Some things work much better when combined. Bread, cheese and tomatoes are all pretty strong on their own, but put them together and you’ve got pizza. That’s next level. And what about cake? Infinitely better than its ingredients. Lots of people swear by cocktails. (Lots of people swear after cocktails, at other people who’ve also had a lot of cocktails.)
The point is, great stuff can happen when you mix things together. If they’re the right things. But others don’t go together. Cigarettes and petrol stations, ketchup and trifle, bagpipes and libraries. At best, you get a nondescript mush, like the product of a child mixing all the toiletries in the house together to create a ‘potion’. At worst you get something downright dangerous.
We’re all living through one of the worst lumping togethers in history. The Great Lumping Together of social media. And it’s becoming an increasingly difficult mixture to swallow.
Everyone in your phonebook ringing you at once
Social media totally screwed up the dynamic between, well, everyone. We brought everyone together; friends, family, people from school, colleagues, people from our Zumba class, people we admire, businesses we shop at, our favourite celebrities, artists and performers, politicians we support, charities we like, all into one place.
And then we started to make them act…the same.
We now expect Tesco to post memes. Jump back twenty years, if you’re old enough. Did you ever finish your weekly grocery shop and think, ‘Well, I’ve gotten everything I need to keep myself fed and nourished for the next seven days, but I’m a bit disappointed there wasn’t a repurposed still of Neo from The Matrix by the bananas’?
We used to segment our information pretty well. News came in newspapers. If you wanted articles you bought a magazine. Non-fiction and fiction were shelves in libraries and bookshops. You saw your friends at school or on weekends. Your co-workers existed only in work. You phoned your parents, maybe went around for Sunday lunch. You only ever encountered your ex’s cousin’s guitar teacher twice; once at a Christmas party, and again a few years later when you bumped into them while shopping for garden furniture.
Now it’s like everyone in your phonebook is ringing you at once.
Context switching at the speed of scroll
Social media has blurred the lines between all of this. It’s a one-stop-shop for pretty much every type of human interaction you can imagine.
During the course of five minutes of scrolling you can see people dressing up their cats, pictures of takeaway food, those political rants that use a lot of big words but don’t actually make any sense, crowdfunders, fan erotica, memes about getting old, pre-gym session photos, post-gym session photos, recommended posts about something you’ve never even heard of, 800 ads for guitar lessons because you looked at one guitar six months ago, maybe one of your friends if you’re lucky, motivational quotes, couples ripping off other couples’ reels that have gone viral, and more false information than you’d find inside a spy’s passport drawer.
It can’t be good for us. We’re jumping from topic to topic, relationship to relationship, context to context, tens or hundreds of times during the course of a scroll. Think how irritated you’d be in a real-life conversation if the other person you were talking to told you about their breakfast, a fundraising campaign for victims of the latest horrific war, a new book coming out, and a joke about how hard it is to wash spoons all in a space of a minute.
We go from the friendship mindset to being politically switched on to admiring some art to laughing at a joke to being punched in the heart by a picture of a child in a warzone to being made to feel ashamed because we’re not supporting this demographic or that demographic, to drooling over pictures of an epic cheesecake to trying not to drool over a stranger’s bikini photos.
And all the while Disney+ is advertising to you and Walgreens wants us to think we’re BFFs.
Content, content everywhere – and not a spot to think
This may be the old autism talking. I can’t get my head around so much variety. I want my online space carefully curated; I want to see just the things I’m interested in. And as an autistic, maybe I have less tolerance for things I’m not deeply interested in, and I’m not interested in things other people are.
But as algorithms become worse and worse and more people vie for our attention, everyone’s been pushed into creating more and more content in a desperate attempt to be seen.
I hate the word ‘content’ (in an internet context). It’s so nondescript, so utterly lacking in appeal or, well, content.
It’s just another word for ‘stuff’. When someone says ‘content’, they mean ‘internet stuff’.
Going online to look at ‘content’ is like going to a clothing store to buy ‘products’. “Honey, I’m just off into town to do consumerism, would you like me to exchange money for any goods or services you’re interested in?”
It literally just means the stuff inside. Like contents insurance for a house. No one whose house was burning down would kneel on the pavement and sob: “All of my contents were in there!”
Content is just what fills the internet. If you’re a content creator you’re essentially named for filling things up. You may as well call authors ‘Waterstones shelf fillers’. God knows what job titles the people who make sex toys would have.
Why is it even a term we use? Because others, like ‘filler’ or ‘padding’ are too on the nose. Content, at least, sounds neutral. It’s a term that spans everything from podcasts and articles to social media posts, reels, vlogs, stories, microblogging, photos, drawings and more.
A phrase like ‘subscribe for more great content’ therefore is so vague it’s like a tourism advert saying ‘Come to our country to see bits of it’.
And this is the reality of the world we live in. We’re overwhelmed by ‘content’, yet struggling to find anything to actually engage with.
