Yes, yes, heard it all before. And it’s never matched my lived experience.
Social media does have a powerful use case: keeping in touch with friends and family you don’t see often. It feels trite to watch a video of them with their kid and give it a ‘like’ but I’d miss it if it were gone. Especially if it was still there for everyone else, I’d miss their collective presence more than they’d miss my singular one.
Rather than another scolding post telling everyone to delete social media I’d much rather folks think and talk about how we can make a better social media, preferably divorced from the control of giant corporations.
The FOMO is to get you to download the app, make an account, and deter you from uninstalling.
The real game is to keep you on the platform when you compulsively open it. You go in to check in on your second cousins, you stay to scroll through their TikTok clone or whatever attention harvesting algorithm is trendy currently.
Social media does have a powerful use case: keeping in touch with friends and family you don’t see often. It feels trite to watch a video of them with their kid and give it a ‘like’ but I’d miss it if it were gone. Especially if it was still there for everyone else, I’d miss their collective presence more than they’d miss my singular one.
Rather than another scolding post telling everyone to delete social media I’d much rather folks think and talk about how we can make a better social media, preferably divorced from the control of giant corporations.