to BeReal or not to BeReal
social media sucks. that's it.
You don’t need to look very hard to find people complaining about the state of technology and the Internet — whether it’s supposedly corrupting children with depictions of sex and violence, ruining work-life balance by letting your boss pester you with emails at ungodly hours of the night, or destroying academic standards by making it trivial to cheat, such doomsaying is as old as electricity. Over the past few years, though, a surprising new observation has become common: to more and more users, the Internet feels boring, a true feat for something that is basically a universe unto itself. The phenomenon is perhaps best summed up by a viral tweet bemoaning that the 2010s Internet is just “five websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” Even setting aside the hyperbole, it’s hard not to feel like every popular website is now essentially offering the same set of services: in particular, all of them are trying to become social media.
Even though we’ve just started, we already feel like broken records saying “social media” — not only is it everywhere, but everyone talks about it everywhere: its drawbacks, its effects on “the youth”, and how it’s changing and launching and killing whole industries. It also feels nebulous to say “social media” as though the intricacies of each particular platform can be summarized in such a broad term.
What used to be a free tool of distraction and connection enabled by the ever-improving technological capabilities of seemingly-virtuous Silicon Valley companies is now a cesspool of targeted ads, sponsored and suggested content, and AI-generated trash and propaganda. Now it feels like every company wants to leverage social media, if not become it (we’re looking at you, LinkedIn). Maybe we’re just naysayers, but there’s a sense in the world that everyone is just tired, yet unable to close the app. Whether it’s apathy, addiction, or a desire for inclusion and escapism, it doesn’t seem likely that these platforms are going anywhere or changing their diabolical strategies unless some legislative reforms with actual teeth overhaul the whole dichotomy — in other words, unlikely at least in North America.
On the plus side, the rampant and universal proliferation of these apps and websites have democratized fame to an extent no one could have predicted even a decade ago. Anyone is capable of generating their personal fifteen minutes of fame, and even leveraging that into further and more long-term opportunities — very demure and mindful of them. And of course, the original promoted benefit of social media: it’s easier to stay in touch with friends, embodied perfectly by our grandparents finding old classmates on Facebook and culminating in a decades-late meet-up to reminisce about the good ol’ days. As a counterpoint, it’s worth considering if you really, really, care what that one guy from history class in grade nine is up to these days — let’s be honest, you have better things to do.
Unfortunately, we’re writing this article because it’s possible that social media is not a net positive to society — it’s not a purely beneficial enterprise. At this point it’s almost cliché to describe how much these benefits are outweighed by social media’s harms.
We give up our privacy and our time, more of it than we would need to in real life. We become susceptible to the traps of parasocial relationships with celebrities and influencers to whom we are just metrics to market to, potentially forgoing real friendships (and even the money in our accounts) along the way.
There’s also the issue of feeling observed — previously, we would feel this way in the locker rooms before gym class, or in front of the class while doing a presentation. But social media has made it so every moment that you are not alone and in a non-public setting is an opportunity (or a threat) for publishable content. How many people end up in the backgrounds of gym selfies, comedic Instagram reels, and Karen-of-the-week videos?
In addition to a lack of privacy, we feel that we have to be up to date on every meme and moment and trend in order to fit in — who has the time (or money) for such a ridiculous endeavor? We believe that everyone cares what we think, even if our opinion is a copy-paste of someone else’s, which floods the internet repository with people tweeting (x’ing?) about political candidates and reviewing trivial phenomena like this week’s Crumbl cookie flavors.
The issues with social media and body image (and comparison in general) have been covered in mainstream media ad nauseum, but it’s still worth saying here: while plenty of paper and digital media impacted people’s insecurities about themselves and their opinions of others’ appearances and wealth before social media existed, it was easier to close the magazine, turn off the movie, or otherwise escape from the source of the problem before it was compartmentalized into a pocket rectangle that also housed many other features that we can’t avoid interacting with daily: phones, calendars, grocery lists, GPS, even apps that track insulin and measure the speed and elevation of your run. The idea that you can’t see your high school classmate’s engagement photos without also being attacked by Shein hauls, forty-step skincare routines, and home decor DIYs that look like they belong on Architectural Digest is novel, but it has become normalized — we just accept it as part of the whole package.
A few other trends that belong on the above list: walk-in closet tours that only contain luxury handbags, strategically angled workout videos to show off the assets, and montages of identically-beautiful Santorini trips. A trend that does not belong: “look at this funny thing my dog/cat/kid did,” which will always be appreciated and enjoyed like we used to on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Among the most discussed of these cons is the ease with which social media has enabled radicalization and conspiratorial beliefs. When pretty much every belief — no matter how implausible or factually incorrect — has a dedicated social media community dedicated to promoting it and denouncing skeptics as heretics, attempts at deradicalization or re-establishing shared truths become increasingly futile. Even comparatively apolitical niche communities can foster harmful delusions and groupthink — perhaps most famously, there exists a “pro-anorexia” subculture on platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr essentially dedicated to maintaining participants’ disordered eating behavior.
