How Culture is Taking Down Social Media
As futurist/forecaster Paul Saffo once said, first technology shapes us, then we shape technology. While it’s far too early to sound the death knell of social media on the whole, if we look at how we use culture as a survival tool, we can see that t is now starting to re-shape social media. How and why? What might the near future look like?
First, it’s key to understand exactly what culture is. For many, it has come to mean the arts; literature, music, design, architecture, art. That is the aesthetics element only. Culture also includes traditions, values, norms, behaviours, political systems, societal structure, economic models, family and community relations, military. All of these make up culture.
Culture is the very code humans have used for many thousands of years. Exactly when is increasingly debated. Estimates for modern culture would be around 4,000 to 3,500 B.C., but we could take it back to the stone age, 2.6 Million years ago. Debatable. We use culture to get a head start on biological evolution.
How Culture is Changing Social Media
Big shifts on global sociocultural systems sometimes happen slowly, sometimes very quickly. When we invent new technologies using our imagination, changes vary. When it comes to social media, most Western countries (i.e. democracies), figured a new age of global democracy would spring forth. Instead the trolls crawled out from under the bridge and started rampaging. Things got messy fast and have stayed that way for over a decade.
In the ancient digital past of 2017, I predicted that the biggest upcoming channels of social media platforms would be regulatory, not technical. And things did start to get darker for them. But it is only now, in 2023, that we can start to see how humans are applying culture to change social media.
It can take a while to see the collective impacts of a technology on a society. We’re also quite horrible at predicting the bad stuff and even if we do, we prefer to accentuate the positive. Especially if you’re about to become a billionaire. Damn the torpedoes and all that.
The first signs of trouble were largely laid at the feet of Zuckerberg with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Then a few whistleblowers on the reality of ethics at Facebook along with their own study of the damage their Instagram platform caused teenage brains. Damn the torpedoes they said and cracked on.
Congressional hearings began in the US, the UK wanted in on the fun as did Canada and the UK. Politicians do like some theatre for re-election points. But enough citizens were exercising their rights that the politicians had to do something. The U.S. hasn’t done much. The EU aggressively updated privacy and data rights laws. Autocracies doubled down on ways to control the population. Digital torpedoes on the citizenry.
Then of course TikTok, which is also locked in geopolitical dynamics. Now, other signals point to culture fighting back.
What Are the Big Signals of Social Media Changes Ahead?
While it’s tempting to think it’s big congressional and parliamentary hearings that are the most important indicators of what’s ahead, it isn’t. It’s the small stuff that starts to add up. And they’re starting to add up, mostly with lawsuits. According to American news channel Axios, there are nearly 150 lawsuits against social media platforms including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.
While in Canada, I could assess about 50 and in the UK around 80. Undoubtedly there are other countries like France, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and others, piling on.
Research by psychiatrists, social action groups, sociologists and anthropologists is piling on the evidence of just how damaging social media platforms, as they are currently run, are to mental health. Most studies have focused on teenagers, a particularly vulnerable segment of society. When it comes to our kids, societies tend to get rather protective. This made a very dangerous strategy for social media platforms to choose.
Increasingly, municipal, state, provincial and county level governments are investing in programs to educate youth and parents on the dangers of social media use. Citizen groups are forming and class-action suits are becoming the norm.
When grass roots organisations start to get mobilized in a society and gain significant support, at least in democracies, is when culture starts to be used to change what it finds is a threat to society or to our species as a whole.
This is a force governments struggle to deal with at scale unless they have a lot of brutish thugs with all kinds of nasty weapons to exercise the violence of the Leviathan. That all goes into revolutionary territory. We’re nowhere near that with regard to social media platforms.
But we are at a fundamental point in time, a tipping point as Malcolm Gladwell would call it. While it may take a while, the cultural pushback on social media in its current form is ramping up. Just how many lawsuits and regulatory changes can these platforms manage? TikTok still isn’t profitable. Do shareholders want to pay to fight those legal woes? will Facebook shareholders? Twitter may well just self-implode. It seems to be doing just fine wiping itself out.
While it’s impossible to say how social media platforms will change, the odds are very much in favour now that they will. While the American federal government may ignore citizens privacy rights, other governments aren’t. TikTok may well be broken up or forced to change so much it becomes a pale imitation of its current form.
The imagination of culture is at work. It is a force to be reckoned with. Social media platforms must, for once, innovate on the side of humanities, not shareholders.
