The dynamics of social media have been on my mind a lot recently. On one hand, it's really impressive to me from a technological standpoint: in the last thirty years, we've been able to be exposed to other people and other cultures in a way previously unthinkable. I have friends today and have had experiences that simply wouldn't have been possible twenty years ago. But on the other hand, it's caused irreparable harm and change to people. The amount we're connected to one another is what makes this such a problem: the human brain was never meant to process this amount of information. In the same way we cannot comprehend a billionaire's wealth, we cannot comprehend the amount of complicated human beings out there, which has caused the internet to become such a hostile place in the last ten years.
Because we don't have the ability to comprehend the amount of people we are exposed to, we reduce them to stereotypes or archetypes in our mind. This is normal, just how our mind processes information, but when people aren't aware of this happening, it can result in really dangerous and harmful behavior.
We're recreating something that's based on how we remember it but without thinking about why we left it behind
Whenever I hear people reminiscing about how they miss MySpace or some relic of the early 2000s, I wonder what about it that they miss. After all, we innovated from that point for a reason. Things like SpaceHey try to recreate it but forget that the reason that we ended up with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, is because there was something that MySpace lacked: discoverability, for one, which lead to the development of the algorithm which is so controversial today. The problem is that while we want to discover each other naturally, we are connected with others too much to feasibly do so on our own.
The problem is that there are really only two ways to experience the internet right now: inundation, where we are bombarded with advertisements, sponsored posts, and then people trying to play up trends, or droughts when people can no longer bear drowning in that ecosystem. It feels like the internet is in this vicious cycle where things bubble up, hit this boiling point, and then fracture and break off. Twitter → Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads. TikTok → Reels, Shorts. The issue is, these things suffer from the same problem: when you go off of the main Bluesky thread, you join a Mastodon instance, it's a common experience to just not find many people there and to feel as though you're in a drought. We want to connect with others but it's not quite possible to do so in a way that's not overwhelming right now. It's the same way with news, so many people I know don't read it because doing so is stressful with the amount that's going on, especially now. The world is huge and there's things going on all over the place, it's hard to figure out a way to sift through it all. News outlets are starting to innovate, with things like topic-focused newsletters (New York Times) or more digestible, bite-sized news formats.
Part of the reason I think that AI has such a negative and visceral reaction against it is because it's exacerbating an existing issue, which is the amount of stuff that's not really worth paying attention to. Ragebait, satire, fake stories, misleading content, misinformation, all things that AI makes it so much easier to do. Something I have grown to believe more over time, and I think others too, is the need for curation in our own lives.
Fifty years ago, the world was a lot more interesting because people were exposed to such little of it. People were forced to search for things they found interesting. Now, it's so easily available, which is both a blessing and a curse. We've never been more exposed to more and I think that we've been getting more docile as a result. I had a separate thought on this from a while ago, the idea that being bored is a good thing.
However, I'm optimistic about this: I think in the long run, our standards will increase and our taste will evolve as a reaction to this inundation. Because there's so much, I think that this coming generation is going to learn to be better at learning what they value and what they want to spend time on. TikTok is relatively new, only about five years, and I think already people are realizing that they're not comfortable with how much time that they're spending on these apps. That while we have the ability to share and create each and every thing we find, that we maybe shouldn't, forcing us to think about what we value and are interested in and eventually, pushing everyone to become a curator.