Social media formats
Jun-2020
Platforms and their formats are a subject I’ve been very interested in for a long time. Though, lacking the engineering know-how, and the capital required for such a project, I’ve generally stopped pursuing the train-of-thought past vague thought-experiments and reasonable practicality.
Facebook serves as an analogue to ancient town squares or marketplaces (agora as they were called in Ancient Greece). Its format does not do anything particularly well, which is exactly why it can serve that function. Here, we can liken ads on news feed to merchants peddling their wares; smaller hobby groups to guild-houses and university forum favorites to the stout and portly town criers standing atop makeshift platforms of barrels or wooden crates – bellowing notices and announcements from the town chief or bounties for criminals on the loose.
I’m sure there are many the extrovert who have a Facebook tab open without doing anything; you just feel more connected. We can resemble this to the stereotype of a working man falling asleep in front of the television; the news channel a mumbling drone in the background; his hand lightly holding a half-empty beer and his head nodding faintly forward.
On Facebook, the ability to identify; or rather the lack of anonymity serves a greater good and evil. It serves as a deterrent for troublemakers and schemers but is also a record of one’s social interactions, thereby allowing the opportunity in being wielded as a targeted weapon to bring down specific individuals; the frequency of Twitter/Facebook scandals inevitably come to mind.
Reddit is the English-speaking world’s forum. Its users supposedly acknowledge a post or comment’s contribution to Truth by up-voting it, and down-voting it vice-versa. Like Facebook, its infinite scrolling allows for continuous stimulation; ever-present news or advertising or funny videos or memes to monopolize your attention and keep you hooked. Individual sub-reddits often hold biased opinions – beckoning the ever-present danger of turning into echo-chambers; yet can one envisage if things were really any different or better in the old days: before the telephone, the internet, railroads and automobiles, when everything travelled by word of mouth and messengers on horseback? When fearful superstitions and heroic myths made creatures and humans appear larger-than-life?
Instagram has similar reach, though for one reason or another, it has become personally tailored promotion en masse. You could epitomize many ‘influencers’ as the sleazy advertising salesman of the past. It is capitalism at its purest; pure and rational greed for status or money. The difference being: where snake-oil salesman sacrifice their word and integrity for profit, many female ‘influencers’ sacrifice their chastity, revealing ever-more skin in extremely original poses and calf-tenses. This is, of course, not to say that all female users with a large following are like this, and not all of their posts deserve this criticism. Instagram’s one saving grace has been their copied iteration of stories, originally from Snapchat; essentially encouraging its users to engage in sharing personal moments from their lives when perhaps curation is not needed or wanted.
Tinder is alike in this manner. Its market appears to be sexual selection; but is really ego-gratification – many men might consider their story of how they tricked “an 8 or a 9” into having sex with them as their magnum opus. Whereas women no doubt enjoy being matched with a striking man as affirmation of their beauty; doubtlessly not following through as they’ve obtained what they were looking for in the first place: narcissistic satisfaction.
It is in this milieu that ‘ghosting’ has become more prevalent, to the extent that we’ve designated an actual term in describing the deplorable practice. Take a moment to consider how fucked-up and inhuman it is to ‘ghost’ someone. Our egos have become so unbelievably fragile we have to delude ourselves into pretending someone didn’t exist so that we can dispense with them with minimal effort.
Before the twenty-first century, we would look down and talk badly of employers or friends who just up-and-vanished. If you wanted to start a new life in a new town: you’d need a new name and identification; our actions had consequences. With unadulterated selfishness becoming the norm, of course using women for physical pleasure and men for emotional dependence would also, become the norm. Unfortunately, we’ve skipped over a tiny-detail: we’re humans, not machines.
Upon matching with an old (but evidently honest) acquaintance, I asked if she was looking for “future husband material”, to which she replied, “Nahh not actively looking but I like seeing what my options are. Bit of an ego boost haha”. Needless to say, I have a hundred times more respect for her honesty than those who prey on others for self-gratification only to throw them away after they’re done.
Imagine raising a generation of children who think ‘ghosting’ is the acceptable, even desirable standard of human behaviour. In fact you don’t have to imagine; it is unmistakably apparent in certain populations already. All you have to do is open up Instagram or pornography websites to understand how depraved and therefore fucked civilization will become.
It is as if sociopaths see an opportunity to repeatedly reenact their trauma, and in doing so enact it on the rest of the world; indeed they might succeed if we stand by and take it.
“The answer’s nothing. I have no feeling about you one way or the other. You’re like… like lint or a bottle cap. You’re just a thing to remove.”
– Teddy, ‘The Equalizer’
The great thing about movies is that entertainment is built into its format. Most people are not capable of appreciating the full horror behind a sentence such as: “You’re just a thing to remove”, until they confront historical photos as these:
