That's not necessarily true. I think social media usage is evolving - or devolving - into smaller and smaller pieces as people's attention spans become smaller and smaller. The trend is to video over text, as TikTok has taken over everything.
But TikTok, as I've seen it through observing other people use it, since I'm not a user, seems quite passive. In that endless scrolling you can like it or share it, but how much do people actually engage with it with an exchange of words? It doesn't seem like much.
Coincidentally, a newsletter arrived this morning in my inbox from a writer who specializes in technology and media, Charlie Warzel. He was talking about a "geriatric social media" and he makes some good points. Here are a few:
There are a few things that I think are probably going on, instead. The first is that some platforms just have a natural network decay. Facebook was, at first, novel and exclusive (I got an invite from a friend who was in college! Very exciting!). Then, it grew and took on a different kind of utility (you could find all kinds of people on it from your past, or whom you met at a party!). Soon, every human you knew was on it, and, overnight, it morphed into a lot of people’s main news source. The loudest, angriest people—many of whom didn’t quite understand how to talk to people online—made it an unpleasant place to be, so a lot of people left or stopped engaging, and the loudest voices got louder.
The same thing is happening on Twitter. One thing I’ve noticed a lot is that a lot of my favorite power users have become power lurkers. They haven’t given up the platform, but they realize that posting is mostly a losing game full of professional liabilities, endless and futile fights, and diminishing returns. And that’s grim because, for those who do post, we’re much more likely to encounter the loudest, angriest, most politically charged voices in response, which in turn makes the place less fun to be around!
The second factor is the predictability of online discourse. Even if you strip away the toxicity and political polarization and the overlapping polycrisis that is being alive in 2022, it’s hard to deny that a lot of us have been logging into the same platforms that have many of the same quirks, communities, and rhythms for years. We’ve all been at the party for a long time! There’s something lovely and comforting about that, but also something that’s exhausting and boring, too.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this line from Ezra Klein about Elon Musk regarding Twitter. The gist is that Musk is the ultimate player of the game of Twitter, and now he’s purchased the arcade. “He will have won the game,” Klein
writes. “And nothing loses its luster quite like a game that has been beaten.” Now, only one person gets to buy Twitter, but I think everyone feels a bit of that loss of luster.
We log on to our platforms, and we essentially know what everyone’s going to say and do.
The third factor is an algorithmic one. The best argument that social media is dying is if you define social media as public feeds full of stuff that your friends post. Because that does appear to be going away, in part due to algorithmically curated feeds. It might be too simple to only blame TikTok and the influence of its For You page for this, but I think it’s directionally right. The For You page offers a frictionless user experience—you don’t even have to be logged into TikTok’s app to start immediately sampling some of its most popular, even niche content. It’s a genius, addictive feature, and, as every other platform tries to import elements of FYP into their app, they’ll make it so that you’re seeing less and less of what your friends are doing.
Now, if your platform is in good health, with a vibrant, creative user base, and your recommendation algorithms do a good job of quickly assessing your users’ preferences, then it might work out for you. But if your user base is slowly atrophying due to the network decay I described above, or if your algorithms are pretty mediocre at understanding what your users like, your platform will start to feel a bit like a mall where all the stores have been replaced by weird cellphone-case kiosks.
I think the biggest factor, though, is that media-consumption behaviors are shifting. A few weeks ago
I spoke with the political science professor Kevin Munger, who is very focused on TikTok and its ascendence in politics. Here’s how he described it:
The combination of the short video and algorithm is something people really like, but, more importantly, it seems that people are really adept at using it. What I mean is that it seems like more people naturally are able to put out a decent TikTok video than, say, can write a very good tweet. And that sounds flippant, but I actually think it matters. It’s an era of social video taking off.
I’m not totally certain if he’s right about people being more likely to create a good TikTok than a good tweet, but I strongly believe that short-form videos are far easier and more engaging to consume than cascading feeds of short-burst text. Munger goes further, suggesting that a much bigger shift is coming that will drive our society further and further away from text as a medium:
People are always looking for more information that’s faster and easier to digest. And video just encodes so much more information than text. The medium is so dense, and, ultimately, that’s more effective at communicating information. It’s shocking how much less experience younger generations have with reading, and just how much better trained they are to use and interpret high-density mediums. I don’t mean this as a negative—they are able to communicate so much better with these mediums.
This shift still feels like social media—but in the way that YouTube is considered social media. It’s about feeds and broadcasting in a way that, even with individuals, feels very conscious of people as internet brands. What feels much less ascendant is the more personal and informal status-update form of social media, which we’re seeing get funneled into siloed messaging apps, text threads, and chat communities like Discord. The broadcast-focused version of social media, as Munger suggested, is one with people who argue about politics in green-screened “videos that look more like a John Oliver or Tucker Carlson cable-news clip than anything else.”
You could say that social media isn’t exactly dying, but bifurcating. Apps like Twitter—which don’t really offer the ability to split status updates and broadcast capacities or switch to short-form video posting—and Facebook—which are essentially so rotted out by network decay—are not fertile ground for this kind of consumption shift.
One could also say that social media isn’t dying but that text, as the cornerstone medium of modern society, is. I ran this idea by my colleague Kate Lindsay, who writes about the internet and focuses a great deal of attention on TikTok. She suggested that TikTok “didn't kill old social media, but I think it changed what we're looking to consume online.”
. . . .
That bolded part relates to my experiences with TOL. There's something nice about logging into the same place for the past dozen-plus years, but it's also exhausting and boring. The arguments and the players are same, and it's rinse and repeat. At some point, the exhausting and boring tilts the scales. A long break can help, but then, coming back, all the sameness is so immediate... And because some of you mostly post in memes and videos, the amount of textual exchange is dropping here the same as everywhere else.
As soon as I see it I'll buy that none of the alarm systems were operational and when he broke in the tempered laminated-glass panel on that very expensive door; he pulled the glass and panes *out* rather than pushing them in. I won't question the obvious cacophony of noise this all would have caused and wonder how this guy got so far into the house without 911 being called or some security response prior.
