Society is Questioning Social Media. That’s Good.

Photo by Natalya Letunova on Unsplash

It takes a lot longer than we often realize for culture to grasp the impacts of a new technology then figure out how it should work for the benefit of humanity. Digital technologies such as the internet and related communications technologies enabled social media. It slammed into society nearly twenty years ago like bullet train.

Now, through over fifteen years of researching social media use in both the business sector and public policy, a fundamental shift in how we use and understand it, seems to be underway and this is a good sign. Why?

What I believe we are seeing is what has been seen before in human sociocultural systems with regard to technologies. First, a revolutionary technology will shape culture. Over time, as culture learns about the social impacts of a technology, it starts to then reshape that technology.

We tend to think that technological revolutions happen overnight. They never have. This is not helped by some pundits and forecasters who misinterpret the way a technology is adopted by a culture.

We see this when they say things such as how the arrival of ChatGPT was a record breaking adoption of a technology gaining 57 million users in around a month. Or how Threads had millions of adopters overnight. These are misleading at best.