Social Media Is Pointless Slag
The irony here is we're being "consumed" by the process of "consuming" social media.
If we want to understand why a system generates unfavorable output, a good starting place is to identify
1) the incentives embedded by the system's design and
2) what this type of system generates by its very nature. One way to understand this is Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, the medium is the message: the medium itself defines the message, not the content.
Per MarshallMcLuhan.com, Each medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects which are its unique message.
'The medium is the message' because it is the 'medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.'
The classic example is the medium of print media versus the medium of broadcast television. These are not interchangeable, as each medium lends itself to different avenues of communication, knowledge and emotional impact. Each is attractive / addictive in different ways, and the incentives to "consume" content in each medium differ, as do the incentives to create content in each medium.
The basic idea here is it's more productive to investigate the incentives and behaviors generated by the communication medium itself and ignore the messages / content.
What becomes immediately apparent is social media is slag--the worthless mass left over when we melt a mountain of ore to obtain a handful of useful metal--both by the nature of its incentives and by its structure.
The incentives of social media are uniquely perverse: social media platforms invite users to create content with two built-in incentives:
1. increase your social status and sense of self-worth by posting content showing yourself in the best possible light
2. attempt to earn money by posting a mountain of content to extract a handful of payments from the corporate platform.
The consumer economy systemically induces insecurity as the means of promoting the purchase of goods and services we don't need but which confer social status: "you have to have this new product/service or you're low status."
Given the mass insecurity this system generates, people are starved for opportunities to increase their social standing and sense of self-worth by increasing their visibility: look at me!
Social media fulfills this desire to a T. Constantly post photos of oneself in exotic locales, dining out, looking fabulous, etc., none of which has any appeal to the truly secure individual.
This competition to gain attention generates envy and insecurity, which then feed a desire to fabricate / highlight even more looking fab content, which then generates more data and profits for the platforms.
That we don't actually become higher status or more secure by entering this competition undermines the entire exercise / "investment" of time and energy. The platform's Happy Story is that social media "connects people," but the medium only lends itself to superficial simulations of connection, not actual connections.
For that, we have email: individual to individual, not broadcasting on social media.
The financial incentives are equally attractive: sit at home (or at work) and post content for "free" (because "free" means we're the unpaid source of the platforms' profits) which can generate substantial income if our content goes viral and attracts millions of views.
By its very nature--users post as much content as they want, 24/7--social media thrives on quantity, not quality. So the way to make money on social media platforms is to post a mountain of content as the means to extract a handful of cash.
This is an ideal setup for social media platform corporations: users create content that is addictive by design--the endless scroll, keep going or you'll miss out on a terrific post!--which can then be scraped for data that can be sold to other companies while also being used to target advertising tailored to each addicted user / poster.
The platforms rake in tens of billions of dollars and dole out a tiny percentage to content creators. It's actually an amazingly one-sided extraction machine: the platforms recruit users to slave away posting mountains of content that's profitable to the platforms in the vain hope of becoming an influencer raking in big bucks from attracting tens of millions of views. The actual distribution of the money follows a power-law curve: only the few at the top make any real money, the 99.8% earn pennies or nothing.
This meager monetary inccentive also generates an unquenchable desire to post attention-grabbing content. Whether it's accurate or not is not the incentive; the incentive is to be outrageous enough to activate users' limbic attention to emotion-generating images and text.
There is no other possible output of this structure other than addiction to a pointless mountain of slag. Mighty bulldozers scoop up the raw content and extract the value via data collection and advertising, and a few nuggets are tossed to the content creators who generate the most addictive / attractive content. Everyone else is generating content in the futile pursuit of higher visibility / status / security.
Hey, Hypocrite, don't you post on social media. Yes, I do, because that's where the audience is now. If you expect me to stand on a street corner reading my content aloud (and likely being arrested as a 5150 or public nuisance), sorry, I'm in the business of creating content, and so I have to go where the audience is, which is now social media.
I don't have to "like" social media or spend any time on it to recognize that it is a global mass medium of open access. I don't post enough to ever attract much of an audience, nor is my content of the sort that attracts vast audiences. But no writer can ignore changes in the mediums of communication if they want their content to be read, oops, I mean "consumed."
The irony here is we're being "consumed" by the process of "consuming" social media. The medium of social media lends itself to Ultra-Processed Content, the cognitive-emotional equivalents of addictive-by-design Ultra-Processed snacks.
How much "nutritional value" did we extract from sorting through the mountain of pointless slag?
The answer is not enough to make the time-attention-consuming process worth our time or energy, given the degradation of our mental-cognitive health that being addicted to social media incurs by its very nature.
Social media can be productively understood as a medium labeled "to serve humans," as it consumes us to feed a profit machine that can only generate mountains of pointless slag due to its incentives and structure.
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