Agenda overload
To be clear, it’s not that certain topics are better than others, or more worthy of being shared. It’s not that you should stop posting certain things on social. If you had an epic breakfast, talk about it. If your people are being discriminated against, stand up for yourself, by all means. If you thought of a great joke, share it.
I guess. I just think that social media is actually an inefficient way of getting any sort of entertainment, knowledge, enlightenment or connection. Because whatever you go on it for, it’s diluted by all the other stuff you don’t want. Everyone has a different agenda. Too much is happening at once. It’s like sitting in the cinema reading a book while listening to the radio.
And, yes, this also annoys me as a creative who wants to get my voice heard. Because platform building has become so important. Actually writing books is practically relegated to the last item on an author’s checklist now.
Writers are struggling to find traction because we’re interjecting into a thousand different conversations on a thousand different topics with updates about our book. The offline equivalent would be to shout “Book!” every fifteen seconds, regardless of what conversation you’re in. Discussing budgets in the morning meeting at work? “Book!” Trying to negotiate a lower price with your broadband provider? “Book!” Trying to tell the police that No.4 looks like the man who broke into your house and tried to beat you to death with your grandfather’s accordion? “Boooook!”
Except it’s not all “Book”, is it? Because that’s considered overly self-centred. Social media is supposed to be social, right? We’re all lumped together and expected to behave in a social way, it’s not ok to just be promoting stuff all the time.
So we have to post photos and updates about our lives, our shower thoughts, other interesting stuff we’ve seen and read, share other people’s content, curate things of interest for our community, get involved in everyone else’s stuff, interact and engage.
And it’s not that I think I’m above any of this, it’s that I don’t think that’s what I really have to offer. I’m just not interesting in those ways. And it feels fundamentally dishonest to me. Brands are trying to be our friends, even though they’re only ever there to sell to us, ultimately. And if creatives are busy creating ‘content’ to fill their social channels instead of the actual art that they’re good at, that people can consume and enjoy, aren’t we all just losing out?
But social has become the channel. It’s become where you have to be, especially as the traditional means of getting discovered and promoted continue to erode.
Just like so much of consumerism, we’re all getting less and less of what we actually want. The internet is full of low-value content, in the same way supermarket chicken is injected with water.
Searching, searching, never finding
And all the while Tesco in is trying to be sociable. Apple is doing the same. Your local hairdresser is doing the same. The Church of England…probably is; I haven’t checked.
All of us desperately trying to get noticed, and in order to do so, and to appease our algorithmic overlords, we have to create more, and more, and more. And more.
And some idiots genuinely thought that introducing AI to this environment was going to help. Create more content, faster! That’s like ringing the fire brigade because your house is ablaze, and they turn up with more fire, like the book burners in Fahrenheit 451.
Who is this good for, really? Think about your own social media: when you’re scrolling, are you entertained, engaged, informed throughout? Or do you spend most of your time skipping and swiping, finding nuggets of interest amongst the deluge of stuff?
For me, it’s definitely the latter. (If you’re the former, please do share your tips on how you curated your feed so well). If I spend 30 minutes on YouTube, that’ll be 20 minutes of scrolling and one video. I can go through Instagram and Bluesky for half an hour each and not find a single post I want to engage with.
It’s not that every post I’m seeing isn’t ‘worthy’ of my time and attention, it’s just that there’s so many different things happening, and everyone is sharing so many different aspects of themselves, that it’s statistically unlikely a lot of the posts are going to fall within the window of my own interests.
We’re all just swimming in content, producing content, consuming – or, largely, skimming over – content. And is it enriching us? Don’t get me wrong, there’s great stuff on social media. I wouldn’t bother with it if there wasn’t. But is it the content, or the FOMO on the diamonds in the mud, that keeps us going through the bad, the irrelevant, the boring and the stuff we’re just not in the mood for?
Too much information
Social media is like drinking from a firehose. Except the water tank is full of every different liquid they sell in the nearest supermarket. It’s a barrage of flavours, some of which you like, many you don’t. And some of which are poisonous. And we keep on drinking in the hope that every now and then we’ll go “Ooo, that was a bit of mango”.
I’m not telling anyone how to do social media. These views, this feeling, could be entirely my own. It may be that I just don’t ‘get’ social media; I’m not its target market. Maybe I’m just rubbish at it, and hiding from the fact I’m actually not interesting enough for people to pay attention to. It could be all of the above.
But when it comes down to social media, are you happy? Do you enjoy it? Feel fulfilled? Feel that it was time well spent?
Or does it make you feel kind of overwhelmed, anxious, confused and just…empty?
With old school media, you knew exactly what you were getting. With social media, you’re getting everything, everywhere, all at once. Including reviews, hot takes and arguments about the film Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Even if you only wanted to talk about Warhammer or see pictures of owls.
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Header photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash
