We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Some of us go without conversing with people in the real world for days or even weeks at a time. Is now the time to be offensive about people’s social media habits? For plenty of TikTok users, their only window into the social world is their phone.
Plenty of people are lonely, and in need of human connections. Social media is a great means by which to have moments of intimacy, to flirt or even just to have a convivial moment with someone else.
If we’re going to behave like bullies then it would make sense to comment on the people who do not wear a mask, and those who do not respect the two meter distance. How about all those people going to bars, restaurants and pubs where there is no respect for the two meter rule?
During a pandemic the behaviour that is harmful to society is that which spreads COVID-19, not instagramming or TikToking, or other. If people are dealing with the solitude of a pandemic by socialising online welcome, and thank them.
Their behaviour will cut the pandemic short, at least in some cases. Solitude is a positive, during a pandemic.
Never forget that just because you’re married, with children, or living in an apartment with others, that this is a reality for everyone. Remember that we’re six months into this pandemic and that some of us have yet to give a hug or even shake the hand of a stranger.
Pandemics are solitary affairs, so give “influencers” the benefit of the doubt.
Instagram has become user-generated content with adverts every fifth post. We went from following friends and their life to following personalities within our field of passions. I follow climbers, photographers, and friends. By following strangers, the timeline has become less relevant. This is especially true about following influencers.
Influencers don’t share their life. They share adverts. They share an illusion, a dream, an ideal. In so doing their posts lose value because they are no different from adverts. They are cold and devoid of character. They are impersonal. They’re a waste of time.
“but social media is a waste of time ;-)”, some would argue. Today it is, but for a long time socialising on the world wide web was about people connecting with other people and establishing friendships. The more time you devoted to forums, discussion groups and bulletin boards, the stronger the connection was.
This wouldn’t be an issue if Instagram was not profitable. This wouldn’t be a problem if our time-wasting wasn’t profitable to a third party. The problem is that we’re out on our daily activities capturing images and sharing them to a network where no one will see our posts, and where our addiction is making someone else money.
Instagram is compulsive. We go, we scroll and see posts by influences, but the posts by those that are important to us are gone. Is it because the algorithms are hiding them or is it that people are now dormant? The compulsion to check the timeline wasn’t strong enough so quantum posts were added as stories. As soon as you see them they cease to exist. IGTV is there too, trying to hook us. We watch videos but we can’t scrub through them. We’re forced to watch from the start of one video to the end. We’re then given tabloid rubbish as a suggestion for the next video to watch.
Today I posted my fiftieth photo on my WordPress photo blog. The audience is tiny, and it will take time for it to gain traction, but at least if and when it does gain traction WordPress and I can profit from it. I’d rather play with WordPress, a decentralized blogging platform for the sharing of videos, photos, and ideas than be stuck in algorithm-driven timelines where I see adverts rather than content.
Twitter has three options. You can tweet to the world without barriers and anyone can read and respond. This is great when you want to grow your network and have conversations. The second option is to send DMs to specific individuals or groups (if I remember correctly). The third option is to make your account private. The only people can read your tweets are the people who were following you when you made the account private.
The weakness of a private account is that twitter is a social medium and as such any time we @ or retweet someone they will be unable to see our answers. Any answer we write to those people will be unseen and so we will be tweeting in the wind.
My two reasons for keeping twitter private are:
A) More freedom. If we approve the people who can read what we write we can first warn them that we may be cheeky. We may something that we only think for long enough to write a tweet, and by the time it’s published we have already changed our mind.
B) The people we’re tweeting with are also private. If we answer a private tweet publicly then people may intuit what the conversation is about. We could use another IM platform but WhatsApp is part of Facebook and other IM networks have their own problems. People tend to be spread across platforms.
Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are three different types of social networks. LinkedIn is serious. I keep my profile up to date but not much more. Facebook is the network of former university friends. Due to this, I need to trust those I add. When twitter was a network of friends waiting to meet at tweetups everyone was accountable to the community so everyone had reason to behave a specific way. Now that trolls, hashtags and other issues are present keeping an account private keeps them away.
140+ characters is excellent to tell people how we feel but terrible for context. Blogging, forums and other long-form discussion websites are better suited to being public because you spend half an hour to an hour developing your idea, modifying it, and then sharing. That is long enough for an irrational tweet to become a rational post.
I’d rather have one to three blog posts by the end of a given day, than twenty-five to two hundred tweets. ;-). I haven’t tweeted like that in years for a reason.
Facebook and Instagram both have “Stories”. Stories are temporary vertical pictures and video that are only available for a limited amount of time before they are backed up and saved for retrieval once you request your data.
In theory, they are a fantastic way of sharing life as it happens without worrying about something embarrassing being available for an extended period of time. In practise, they are a way for Facebook and Instagram to force users to be active every day if they do not want to miss out on what their friends are sharing.
