Our Unsocial Social Media

We're All Just Talking into a Void; That Anyone Hears us is an Anomaly, Not the Norm.

I don’t know why we call it “social media.” It’s anything but.

To be sure, early versions of it were. Strap yourself into the Delorean as we go back in the time machine to that bygone era known as the ‘90s.

So this whole post is going to sound like some old grampa kvetching about the “olden days,” but it’s important we track the evolution and contrast it with today’s world so we truly understand the differences.

In the years B.I. (before Internet), to be social meant you either went to someone’s home or called them on the phone. You would call or knock on their door and say, “Hello, how’s it going? Let’s do something fun?” It had to be mutual since no one would just let any random person walk into their house or chat with them endlessly on the phone. I do have to make an exception for the odd groups of people who loved to call “hotlines” or “chat lines’ set up by semi-famous celebs, which usually had “976” prefixes and charged by the minute. Dionne Warwick had a famous astrology hotline and Alyssa Milano a “teen steam” hotline.

Getting back, “being social” meant actual interaction. Then the Internet came along and the world was glorious. You could email friends, chat in “chat rooms” about common interests, meet people and start dating online through Match.com. It completely revolutionized how we interacted with people. It did not replace the previous modes of communication yet, it was an additional means by which people interacted and met others.

But it was still kind of garbled. Google wasn’t around yet; most searched for what they wanted through Yahoo, Webcrawler or some early form search engine. Most individuals logged onto the internet through America Online (AOL), which had it’s own social networks, chat rooms and news feeds. When Eric Schmidt said that “the Internet was going to replace the phone book,” he was right, but at the time we still needed the phone book. Chatrooms and comment boards were the way most people interacted on the Internet. It wasn’t “social” media yet, but it was the start.

Issues with comment boards were that there were Internet trolls, even back then. They would disrupt conversations, post disgusting content, and dissuade you from going to sites regularly if not moderated well. Anonymity and a libertarian attitude of “anything goes” were their hallmarks and when the slightest crack of “let people speak” reared its head, they blew through that loophole like a herd of rhinos through a hula hoop.

Then came a guy named Tom.

In 2003, Tom Anderson started a company, which was a knockoff of a site called “Friendster” and who’s biggest attribute was in fact a mistake. MySpace debuted and it changed the paradigm; instead of going to a site to speak your mind and express yourself, people could now have their own Internet listing expressing who they were as people and friends and viewers could come to them. When people signed up, the first “friend” they received was of Tom, and this picture was included to over 200 million profiles in the early 2000s. I could go on about the rise and fame of MySpace and Tom, but this brief video does it so much better than I ever could, and even lets you know what Tom is up to now.

With MySpace, you saw the advent of people posting pictures of themselves and expressing themselves in a much more casual format. You also saw the start of some of the worst attributes of today’s modern social media, with more abusive online bullying and the rank narcissism that permeates online culture. MySpace Tom sold MySpace to News Corp (Fox) in 2009, for $500,000,000 and he’s been an enigma ever since. He probably could have made more but for the a Harvard engenue named Mark Zuckerberg.

With Facebook, Zuckerberg built on the appeal of MySpace, but instead of a “phone book” open to everyone on the Internet to peruse, users could select more discriminately who saw content they posted; privacy settings put control in the hands of the account holder. People left MySpace for Facebook in droves and turned it into one of the largest companies in the world, and the most used social media platform ever. Facebook had finally supplanted the phone book, and the Apple iPhone (and other smartphones) would revolutionize the social website altogether. Now people could take pictures or post from wherever they were, at any time of day, in the palm of their hand. Facebook use skyrocketed, along with fledgling social media sites like Twitter.¹

People were more connected than ever before. They could express themselves, post pictures to Instagram (bought by Facebook), videos to YouTube (owned by Google) or TikTok (owned by the Chinese Communist Party), and their thoughts on anything to Twitter, Substack, Reddit, or any slew of Internet boards. When huge events occurred, following them live on Twitter with new reports and events happening in real time was insanely addicting.

But the trolls persisted. They were always around. We never really tuned them out. And with each broad new step into Cyberspace we went, they were amplified with it. Moderate them out and you were a censor; keep them on and they ruin it for everyone else. As social media use grew in the 2010’s America’s well being declined, rapidly. This was especially true for those growing up post 9/11. According to a Yale research study of American teens ages 12-15, those who used social media over three hours each day faced twice the risk of having negative mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety symptoms. Symptoms of depression and anxiety skyrocketed in high school students.

And the more people posted, the less people were listening. Excluding the numbers for large accounts (over 100,000 followers), the average numbers of likes, replies and shares for most users has stayed the same or gone down with each year and each post; the number of posts continues to increase exponentially, but the number of people reading and responding to each one is declining for most, further fueling depression.

I’d like to say we are on a decline in social media, but that just isn’t true. Following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which he renamed “X”² he opened up the doors and sacked the content moderators. Now every troll in the world, and the worst of the worst, flooded the network driving out regular users.³ People stopped going there and looked for alternatives. For the most part, there’s been four that have sprung up in it’s place:

• Mastadon, which is where the most leftist of the left went.

• BlueSky, which is probably the most alike to the Twitter set up, but is favored more by content creators than it is consumers; I see a lot of large publishers and writers on there, but very few perusing and it seems to be pretty siloed.

• Threads, which is Meta/Facebook’s, answer; it’s probably the broadest in popularity, but least friendly to use, and seems to skew notably left of center.

• Truth Social; this is Donald Trump’s knockoff which just went public. It’s as shitty as he is, and just like him, it’s horribly overvalued, not that good and only seems to be a place where he spews hatred and his followers on the site eat it up.

None of these are “social” in any sense of the word; they are just opportunities to talk out into the void. They're channels for people to flood the zone with their content, which people consume less and less. Nobody’s listening online anymore. It’s time to go back out into the world, knock on a friend’s door and say “Hello, how are you doing? Let’s do something fun.”

PurpleAmerica’s Recommended Stories

If you want a real eye opening experience about what large internet companies know about you, I strongly suggest watching the documentary, “The Social Dillemma.” The film provocatively looks at the information they accumulate and push to consumers, many of the social issues that result from overuse, and the ethics behind our online world.

PurpleAmerica’s Cultural Corner

Can’t mention Facebook without bringing up one of the greatest films of the 2000s so far, The Social Network. This trailer actually hints at many of the issues we are confronting today, and it was released 14 years ago.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

This video covers the top 10 websites in the world through the past 30 years and documents their rise and fall. It really is mesmerizing to watch. It ends just as Musk acquires Twitter, but is full of other interesting information, such as who would have thought that Pornhub gets more visits per month than Amazon.com? You can even watch the decline in Facebook numbers as Instagram surges upward.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

“Hello, is there anybody IN there?”

—Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. Twitter was around since 2006, a year before the iPhone was revealed. It’s rise was consistently tied to the rise of smartphone use until the last few years.

2. Which to me always sounded more like a porn site.

3. I’ve always likened this to the economic “Gresham’s Law” which states “bad money dries out good.” Well, bad users and bad data always drive out good users and good data. Call this the PurpleAmerica corrollary to Gresham’s Law.