My Various Experiences with Social Media
I recently read an article called “Why I’ve Deleted All My Social Media,” which anecdotally describes the uselessness of social media like Twitter while arguing for the benefit of websites like Medium. In my mind, this led to a question — is Medium not social media? If not, why? Everyone is free to publish content, much like they are free to publish content on Facebook and Instagram. Where do we draw the line between blogging platforms and social media platforms, if such a line exists?
My experience with Medium, since Wei recommended it to me four years ago, has been completely positive. I have a tiny account with all of 17 followers, an account that could very well be 100,000 times less popular than that of other bloggers I know, yet Medium makes my content easy to find on Google and provides me with a wealth of information on readership. Thanks to the searching it facilitates, my most popular Medium posts get a few new reads every day.
In the world as we know it today, virtually every young professional is attempting to create a brand. I recently made a website, shared a link to the website on LinkedIn, and described the experience of building the website on Medium. Every social media account I have is meant to project to other people the way I wish to be seen — I would not post something political on LinkedIn, for example, because I wish to keep my political views away from my LinkedIn connections; I might post my thoughts about the movie Parasite on Tumblr, but I would keep that away from my Instagram. Even if I chose to delete my Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Neopets accounts tonight, I would still attempt to project myself to others but it would be in a simpler form…with just a resume, perhaps.
One danger of social media is that the ease of sharing makes it susceptible to misinformation and content theft; the ease of sharing also makes it an incredibly useful tool. Social media has had a profound impact on disaster response. A scientific article published by Johns Hopkins called You Are What You Tweet even demonstrates that tracking Twitter for keywords can lead to disease trend models that are faster than and consistent with those of the CDC.
[Quick note: This article was published in 2011. I would be curious to see if that team has experienced any renewed interest in the last few months]
Social media platforms have made significant contributions to the web community, for example with Twitter’s decision to make Bootstrap an open source tool. All of that being said, social media has a dark side that is probably worth exploring.
The Bad
Someone named Sonnet reached out to me on Linkedin about my technical writing internship at Splunk (10/10 would recommend technical writing to English majors, 5/10 might recommend to people in less related fields). I explored a little bit of her research in my own time: Under the flag of a research team at UC Berkeley, she and her team used numerous tools to analyze a particular case of misinformation, and how it was able to spread (you can read the full article here).
Smarter Every Day has an entire web series about how misinformation spreads on social media, and what a complex arms race it requires tech companies to use to fight back. In addition, there is a lot of content theft.
Though some companies are cracking down, a big problem with social media is that content creators do not have to do something first grade English teachers require — they do not have to cite their sources. If I wanted to, I could open a tab right now and title an article “Trump Announced that the 2020 Election was Cancelled.” On one hand you have the ability to produce or perpetuate blatantly untrue things, while on the other you have the ability to plagiarize.
A Few Other Negatives:
- There is some debate regarding terminology, but generally speaking social media platforms make money by advertising and selling your data. Companies like Facebook claim they do not. Others argue that they absolutely do
- Social media is addicting the way video games are addicting, assigning point-values to approval in a “check notification” feedback loop Cal Newport likens to a slot machine. Like video games, social media is something portrayed in an alarmist sort of way (this article in Newsweek compares it to a drug, which is an analogy I have gradually decided to reject), but the addicting quality is hard to overlook
- Overuse of social media can lead to depression
The Good
My family used to keep an album of pictures; it is probably still around. The images would take time to develop. If anything ever happened to them, they would be lost. Now past photos are available at the touch of a button. Now entire lives can be traced out via Facebook timeline, something rather eloquently commented on by Modern Love.
Memory is fallible, but now social media serves as a record of things that have happened. In addition, these last few months have presented us with a horrible crisis and a source of both panic and depression…but also, in isolating people, an opportunity to reach out.
Social media consolidates communities. Social media allows people with shared interests to connect. To top it all off, social media is worth quite a bit of money.
According to Vox (cited via Fox, according to the box), social media influencers can make $50,000 per post. It is now fairly common for companies to hire full-time employees whose primary purpose is maintaining social media presence. The industry is enormous, and whoever wins the race to create the most addicting social media platform could create a company worth $1 billion.
My Personal Experience
I still remember the night when I realized Facebook had no more status message limit: I told everyone there was no limit, then Alex immediately attempted to upload a full text copy of War and Peace and called me a liar. I started to write really long Facebook statuses. I repacked one status as a Word document, then sent it to ThoughtCatalog.
At 32,400 whatever-that-count-means’, that post is likely the most popular thing I have ever written. The content itself is fairly innocuous and non-informative, but that is exactly what I wanted — a short, humorous post to show.
My posts on Medium are viewed by even fewer people, but I am a lot happier with their readership (particularly this post, which actually might come up on the first or second page when a user Googles “UC Davis Computer Science”). This post was actually informative. ThoughtCatalog, if nothing else, is the best and worst of both worlds. At best, ThoughtCatalog is a place for incredibly diverse thoughts without any barrier to entry but an editor with loose guidelines and a few hundred submissions. At worst, ThoughtCatalog is an open place for people to share misinformation, or even incite violence without having to face a thorough fact checking and editing process.
Informative posts on social media are fantastic: A few of the things I have found on Medium, including an article about Kotlin Room, have been even more useful than official documentation because all users are free to post content and upvote things they deem relevant. I am a little more wary of self-improvement blog posts, as they tend to be written by people who have a quota to fulfill and understand the “click-potential” of short pieces promising to improve a life in ten minutes of reading…but some writers are very qualified on the matter, and deserve the praise their work has received.
GIF-only blog posts are garbage, and I hate everything about them, except maybe the ones with golden retriever puppies and the one of a corgi riding on a turntable.
Scratch that, I just changed my mind about GIFs.
Closing Thoughts
I think that social media can be a good tool, so long as its users recognize that it only serves to project the image of a person. If a resume is only a surface-level account of a person’s career, then a LinkedIn account is only a digital extension of the resume. In the same way, Facebook is a little bit like the digital extension of a photo album.
At worst, Facebook is an illusion or the false reflection we mistake for reality. At best, Facebook is one of the things we leave behind to remind people of who we were, what we did, and what it was like when we were together.
