March 3, 2024
The Future of Social Media
- the ability to focus will become a rare and highly valuable skill in the future
- social platforms will continuously become more niche to cater to specific groups of people, for example an app for baristas
- there’s a general feeling that we are not yet smart enough to use social media/ai, we are somewhat like unsupervised children playing with fire
- gravitating towards the return of personal blogs, the rise of substack and patreon, apps that feel “nostalgic” becoming more popular
- social media will not die out for a long long time, if ever. unfortunately we are in the phase of it where we don't quite know how to utilize it in a useful way, we are pioneering its path for the future
- we may see schools begin to educate students on how to spot media made by AI, especially for younger children who will have a difficult time deciphering the human vs. AI made
QUESTIONS WITHOUT CLEAR ANSWERS:
- it's clear that we need to find a balance between social media and real life, but how? has anyone truly achieved this?
- is there anything that would motivate profit-hungry social media companies to stop targeting users so viciously in their attempts to keep people on their apps?
- is there a market for paid versions of ad-free social platforms? would people pay a subscription/fee for instagram without ads?
- is the influencer career dead/dying, would it have a role in the future?
- will social media and the internet in general become a landfill of AI generated content, will there be a way to filter it out easily?
Social media gives as much as it takes from us. Like anything else, it’s important to find your own personal balance with it, and that will look different for everybody. At this point in time it’s easy to imagine a grim future living with social media, many of us struggle to envision a life where it helps more than it harms. We’ve been traumatized by things we’ve seen and felt from using it, often without realizing how much it has impacted us and our views of life. Perhaps we’re not evolved enough yet to use it responsibly, and we slowly are learning how to do so. This is all so new to humanity, we cannot expect to be in perfect harmony with it within the 20 short years we’ve had it.
Generally we are all well aware of the negatives of social media, we dislike the profit-oriented companies feeding off of our weakest points to trap us in their schemes and yet we allow them to continue anyway, we’ve felt the whirlwind of a doom scroll more times than we’d like, we know every fault in the systems. Living with this knowledge is not easy but it is entirely necessary.
The more aware we can be about the ways social media affects us, good bad or neutral, on the personal and worldwide scale, the more we can begin to use it to our advantage. The world has birthed a beast, built a hall of mirrors reflecting hidden fears, a siren drawing us into seas of emotion. It is time for us to realize our role in history, this strange time of extreme paradox where we know all too well the systems imprisoning us in our own minds. We dance around the conversation, hinting at what we all know but not daring to discuss a way out. We have become the guardians of a digital panopticon. We watch ourselves dancing and performing on the screen, posing for the pictures, remembering life through our camera roll. We constantly check the vital signs of our digital selves. How’s the heart rate of the self that was living in that picture I posted? 104 likes? How many comments? All the notifications begin to feel like the sustenance tying us to existence the same way food ties us to our bodies.
The most infuriating part of it all is the fact that we are holding the keys to the cells we’ve locked ourselves into. But we are stuck in a trance. It’s not so easy to unlock the door when the mind is drugged up on dopamine and then dragged through the muck of media, feeling every type of emotion twice within the span of a ten minute scroll. It’s a double insult from the companies who do not try to hide their efforts to keep us hooked, knowing we’ll take the bait again and again regardless of how aware we are of what they’re doing to us. Change is right under the surface, we can feel it bubbling up and waiting for us to tame the beast, escape the maze of mirrors, build an ark to navigate the seas. We’ve reached a tipping point in history. The path is uncertain, we roam in the uncharted ethereal space of the internet. We are not strangers, and we cannot do this alone. There must be a collective shift in the ways we use social media, and the best way to reach it is by talking about it. It is an important time to be alive, you have a duty to find the balance between life in the real world and life on the screen. It helps to remember positive experiences you’ve had using social media, things you’ve learned or people you’ve met. Remember those, but also think of why you reach for the phone in the first place. There’s a million reasons here. Which ones are unnecessary? Make a list, cross off the ones you don’t need and replace them with another remedy of action.
What makes finding real nourishment so difficult? It’s bigger than the individual, social media is so deeply ingrained into society that it may feel impossible to maintain a full life without it. There must be a change in the fundamental ways of life. How can we create stronger communities and support each other through this time? There is a way out if we build one.