I recently came across an essay by James O’Sullivan, a professor at University College Cork. The essay spoke to me, probably through the well traversed mode of confirmation bias, but nevertheless I believe it to be genuinely engaging and insightful.
That essay, “The Last Days of Social Media” is far more insightful and infinitely better written than this post so go ahead and read that. Don’t even worry about coming back here. This was written primarily to learn, that perhaps by slowing thought and expressing concepts I could understand and communicate my own beliefs better. Preface out of the way:
“Social media was built on the romance of authenticity. Early platforms sold themselves as conduits for genuine connection: stuff you wanted to see, like your friend’s wedding and your cousin’s dog.” — James O’Sullivan
Social media is dying. Well maybe. The original tenets of social media have long ago transformed or (d)evolved into a consumerist first, one to many platform, that’s almost unusable for any experience that can honestly be labeled as ‘social.’
And this is the basis for the essay. That as social media increasingly becomes a commodified market for clicks, the content it contains becomes less human and we see less actual ‘connection’ online. It’s the natural outcome of the technology: Social media algorithms abstract human connection to something a computer can use, data in the form of likes and clicks. Platforms are algorithm based and therefore can be gamed by algorithmically created content. Bots flourish in this digital world; they can write at any time of the day and are always available to respond to comments. They never tire and they don’t have personal lives. They automatically self-optimize while indexing on ‘engagement.’
The bots perform well, drawing the attention of the masses. Thus to compete in this attention economy, ‘real’ creators need to create content in the likeness of a bot.
To hold attention, some creators increasingly opt to behave like algorithms themselves, automating replies, optimizing content for engagement, or mimicking affection at scale. The distinction between performance and intention must surely erode as real people perform as synthetic avatars and synthetic avatars mimic real women.
The concept evokes a connection to dead internet theory. Yet what O’Sullivan describes is something much more tragic, people operating as bots; behaving less and less like humans and more and more like the machines they work on. Each creator individually striving to achieve engagement metrics void of any actual human connection. Under this dystopian paradigm the internet doesn’t actually need to be run by bots for it to be dead. We’ve become a part of that recursive machine.
Regardless of our opinions about the state of social media, it doesn’t follow that social media is literally dying. As far as this uneducated writer can tell, social media use continues to climb. Statista, Pew and SemRush have all reported steady, if slowing, adoption rates even as we approach market saturation. Perhaps the “Last Days of Social Media” as a title creates a false perception that the world is turning away from these apps when they are in fact stronger than ever.
It might be more appropriate to say that “social” media has evolved into something entirely different. Maybe we instead start calling it “algorithmic” media and admit that when we hold our phones to our face we see more influencer posts, advertisements, and corporate shilling than we do our friends and family. Maybe we admit that the influencer with 10m followers doesn’t really know or care about you… even if they or someone on their team responded to your comment. So maybe we could abstractly say that the concept that was once social media is dead. For our purposes we’ll hold to the common vernacular and social media is very much a thriving industry.
Semantics aside, the pathos of the essay resonates deeply. The scroll so often feels fake and void of meaning. Every post screams for attention yet precious few provide any real value. It’s impossible to tell what’s legit and what has been fabricated. It’s impossible to have a sense of truth in these posts so devoid of context and nuance. Cognitively, we know that the content we’re seeing isn’t based in reality nor does it edify our mental health but we continue on. As O’Sullivan writes:
“The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing. We’re drowning in this nothingness.”
The algorithm rules the internet.
On my twitter feed a video pop ups of a guy painting a cieling efficiently in heelies. It’s comedic and brought a smile to my face. There’s a text overlay informing you that this man is “the new guy.” However, after a moment of critial thought you realize that in reality, he’s most definitely not the new guy and this whole video was made for the gag.
The next video is Bryan Cranston closing a containment door before his wife can escape, captioned over with “Choosing between saving your family or the world is the toughest decision to make for anyone.” The post does not mention where the clip is from and replaced the original audio with a sad music track. It’s on twitter but it features the omnipresent tik tok watermark. (After a little digging I was reminded that the clip is from Godzilla and the world was not at stake when the door was closed)
And on and on ad infimum.
So long as we get our dopamine hit, we’ll scroll. What’s real and what isn’t doesn’t really matter to us. Spongebob fleeing the police may be followed by an immigrant getting arrested at a courthouse.
Fictional comedic hyperbole can be immediately followed by tragic current events causing a mental dissonance where the real and fake are displayed side by side with equal weight and authority.
With the advent of AI tools such as Sora non-reality posts have become more and more common. Even government sources post AI generated images which creates a lack of truth at a national/institutional level. Everything you see online should be assumed to be false. This is a season where cynicism reigns and perhaps rightly so.
At more mundane and trivial levels the line between real and fake is much more blurred. Do not all LinkedIn posts sound the same? Are clips I see misleading? Is that headline true? I’m lost in sea of engaging content, it’s not as if I’m above it. Each wave of information influences my understanding of the world. Each post requires the careful practice of discernment or else I risk contaminating my perception of events and people based on intellectually flawed and vapid click bait. But really, when I’m scrolling how often am I actually engaging in critical thought? And so truth is lost is noise.
In this article I felt seen, and understood. Social media is no longer (if it ever was) the democratic market of ideas we were promised. There is no true connection or discussion to be found there.
“Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks.”
“Yes yes,” I mutter, once again imagining myself a bastion of objective intelligence in this cultural moment, grounded in ‘the real’ and recognizing social media for the lie that it is.
But this morning I spent an hour on threads. Doing nothing but scrolling. I don’t even like what I see, I’m not enjoying myself. In fact, I actively despise what I’m doing. I’m just scrolling. My own addiction for colors and noise is satisfied as I choose a meaningless doom scroll over… anything else.
The antidote, O’Sullivan argues, to this version of social media is a series of smaller networks.
The future points to a quieter, more fractured, more human web, something that no longer promises to be everything, everywhere, for everyone.
This isn’t the first time such a strategy has been proposed. The Indie Web is a movement taking a similar tactic. Decentralizing the internet allows for much greater ownership and agency over what sort of content you see. This allows you to be much more intentional with your time online — no longer beholden to the arcane algorithm of a mega corp that controls our digital lives we would be free to consume what we want to. To choose content and experiences that actually enriches us.
He expands on the concept at length, imagining a world where users do have true choice over what they see. Where perhaps people have a federated digital profile that can seamlessly transfer between different communities. Maybe the communities themselves are seen as public utilities with transparent governance. Maybe people have a say or vote over what sort of content will be prioritized within a specific ecosystem.
At the time of this writing I’m a little jaded and cynical. I’m skeptical of O’Sullivan’s proposal for a brighter online future, we humans are incapable of creating the utopian futures we imagine… but I want to try anyway. I want to experiment and see, because while it won’t ever be perfect maybe it will be better.
