How Social Media Ate Itself & What’s Next
Social media, to the contrary, is not yet dead. Although such juicy headlines do make for great clickbait. Which is also an elegant segue into part of the reason social media platforms are starting to undergo a sea change. The easiest business model for social media platforms is advertising. And that’s where the slippery slope started.
To attract more advertising revenue, these platforms, as we all know, need two ingredients; lots of eyeballs and lots of time spent on the platform. That’s the first requisite for brands to spend ad budgets on a platform. The second thing brands wanted was precision targeting and as marketers have always longed for, as much information about the customer as they can possibly get. Likes, politics, eating habits, geography, age. The social media platforms were happy to oblige. And so came the rise of what Shoshana Zuboff has cleverly termed, surveillance capitalism.
Brands and social media platforms and the various ecosystem of products around them, dissociated themselves subconsciously from the humans they were impacting by calling them “users” and creating “personas.” This avoided any uncomfortable thoughts about exploitation and ethics. It also enabled the platforms to spend less time thinking about sociocultural impacts of their products. This too was important since they needed capital to grow and so went public, which meant the shareholder and dividends became the product and the users the data to monetize.
This arguably completed the requirements for the business version of what in psychology is called dissociative disorder. Which is defined as mental disorders that involve experiencing a disconnection and lack of continuity between thoughts, memories, surroundings and actions. This of course causes ones life to be a bit of a mess. So what I see with social media platforms is what I term as Economic Digital Dissociative Disorder. And this is where these platforms started to eat themselves leading to the mess we are in today.
It is easier to keep going at something when you can disassociate yourself from reality. Software engineers and computer scientists are brilliant and have provided excellent products. They are not however, very much tuned into the social sciences. Disassociation then, becomes much easier, especially when it is assumed, without evidence, that the good outweighs the bad.
While it is easy to lay blame at the feet of the creators of these platforms, that too would be wrong. All the woes of social media are simply reflections of human behaviours that have always existed. The problem is that the creators of these platforms, who saw all the good, also failed to consider the bad. All technologies have unintended consequences. Perhaps now, we are far more aware of this than we were back then.
What we can hold these platforms creators responsible for is the way in which they conducted themselves as crises continued to unfurl over time. It’s not that they didn’t, and don’t continue to try. They have. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snap, Pinterest, have all tried content moderation, managing misinformation and so on. But the tension that always existed was the need to deliver shareholder value versus doing what a corporation should, which is to deliver a social good. In this, they have failed.
So in large part, the platforms are the architects of their own demise. So what happens now?
That is even less easier to predict, but we are seeing some signs of what likely lies ahead. More government regulation is most certain. Rules around privacy and data protection are coming. Some have been implemented. More rules will come into play around data rights, defining social media platforms as social good, greater definitions of hate speech and where the line is crossed. Industry has rarely, if ever, been shown to self-regulate in the public interest. Social media platforms have shown they’re incapable and have admitted as much.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, may well survive. They will fight regulation viciously. The challenge will be in ensuring they and new platform approaches can innovate and not be stifled by over-regulation. That is a struggle that has always existed between capitalism and democracy. Such tension is good.
The general public acting as both citizens and consumers, are unhappy with how they’ve been manipulated and surveilled and find the platforms less and less enjoyable. Today’s forms of social media are slowly slipping away. What’s next may be very exciting indeed. If new creators acknowledge the failings of social media 1.0 as they create the next iterations.
