspects of social media that we don’t like are those that are the result of the way the humans operating them are and have acted. The platforms and tools that have sought to better understand their communities, their customers, and have adapted accordingly, have performed better and remain more enjoyable.
Platforms like Pinterest, Medium, Substack, Snap, Reddit, LinkedIn, remain popular and more enjoyable. They’re not perfect and some have suffered their share of missteps and mistakes. This is to be expected.
When a technology enters into the broader stream of society is when we truly begin to understand it. I wrote previously on this process of awareness, evaluation and adaptation.
We are in the evaluation phase of social media tools today. As social media changed us, we slowly became aware of the downsides and reacted along the way. Today, we are in the evaluation phase because we can see the longer historical arch of how social media changed us.
What we dislike about it, we, society, are now creating the pressure to drive changes. That’s when we move into the adaptation phase, when we apply enough societal pressure to enforce changes to meet with desired cultural norms, behaviours and traditions.
We select what we do like about a technology, and deselect what we don’t like. Overall, we do like social media. We like it because we are social animals and a vital aspect of how we are socially, is through communicating. Mostly through storytelling.
Storytelling is how we share our multitude of realities. My reality is different from yours. By telling stories, we find commonalities and we can understand one another and we build the societies and cultural systems, that we want. It is why culture and societies are always changing and evolving.
In addition to storytelling, social media tools help us organise, quickly, at zero cost, at scale. Whether to take civil actions or just to organise a local sports team. Social organising has always been important for human societies to function.
Social media has enabled us to have important societal debates and discussions as well. From #MeToo to Black Lives Matter and beyond. Early social media platforms and even early proponents of the internet largely framed their view of the world through rosy coloured glasses. This is nice, but they didn’t really understand human social behaviour. They are beginning to. Those that have, are the platforms we prefer.
If we truly didn’t like social media as a whole, we would be rejecting today in significant ways. We would use the cultural tools at our disposal, such as Rule of Law, regulations and economic power, to shut them down.
Instead, we are using these cultural processes to pressure for changes. The social media platforms that do not adapt are the ones that will eventually decline and fade into the background. MySpace was a flourishing social media platform, but it didn’t adapt to cultural changes in combination with technology advances. It became irrelevant.
If you’re worried that social media is destroying society and ruining our lives, it is not. Society is much more aware of and understanding of, the negative impacts of social media. Now, society is reacting.
We may be entering the most interesting phase of social media yet. When we remake it into something broader societies want. Reflecting common human cultural values more effectively.
Society, through cultural mechanisms, is now starting to pressure changes. No technology in the history of humanity has ever been able to remain the same against the force of society when applied.
While it is hard to predict exactly how social media will evolve, we can look a little bit ahead and through the areas we are pressuring these platforms behaviours that we don’t like, we can make some guesses.
The Future of Social Media in a Sociocultural Context
In the coming years, social media platforms will begin to develop more safeguards and rules around human behaviours. Addressing child exploitation, cyberbullying, the use of AI generated content from articles to images and videos. This is being driven by government regulations as a result of societal pressure.
The platforms that have failed to perform well have been pressured by governments because enough of the populations, of society, have pushed back.
We increasingly see that people are shifting to use social media platforms where they can define the group(s) they are in, sharing less in mass public forums. This is a societal reaction to the issues they feel some platforms have failed to address in meaningful ways.
As culture becomes aware of the impacts of oversharing, such as privacy and security concerns, we are changing our behaviours around what we do and don’t share. Social media platforms that understand this are seeing their audiences grow.
For social media platforms and potential new entrants that understand these sociocultural shifts, there are opportunities.
One of the challenges for the social media platforms will be their business models. Advertising has become so intrusive and prolific that it has eroded the customer experience. Advertising as a business model was always inherently lazy. Subscriptions may become more prevalent, but consumers are already experiencing subscription fatigue. The answer will come through innovations.
We will still make mistakes with social media tools. We’re unlikely to create some social media utopia where we’re all rather chuffed with it all, but it will get better.
Social media is here to stay. Now it is evolving and we are about to enter a new phase of how we will use these platforms. The platforms that listen, that innovate by understanding human culture, not customers, will be the ones that thrive.