These days, it’s difficult to feel excited about technology. That statement is a far cry from when I started blogging in 2007. Back then, it felt like the newness of writing for a small audience was a pretty wonderful thing. The connections I made with fellow bloggers (or even readers who liked what I wrote) felt like payment enough for writing five times a week. Sure, not all the posts were substantial, but it felt like with blogging there was this sense that a whole other world was out there; a world where people took time to read the musings of regular folk — and seemed to find it interesting.
Lately, however, I’ve thought about deleting my blog and just not writing anymore. Part of that could be laziness. Part of it could be that without an audience (even a small one), it becomes easy to feel like Marvin the robot in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Sure, that’s bleak, but is it really an audience that writers crave? And why do writers crave an audience? Is it because an audience can provide a dopamine rush of being recognized? If that’s the case, then there’s absolutely not wrong with social media. You can get that rush by being a serial poster of extreme content. But, if you’re writing to create a connection beyond emojis and comments, then social media is absolutely a problem.
Social media thrives on brevity, endless scrolling, sharing, trolling, outrage, and more than a dash of being a sociopath. That’s what creates engagement. So, if video killed the radio star, social media killed the writer. Now, I know what I just wrote is an exaggeration, but I did lament that it sure feels hopeless to work hard on a post only to find that no one seems to care about what you wrote. Zero comments, stats that show very little engagement, and a feeling that what you’ve spent hours (and sometimes days creating) is just simply ignored. My Popdose colleague Dw Dunphy agreed. He noted that a silly post that took him a short amount of time to write and publish was the most popular piece he’d written for the site. The title was “Listmania: Five Reasons Why Caillou is Bald.” Sure, it made me chuckle because I know that while the post was good, it wasn’t as good as other pieces Dw had taken a lot of time to write.
If you’re a writer of any kind of substance, you craft your work so it matters. Not just today, but tomorrow, and far into the future. If you think about a piece of writing that you come back to, you know that you’re doing so because there’s something about what the author wrote that has more value than say a tweet from three years ago by a troll who got thousands of likes and retweets. Maybe I’m wrong, though. Maybe those kinds of words are valuable. After all, elites with money, power, and a large following on social media are able to change things in the world. Just look at the way so-called patriotic Americans can get their fellow Americans to go from loving their country to hating it — while professing a deep love for it. That’s power in a very destructive way. But it’s powerful people doing what they always seem to do: find ways to have power over the powerless. Maybe that’s why I’m so down on social media. I don’t see the value in it, or what it originally promised: a meaningful connection with others.
Just flash back to when early social networking sites were the newest toys in the tech toy box. The bar to entry was low, and the promise of a democratic creator class sounded promising. But these platforms morphed from friendly places where people connected with the intention of becoming friends into propaganda factories where it’s far easier to pit us against each other than to strengthen bonds of friendship and connection. Perhaps slivers of that still exist, but how many times have you heard someone say, “Gosh, I love Twitter. The people there are so interesting, informative, and engaging.” Nope. I used to say that Twitter’s bad reputation for being a hellscape was reinforced by terms like “Twitter wars” or “Mean Tweets” on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Those terms just branded the platform as an extremely unpleasant place to spend time.
And now? Twitter is owned by the richest troll on the planet. But, getting out of that ecosystem isn’t easy for some. I think about all the journalists I know who have grown large audiences on Twitter for over a decade. They know that if they are in the business, they gotta be on Twitter. So, leaving means finding another platform, hoping those you follow set up profiles there, and your followers do the same. That’s not as easy as “I’m out. See you on Mastodon, Tribel, Post, or Hive,” or whatever. If it took years to grow a following on Twitter and other social media platforms, it will take a long time to do the same on alternative platforms. For me, though, it’s not a big deal. There aren’t that many people who follow me on my personal handle or my podcast’s handle. And even for those who do follow me, there’s very little engagement with them. So, if I left, I don’t think anyone would miss my tweets. Why? Because they aren’t important in that ecosystem. Nothing I tweet about has ever gotten accelerated with retweets of a magnitude that it suddenly mattered what I wrote. Nope. I’m like 90% of Twitter users. Most of what I post is insignificant. Twitter’s most active users (roughly 10%) generate the majority of content on the platform. It’s not really writing, though. It’s content. It’s the low fat in a substance resembling milk that gets churned out with great regularity. The sourer the milk, the more people want to sniff the carton and say “Whoa! That smells rancid! Do you smell that? No? Well here, take a whiff.” Repeat the process of sharing the rotten milk and pretty soon the majority of people are only interested in rotting things.
The late biologist E.O. Wilson is often quoted from a conversation he had with fellow scientist James Watson and NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich. Krulwich wanted to know if humans will be able to solve the crises of the next one hundred years. Wilson was hopeful by saying that we will, but we’ll have to be smart about it. “The real problem of humanity” Wilson mused, “is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. Until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago—Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?—rationally” we will be the precipice of destroying all that we have collectively built.
In order to do that (from my perspective), we must constantly keep in mind that the god-like technology of social media thrives when it’s optimized for our paleolithic emotions. Will long-form examinations of our collective soul help us come back from that precipice? It’s possible, but it’s going to take a lot to break the addiction to the dopamine rush of Likes, Follows, and Shares — no matter the platform.