The issue is that social media is not a utility, but a product — capitalist goals drive the project forward, and it took us too long to collectively realize there is no such thing as a free lunch. Either we pay, or they harvest data about us and sell the real estate on our webpages to advertisers — increasingly, the latter is occurring even alongside the former. And this system puts us all at risk, but especially kids growing up in a world where they can’t escape technology.
The amount of digital access that children today have is exponentially greater than only a decade or less ago. Since as long as we have had this technology, people have wrung their hands about the negative impact on children, and while their arguments had merit, they were probably somewhat exaggerated. TV and video games are not good for kids in large doses; but the physical limitations of these devices and well as a prior cultural remnant of “go outside and play with the neighborhood kids, be back by dinner” practically and necessarily limited the time children could spend on them. Handheld devices changed all that — an iPad, a Nintendo Switch, or even a parent’s smartphone with Netflix or Disney+ or YouTube Kids queued up undoubtedly made it easier for parents juggling a wriggly kid in a shopping cart at Target, but it also started the dependence and routine of personal device use early in the child’s life. A dopamine rush from a colorful and nonsensical video will almost always win out over a trip to the playground, both for kids and for parents living in an increasingly stressful environment without inexpensive child-care options, family help, or the ability to make a good life on a single income.
It also seems safer to let kids play on a tablet than play out on suburban streets with cars that are getting so large that they cannot even see a child over the hood, creating a massive blind zone that is already increasing pedestrian accidents in North America; or an urban environment with media-fueled prevalence of random violence and kidnappings; or rural areas where a misstep in a field can lead to a tetanus infection (can you tell we’re not country folk?). But social media and devices in general are not safer, they’re just different. Predators have migrated to every app that kids and teens use, from Facebook and Snapchat to even Roblox and, perhaps most worryingly, the Instagram accounts of young children whose parents want to become influencers-by-proxy. Without the media literacy that millennials acquired through experience (read: trial and error plus a lot of online encounters that were freaky in retrospect), children today are at risk of their naïveté being exploited; stranger danger is a less likely scenario than being groomed online by someone who you mistakenly trust to handle details about your real life as an adolescent.
Physical safety isn’t the only thread that social media poses to children. Online platforms’ financial desires to increase user “engagement”, typically measured in terms of quantity of posts interacted with, incentivize them to promote content that uses behavioral tricks designed to obtain as many clicks as possible. This typically takes the form of short, attention-grabbing videos presented in an infinitely scrollable user interface, allowing users to easily and mindlessly watch “just one more.” Psychological research is increasingly finding the effects on attention spans to be devastating, and anecdotal reports from teachers about students increasingly incapable of engaging with even simple novels seem to justify the concern — but there’s a reason a flurry of anecdotes is called anecdata.
We’ve spent most of an article discussing societal harms caused by various negative aspects of social media’s astronomical growth, mainly focusing on issues with certain types of content. But even if we somehow managed to magically wipe the entire Internet of every piece of misinformation and inoculate everyone’s attention span against infinite scroll videos, there’s a deeper harm being done by the sheer amount of content social media platforms force users to contend with. In simpler times, artistic media such as songs, movies, or novels typically became popular through curators — every field had some group of influential figures and publications that up-and-coming artists knew they could, informally or informally, try to appeal to to achieve positive press coverage and eventual commercial success. In the social media age, the function of curators has largely been taken up by algorithms, which are both more opaque (few if any people outside Facebook truly understand how to get a post to go viral) and less stable (Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was followed by dramatic changes in the service’s recommendation algorithm) than their human predecessors: while upstart artists of the past could at least get a somewhat accurate sense of how to impress trendy galleries or literary magazines, satisfying the algorithm in the same way is significantly harder. This decreases the amount of quality, original art the average person is exposed to, which likely contributes to declining media literacy — and now we’re back at our point about misinformation.
This has been a lot — the writers have exhausted themselves just thinking about all these points. While it’s accurate to say that none of us can change the system, we can at least look out for ourselves and our people. We can take a break from constant content overload, leave the phone in the next room, conveniently forget it in the car while on a date, save the iPad only for road trips with cranky kids, make a nice meal and keep it to ourselves, and just care a little bit less what everyone is up to unless they are sitting right in front of us or have space in our hearts (I felt a little cringe writing that but it’s true). It’s good to remind ourselves that not only is comparison the thief of joy, but our lives are meaningful even if no one else sees them via carefully curated squares and rectangles.
A recent study indicated that a majority of Gen Z users would quit social media if their friends did first — nothing is stopping us from being the first. Even if we downsize our time commitment instead of quitting entirely, life would look less bland compared to a filtered, oversaturated TikTok video.