Social Media

I used to recommend people to start their own websites. Nowadays, I wonder if people don’t have much to say in the first place.

We can read “social media” in two ways. Either we focus on the word “social”—How are we saying it? To whom?—or we focus on the word “media”—What are we saying?

We are constantly worried about the “media” question. Is the content harmful? Anti-social? Is it bad that the videos are getting ever shorter and ever sloppier? Is it bad that we communicate in emojis? Yet these all seem like distractions to me. For one, Meta doesn’t seem too concerned about what form of media you use as long as they own the medium that you are using (Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, Metaverse…).

Instead, it seems to me that it’s really the “social” part that’s concerning. After all, Zuck majored in psychology as well as computer science. No matter what is said, the metric of its success is how socialized it is: How many people did your content reach? For how long? To what depth?

Instagram’s CEO has been saying that there’s been a paradigm shift from posting in public to sharing in private. People post less and share what they see on their feed to others instead. One terrible effect of this is that people no longer have to come up with things to say.

Meta has gone from a platform where people share content they create to a platform where people share content others made. Perhaps LLMs will turn them into a platform of “people” they make sharing content to you. Individuality becomes ever more encroached upon by our unsatiated need for socialization.

The less we create for ourselves, the more and more we have to rely on the outside world to create identities to identify ourselves with, content to content ourselves with, and narratives to narrate our lives with.

We really ought to create better for ourselves, for those we adore, and for everyone else.

Island adventures

On a bright sunday afternoon a friend and I took a boat to Tung Lung Chau, a remote island to the east of Hong Kong.