Society is Questioning Social Media. That’s Good.
We may be seeing the start of the biggest shift in how we see and want to use social media since it arrived nearly two decades ago. Why?
IT takes a lot longer than we often realize for culture to grasp the impacts of a new technology then figure out how it should work for the benefit of humanity. Digital technologies such as the internet and related communications technologies enabled social media. It slammed into society nearly twenty years ago like bullet train.
Now, through over fifteen years of researching social media use in both the business sector and public policy, a fundamental shift in how we use and understand it, seems to be underway and this is a good sign. Why?
What I believe we are seeing is what has been seen before in human sociocultural systems with regard to technologies. First, a revolutionary technology will shape culture. Over time, as culture learns about the social impacts of a technology, it starts to then reshape that technology.
We tend to think that technological revolutions happen overnight. They never have. This is not helped by some pundits and forecasters who misinterpret the way a technology is adopted by a culture.
We see this when they say things such as how the arrival of ChatGPT was a record breaking adoption of a technology gaining 57 million users in around a month. Or how Threads had millions of adopters overnight. These are misleading at best.
Adoption and registered users is not a trend. It is not a fundamental shift in a society or culture. We’ve seen use of ChatGPT tools decline. They may rise. But that’s not today’s topic.
A Shift In Societal Understanding of Social Media
As social media burst onto the scene, leaders of the Western world foretold of a coming wave of democracy and global freedoms, the age of a more civilized would shine. The gods of technology had delivered digital manna. The opposite turned out to be true.
That said, there have been some significant societal benefits to social media such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements among others. All technologies are a double-edged sword.
So what is changing?
Looking back at past research projects I’ve worked on for multinational IGOs like the United Nations, WHO and multinational NGOs like Freedom House and comparing that with what is happening in the current Israeli-Hammas war, some indicators are popping up. Little sparks of light, at least in Western democracies.
The social media research projects I’ve worked on have looked at how online hate speech translates to political violence in the street. Women’s rights in certain suppressive countries. The use of memes to create social divisions, media trust in emerging democracies and more.
One is a broader, better understanding of the nature of the current conflict. It is citizens doing research and applying a more nuanced understanding of the situation and the use of critical thinking rather than blindly reacting. The second is a growing understanding at a societal level, of the way mis and disinformation is used by State and Non-State actors through social media.
Much like consumers learned to ignore advertising online and become increasingly mistrustful of digital advertising, so it is with social media content.
Western governments have shown time and again how autocracies like Iran, Russia and China have used social media to interfere with elections. How even populist and radical political groups within democracies create misinformation to create social divisions.
This is culture reacting. Humans use culture, which includes political and economic systems, aesthetics (art, music, literature), traditions, customer and social governance, to evolve as a species. We apply these various elements to figure out how we want a technology to be used in our societies, both hyper-locally and nationally to globally.
We are also starting to see citizen groups and governments psh back against the way some social media platforms manipulate youth and adults through their use of data and turning psychological behaviours against citizens and consumers. The launch of bipartisan lawsuits against Meta this past week being one example. The EU governments change in digital laws being another.
While it is hard to collect quantitative data as much of this type of research, using the methodology of netnography, which is qualitative, it does seem as though a shift is underway. This may be an emerging trend. It may not. It is a case of time will tell.
If it is however, this signals a sociocultural shift may be starting. While it impossible to say how this will all turn out, history can provide some insights. Two prime examples are how governments ended up setting regulations and laws around pharmaceuticals and food standards to protect citizens health. Setting up such regulations and standards for social media companies can protect citizens mental health, privacy and freedoms.
We’ve struggled to translate the Rule of Law and cultural norms and social behaviours from the physical world to the digital world. This is neither the fault of governments, technology giants or broader society. We simply didn’t understand, could not have understood, how social media would evolve and impact our society.
Human adoption of technologies, especially revolutionary ones like the printing press, telephone and internet, have always been a bit messy. It’s just how we roll as a species.
We may well be seeing the signals of sociocultural changes that will put societal level pressures on social media companies and how they want them to fit into our society. If we are becoming increasingly skeptical and questioning of what comes at us from social media, that is a sign of sociocultural health. A system working.
Unlike those who decried the global showering of democracy bringing the world into a new Golden Age, I’m not going to make any such proclamation. But things may well be changing. How that unfolds may get a bit messier yet as systems, ideologies, norms and behaviours bash around the schoolyard like a bunch of kids jacked up on sugar.