Our Toxic Relationship with Social Media, Why Breaking Up is Hard to Do.
Social Media. We love it, we hate it, we ghost it, we delete it, but yet, we always seem to come back for more. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, and a slew of other platforms like Pinterest, Reddit and Twitch, are the digital societies in which we live in. Whatever your social media vice of choice, there is a platform that you can head-long immerse yourself into and yes, be algorithmically addicted to it. As Jonathan Berger writes, “Social media is like a drug, but what makes it particularly addictive is that it is adaptive. It adjusts based on your preferences and behaviors, which makes it both more useful and engaging and interesting, and more addictive.”
There has been a lot of talk recently about breaking up the robber barons of the social media age like Facebook which currently is undergoing an antitrust lawsuit. Facebook has become the target of this because of their accelerated overreach of this sector’s dominance via their takeovers of previous upstarts like Instagram and WhatsAp which are now a part of their ever expanding portfolio.
Facebook unlike past pioneering platforms like MySpace and Vine (who have both gone the way of the dodo bird) have survived because instead of trying to reinvent their own wheel to keep up with the times, they have jacked the coding tools of others to create a transformer like mega digital beast. Darwinian survival of the fittest applies in spades to when it comes to social media monopolization and while there is an obvious need for some rules and reigns, it will be a huge undertaking and one that seems unlikely to succeed.
As Sinan Aral, professor at MIT and author of The Hype Machine writes, “Social media markets tip toward monopoly because of network effects: The value of a networked platform is a function of the number of people connecting to it. As more people use the product, its value to everyone increases. The greater the number of people on a network, the greater its gravitational pull. The greater its gravitational pull, the greater the grip it has on current customers. Breaking Facebook up into its component parts might slow that process down — but it won’t change the fact that, in the long run, network effects create monopolies or near-monopolies.”
So what does Aral mean about this “gravitational pull” and “networked effects?” In simple terms, it’s not the platform that creates the conglomeration but the ecosystem and the people within it that do. This is something that I think is vital to the conversation about breaking up Facebook or any other monopolizing force in the digital marketplace as this is the underlying powerpoint to make any true impact or change. When we think of “social media” we see it as companies but what it really is are systems of control that take advantage of humans being well, human.
Since the dawn of time, us pesky humans have been trying to communicate with each other. To share information, make connections, to learn and advance. This is how we are built and it’s not just because it’s something we like to do, but rather something we need to do. The timeline of human advances through technological advances begins from the start of our homosapien origins and even though a shovel may feel very different from say Instagram, they are both tools that allow us to advance in what makes us human. As Wharton marketing professor, Pinar Yildirim notes about how social media supports this instinct, “We are used to being in contact with more individuals, and it is easier to remain in contact with people we only met once. Giving up on this does not seem likely for humans. The technology with which we keep in touch may change, may evolve, but we will have social connections and platforms which enable them.”
While both the shovel and an app may be tools, there is of course a difference because social media and the secret sauce that these companies use to make us addicted to them uses our very own neurochemical biology to get us hooked. That’s a sinistar aspect of this issue because these platforms in order to increase their revenue via our attention spans means capitalizing on our base nature to be social creatures. This is the very reason why governments and citizen groups want to break up social networks’ control and this does need to happen but just breaking it into pieces will not solve the real issues at the heart of it all.
Social media is like a multi-tentacled organism and it will just grow a new arm or clone if you cut a piece of it off. It does not thrive due to its structure but rather it’s life source which is us, humans and our need to be social and connected. As long as we let platforms drain us of our attention and data, there will always be a carrier host that wants to absorb and consume us. And while this is getting a bit too deep in horror film metaphors, this is to acknowledge that yes, this is scary, the way social media has leached into our lives in so many ways, but we have to step back and look at the bigger picture.
We are in control. It might not feel like it but we, the users, the targets, the consumers, we are in control. We have just been fooled and pacified into thinking that we are not. We feel like we are cogs in the machine, that we are just 0s and 1s that are just a blip in the matrix of these platforms. This is something that we have all been trained to accept and it all seems too complicated, insurmountable and frankly free of charge so why complain but this is not the truth. We, as the users, are the ones that hold the key in breaking up and destabilizing the monopoly that these platforms have over us. There is a reason why companies die. It’s because we stop using them. Something better, newer, comes along and we, being the fickle, disloyal creatures that we are, gladly jump ship.
This is what will happen with all the platforms currently existing. It may not happen tomorrow or even a few years from now but that’s the nature of technological evolution. This reality does not mean that we can’t do anything about it in the meantime though. We, as users, have the right to have our social media ecosystem be better and to be of benefit to us. Sure, governments, lawsuits, regulations, these are all necessary and a part of the solution but it is WE, the ones who use and supply our data that have the power to make things truly change.
Our relationship with social media is like any other type of relationship. There is the courting stage, the falling head over heels, the this is changing my life stage, the obsession stage, then comes the familiarity breeds contempt stage, the we might need to seek therapy stage, the this might be toxic stage, the break up stage, and then the I don’t know what I saw in them stage. And like all relationships, even though at certain times you think, heck, maybe this is as good as it gets, maybe this is what I deserve, take a moment and see it for what it is.
You always deserve better, you always have a choice and if it doesn’t work for you, you can make it change. You are in control. Social media, we love it, we hate it, but we don’t need it and we can find something better out there. We collectively need to make sure that the existing platforms know this. Breaking up is hard to do but as they say, there are plenty of fish in the sea and until we get what we all deserve, these companies can’t just keep doing what they do and expect us to stick around.