Maybe we should all embrace the downfall of social networks, and maybe my (and our) need for a global water cooler is just a vestigial feeling we’ll all be rid of in a few years. But even before this era fully ends, before Twitter and Reddit turn into MySpace and Friendfeed and basically disappear from my life, I find myself longing for what they once were. Still are, maybe, just not for long. I miss everybody, and I don’t know if I’ll ever find them again.
from So where are we all supposed to go now? (The Verge)
I was there in the heady days of 2004-2007. We saw that we were all becoming compulsive data capturers (text, video, images), that data was emanating from us like contrails as we went thru life, that the internet was breaking up into morsels, and we’d all want to search for, keep up with, and recombine those streams and morsels.* And we were watching in real time as a billion people took up mobile phones, changing expectations of connection, communication, and access to information.
We talked about social objects, ambient awareness, digital pheromones, the mobile lifestyle (and manifesto, haha), lifestreams, tight-loose-pubilic connections, the mobile aspect of sensors. I even tried to capture all this in one story I wrote called “One Night“.
And the phone, already the best peer to peer social networking tool, would be the doorway to all of that (disclaimer, I was at Nokia at the time).
I even tried to build upon that doorway, reflecting what I thought was the future of connecting people.
Rotten at the foundations
While actively promoting and using social media, as the growing beast was named, I quickly soured on it. Already back in 2008 I had killed my LinkedIn and Facebook for the first time. I became more particular of who and how I used social media. I became more a corporate user than a personal user.
I recall, also, seeing how the promise of the Cloud was actually corporate control in disguise. “Take back the Cloud” was my call to federate social media networks, put it back in the hands of the users. Yes, almost 15 years ago.
Suddenly after a long time
In the past few months, rotten foundations have finally crumbled spectacularly. Now everyone is finally pointing at the emperors for the bare villains they are.
Twitter is the poster child for this implosion. But for years folks have been circling around social media companies – government, commentators, tech publications – realizing that, really, we selected for the wrong things and ended up with the shit we selected for.
There have been some good articles listing out the process of ‘enshittification‘ of social media networks. There’s hope that maybe Mastadon and ActivityPub** – ways to federate social media networks – are the future, the savior. Alas, I think that’s trying to do the same thing a different way – might not be enough to fix what’s broke.
Where from here?
Go read this article, that I’ve quoted above. The article has a good overview of the long overdue collapse of social media and ponders what remains and where things might go.
Echoing a bit the quote I use above, I hope that we don’t try to redo the past 10 years in another form only to fall back into our bad habits (“be careful what you select for”). What I hope is that we understand the situation and potential outcomes and ask ourselves what is it we want (our hopes), what we don’t want (our fears), the tradeoffs we’re willing to make and not make, and what course of action best serves that understanding.
I’m not the one to answer these questions, even tho I do have my own answers.
I just know that we shouldn’t try to rebuild what we had in different clothes, that doing something over and over again and expecting a different result is nuts.
I also know the suddenness of the social media networks collapses were long in the making and the majors were laughing all the way to the bank (just see the date on my links above).
He’s dead, Jim
Technologies never really die, they just end up being de-emphasied. People still use buggies and buggy whips, but not like before. Don’t mention faxes to me. Even Myspace is still around.
And every year we have some darling tech that changes our expectations of what communication, connection, and information should be like.
I look forward to see what comes next, what the complexification of our connections, society, and organizations will look like, and who the next behemoths leading them will be.
What about you?
Image courtesy of DALL-E. Prompt “the death of social media as a dense collage”. I chose this one perhaps because I just finished watching Season 4 of Stranger Things and that sure looks like a gate.
*This article on Google Reader also triggered me to make this post.
**This is not the first attempt. As the article rightly points out, folks have been working the last 15 years on distributed social network protocols (heck, just see my comment on lifestream aggregators).