I never use Stories because I’m over 30 so I’m less of an early adopter than I used to be. ;-). On a more serious note, I don’t use Stories because it encourages people to produce kitsch rather than the content of value. It also forces you to look at an image or video just once for a few seconds. The only way to pause this content is to touch the screen to see content long enough.
Content, in Stories, is so fleeting that if you blink you’ll miss it. It’s also a way for FB to force you to be attentive. With ordinary FB timelines you can stay on content until you scroll past it. This means that you can have a conversation or do something else at the same time. It also means that it’s easier to skip adverts. With Stories they know that you have seen the advert.
Some content and images shared via Stories are worth more than 3-5 seconds. They’re worth an interaction. In Stories the only interaction is a direct message. In Stories the only way to save content you like is to either screen record or screengrab.
Another drawback is that we’ve gone from having one timeline with friend activities to two. We now have to spend time scrolling down one stream, and when that’s done we theoretically have to scroll across.
People who use Stories, rather than the primary timeline become invisible. Their content is so well hidden that I miss it. Their content is so well hidden that they might as well start a blog.
When I finished writing I couldn’t think of a conclusion. The conclusion is that ordinary people social media is a lonely and invisible place. We write thoughts, share pictures and then within seconds they’re far down in a timeline never to be seen. In light of this making them fleeting, as they are in Stories only makes our content that much easier to ignore. By writing a blog post it may go unseen for years, but it’s there, and if someone decides to read every post, as I have sometimes done, then a blog is a good time capsule, a good way of keeping people entertained. Blogs, after all, do get published as books, sometimes.
This morning I uninstalled Facebook and Twitter because most of the tweets I saw were people complaining about things or posts that would fit perfectly as blog posts on a website. We have moved towards the Social Media reflex, rather than towards an open sharing habit.
Before social media, we would have conversations on web forums and within comments on websites. As social media centralised all of those conversations so the engagement between people declined. With that decline of conversations so we shift towards two things. The first of these is complaining, rather than engaging. When you complain there is no expectation of a response so the personal investment is low. Add to this that algorithms are designed to promote posts that have a lot of engagement and you have a perfect storm of pessimism.
That pessimism has no positive outcome and it is for this reason that I removed the two apps from my phone. Twitter and Facebook will probably make their way back on to my phone within days or weeks but I’d like to resist and see what change occurs.
I have kept Instagram and Whatsapp. Both of these apps, although part of FB help us keep connected with people we still see in the physical world. I also love to walk around and take pictures to share to Instagram before reusing the same images for blog posts once I have time to write a proper blog post.
We need to take back the time we invested on Social media, and reuse it for productive pursuits as we did before Twitter and Facebook post-2007. Twitter and Facebook were productive when they were just websites, rather than profitable.
Blogging, as a challenge
I like to see blogging as a daily challenge. The challenge is to find inspiration to write at least three hundred words on a topic every day when possible, and after every adventure when not possible. We improve our writing and creative skills. We go from a blank page to remembering what we did, as well as developing our ideas from 140 characters to three hundred or more words. The result is something that others can read. When it’s about hiking, Via Ferrata, climbing, travel or other topics it may even inspire them to follow and try the same thing.
Another part of this challenge is to write half a paragraph or two and run out of inspiration, think for a few minutes, walk around, put some batteries to charge and then coming back with more. Whereas a tweet or facebook post is a single thought shared within seconds a blog post is a cohesive collection of thoughts that join together to form a blog post. Every blog post is an intellectual journey.
Sustained positivity
Aside from finding inspiration for blog posts another challenge is to try to keep them either positive or neutral. If you write a negative blog post you are not anonymous and it is sustained for a few paragraphs. If you write a positive blog post and sustain that for a few paragraphs. The reader and the writer have gained something.
Something Worth sharing
Blogging is about creating something that is worth sharing. It isn’t about filling time like Facebook or Twitter. It is about thought, inspiration and experiences. It’s about having something positive to share. Whereas some people want to write a thread I do more than that. I leave the stream of constant interruptions and I focus on just one thing, until it’s done, or I run out of inspiration. I wish that the same people who write twitter threads would write blog posts instead.
To write a blog post is to invest your time in an activity that may get no response, or if it does get a response it maybe years later. This doesn’t matter. We read entire books without leaving a response for the writer, except the money we spent to buy the book. Social media has tricked people into believing that without a response, whether a like, a favourite, a comment, or a share they are being ignored. “I’m not writing a blog post because no one will read it, that’s why I write a thread of tweets”.
The time that you spend writing a blog post is the time that you have invested in a finished product. There has been less “mindless scrolling”, fewer interruptions and best of all you have something tangible to show. “Yes, I did spend an hour writing this blog post, but I did something productive with my time”.
Compare that to this article in the Guardian. ;-). I haven’t uninstalled the apps because I’m worried about the time I spend on social media. I uninstalled the apps because the Return on Investment (ROI), as a user, is almost zero.
For a while Facebook was the network to keep in contact with university friends after we all graduated and then it was the network to keep in contact with colleagues. Eventually it became the network where people shared news without engaging with others. It has become a network where you scroll through dozens of irrelevant posts in the hope of finding something personal, and failing.
Instagram used to be the network where we could share images with friends and see what they were sharing. After Facebook bought Instagram it grew out of favour with people sharing between friends. Now when I use facebook I need to scroll by an advert from the second post onwards. They have flooded Instagram with so many adverts that it has become unusable.
When youtube was young we were able to look through 30-60 videos and find some that were of interest. We would need to wait for videos to buffer and then watch the desired content. Today we no longer need to wait for videos to buffer, we need to wait for adverts to pre-roll the obligatory five seconds before clicking to content we want to watch.
The Solution
It’s 2019 and I have reduced the amount of time I spend on Facebook favouring news websites, Twitter and other web portals. When Yahoo and other companies were still young we called them web portals. Facebook has shifted from being a social network to being a web portal. It has undermined person to person communication. It has undermined its unique selling point. If I want to browse through news or information websites I can use newsreader apps, web portals or visit worpdress.com
In its haydayInstagram was unique because it downscaled and uploaded images in the time it took for us to prepare the text that went with an image and we could share it despite little bandwidth. Today it has become yet another multimedia sharing option with the drawback of having to flick through adverts. They have degraded the experience so much that I have uninstalled the app from at least one of my phones. I decided that I would pay, at least for now, to preserve the thirty six thousand images on Flickr. I also paid because I want to move away from the Facebook monopoly. On Flickr I am the client, rather than advertisers.
On multiple occasions I have binge-watched content by youtube creators, sometimes for hours at a time. The issue that I have with youtube now is that they have made it challenging to find new and interesting content. This is because they have reduced the amount and diversity of videos that we can see on the home screen. It is also due to the amount of pre-roll that we have to sit through before the video starts. I often give up before the pre-roll videos have ended. The reason I gave up on YouTube content watching is the request for us to pay 20 CHF per month in Switzerland to watch content without adverts. That is more expensive than Netflix, Curiosity Stream and the same price as I would pay for a telecom provider’s various content packages. I wouldn’t mind if this content was paid for and produced by youtube and if youtube creators such as myself could monetise content, but we have been demonetised.
That’s why I stopped using Youtube. For Video On demand, I have Netflix for general interest content. I have CuriosityStream for documentaries and I have Swisscom TV for random content that is “broadcast” when I am watching television.
Conclusion
By blogging I am developing my creativity and writing skills. By sharing images on Flickr and other services I am contributing to communities where people are sharing images because they love photography rather than to become web celebrities. Finally I want to cut down on YouTube because browsing is no longer straight-forward.
I am tired of the Facebook monopoly. While Google gets fined for helping people shop websites like Facebook do the opposite. Instead of increasing the diversity of content on the web and the sharing of ideas it has helped create silos of like minded people. Likeminded people is a polite way of saying brainwashed in the case where opinions are based on opinions rather than facts.
Low value posts
Shorts on Facebook are usually very short. You skim through dozens, even hundreds of posts but none of them have much value. Compare this to blogging. When you blog you need to develop ideas that you can expand to at least three hundred words. With those three hundred words you can include images, video, tables and more. You can tell a complete story. On Facebook you post some text and people might read it.
Conversational monopoly
People use twitter both privately and publicly. People I follow have their accounts set to private so I am careful not to answer to certain comments to preserve their private sphere. Other people see no value in having a public chat. They don’t remember the chatrooms on the late 1990s in the same way that I don’t remember party lines. Whatsapp and Messenger are used instead. Both of them allow private group chats from the comfort of a computer or with the mobility of a mobile phone. Ingress, Pokemon Go and others are happy to experiment with other platforms but mid to late adopters are stuck in the Facebook universe. They have a monopoly.
Picture sharing
Instagram is a great image sharing app but it’s owned by Facebook.
Events
Almost every event you go to these days has a Facebook events page. Many events only have a Facebook page. Unless you are a Facebook user you miss out on a lot of events.
The World Wide Web offers such a breadth of opportunities for creativity that it’s a shame that people are spending time on Facebook rather than on more malleable social networks. I’m thinking of Wordpress as one example. We will see whether people go back to blog friendly social networks.
Facebook disengagement by those I know has become so serious that I have decided to take a break from the social network myself. For many years this was a network of people I knew and spent time with in person. It has school friends, uni friends, activity friends and social media friends. For many years it was a place to socialise, share events and images. From the moment Zynga polluted Facebook with Farmville the conversational aspect of the social network degraded. As the conversation declined the sentiment that Facebook was a waste of time became a reality.
Facebook users no longer use the network to share their lives and converse. They use it to share sensationalist rubbish. Aside from Social media marketers Facebook has become a ghost town. As normal people no longer use the social network you are saturated with sensationalist rubbish. Facebook has become the preserve of the lowest common denominator. It has become a tabloid news distribution network and those who enjoy intellectual stimulation have moved on to other networks.
The content has declined in value to such a degree that I felt myself turning in to a troll. Every second or third article that people share is sensationalist rubbish and I feel the urge to call it rubbish. I don’t want to offend individuals so rather than do this I will take a break.
Social networks are about people connecting and conversing. It is about sharing what inspires us both through the adventures we have and through the links we share. Every article and headline should inspire us. For as long as social media practitioners focus on telling us how to feel rather than provide a description of the content of articles I will stay away.
Conversations are personal and current affairs articles should be factual. When a network like Facebook no longer has conversations and when articles are emotional the world is upside down and the model is broken. It is time for social networks and social media to become personal once again.
It amuses me that I write this about facebook. I wrote the same about twitter a few months and years ago. Social networks and their strategists keep making the same mistakes.
Social Media and the Human Return on Investment, because contrary to popular belief we use social networks to socialise, not to shop.
As we grow older and more mature our close network of friends changes and evolves. We go from school friends to university friends and then to professional friends. In the process we move from a village to another village, from a town to another town and eventually from one city to another. In the process the links we have with some friends strengthen and others degrade over time. This is modern life.
I find it hard to discern whether the return on time invested on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others is decreasing because people’s understanding of these social networks is shifting or whether it is related to growing up. As the people I know get married and have children their priorities change and privacy becomes more important. We have to keep the children safe.
Facebook, as a social network is less engaging than it used to be. The people I have as friends post less frequently, the events we can participate in together is shifting and the content shown in timelines is evolving. To compensate for the decline in friends engaging in social networks like twitter and Facebook people are following publications, brands and news sources. This flow of information is tailored to the lowest common denominator. The sensationalist writing style discourages me from following these sources of information.
I have a concern that what were social networks until two or three years ago have become advertising networks on which people occasionally socialise and interact with other individuals. I feel that a bigger and bigger portion of the time that people spend on advertising networks is looking at mainstream content and comments. On Facebook as I scroll down the timeline I notice an increasing number of adverts. Personal posts are less and less frequent. Has the community left this “social” network?
I have spent years thinking about online communities and how they interact. During this time I have seen the ebb and flow from one type of community to another across multiple platforms and applications. Within the next two to five years social networks will be virtual reality environments such as we saw with World of Warcraft, Everquest and Second Life. The question is whether people will want to socialise in virtual reality or whether it will be populated by gamers.
Every online social network is stigmatised. This stigmatisation prevents people from fully exploiting the potential of social networks. We see this stigma through the use of dating apps rather than Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks. Dating apps are stigmatised but at least you swipe left or right and you’re done. ;-). You’re only “active” for a few seconds at a time. On Facebook and twitter you need to be active for hours, days, weeks or even months… You have to be careful. You may be stigmatised. 😉
Now that most people see social networks as a waste of time it gives us more time to do other things. It gives us time to read, to do research, to watch television and even to go two or three hours without looking at a mobile or computer screen. Imagine that. 😉
I believe that on the one hand the stigmatisation of Social networks as a waste of time has discouraged people from using them to their full potential. As a result of this people feel comfortable spending ten to fifteen minutes a day on these networks. On the other hand I see marketers, public relations specialists and advertisers push for their campaign to be seen. As peer to peer communication goes down and human return on investment (ROI) decreases, and as marketing campaigns take over the timelines they are effectively closing the door on people’s motivation to spend time reading through their timeline.
You can tell when someone joins a social network by what they think the network is for. I joined twitter in 2006. No one knew what the network was best at, eventually everyone decided to use it as a conversation tool. When people understood how dynamic conversations could be the network grew. The author of “What if Twitter Died“wrote this:
“it can’t seem to stretch beyond its celebrity, celebrity follower and tech roots. If you aren’t into celebrities or the tech industry, Twitter just isn’t that appealing, especially given all the other options for online social interactions.”
It is clear from this writer’s post that he has not been with twitter since it’s earliest days. His twitter profile indicated that he arrived in 2010. That’s up to two years after the golden age of twitter ended. My previous posts have explored this topic in depth.
While social media focus on marketers and public relations professionals I will keep blogging. It allows me to express myself without providing content for platforms that have destroyed the social dimension.
Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
