On Critiques of Social Media - Posted to Social Media

(repost from Substack: originally published May 29, 2025)

Et cetera: and others especially of the same kind : and so forth —abbreviation etc.

Any criticism of social media cannot survive the test of verisimilitude if it can concurrently perform well on social media. It is like seeing an Amish person on their cell phone. The nature of one renders the truth of the other null and void. In order for a post to satisfy the ravenous hunger of the algorithm, one must play by its rules. If an intelligent person is talking about a concept it must randomly punch in and out on occasion. It may have a bit of music, overly dramatic to create a sense of purpose (unless the goal is monetization - but that would make them a “sell-out” anyway). Its “thumbnail” must be almost wholly divorced from the true sentiment of the thesis, in order to get the apprehensive viewer to move, even slightly, out of their “comfort zone of attention” to indulge your viewpoint. By this logic, it still must subscribe to the demands of the medium. It must grip them in a way that they have often been gripped to venture into your corner of the internet in the first place (the internet has so many corners - it’s a circle), and then remain to hear the point to feed the algorithm and generate interest. It might make the viewer uncomfortable, but it can’t make them unentertained. That is the cardinal sin of social media.

It cannot provide true context for its reasoning that can’t be easily served in infographics, that by their nature will only tell a small piece of the story. And in doing so gives the opposing “ideological” side ammunition to cite hypocrisy. For they can never be entirely wrong when one is using such a truncated method of debate; there inherently will be some gliding over the truth that paints the simplistic pictures which thrive in the short format. And with that evidence of bias, you will have created a for and against side, which is the best thing a social media post can hope for. And this conflict will generate interest and time spent on the video. And the video will be far more about the conflict than it will ever be about the thesis statement: which I believe had something to do with a critique of social media. It is a slave to the medium that it trades in.

Context is slow and challenging. Context has pauses for reflection. They cannot be cut out and left on - to borrow a phrase - “the editing room floor,” (although, there is no such physical form that the discarded video may take - the pauses are tossed aside on the project “timeline” and all traces of their ones and zeros are as vanished as if they never existed.) In the land of the apps, pauses are death. Pauses are death unless they are a punchline. Pauses indicate a space for uncertainty, and that will not do in short format serious debate. For on social media the presence of confidence in a statement is of far more value than the statement's truth or worth. For the only thing of any worth on social media is attention. There is no attempt to elevate the mind - we have already reached the apex of social media entertainment: to have the mind guided by an algorithm that knows us better than we know ourselves.

However, I take exception to this. Perhaps it does not know us better than we know ourselves. Perhaps it is shaping who we are (an unoriginal thought, because I was shaped by journalists). “Ourselves” are not fully formed enough, by the ages we venture into social media, to be known without first being assigned a definition. It chooses for us which bread crumbs to follow based on the most primal instinct we exhibit in a click or a view. Instinct that may have no correlation to what makes us happy and fulfilled, but every correlation to what captures our attention. And once the process is complete - it becomes our interest. It becomes ourselves. It is so easy to be entertained when an algorithm is at the helm because, without decision or reflection, we are bought and sold. And content to be.