Hi Colin!

Curious what your experience and thoughts are using social media and how they figure into your me-shaped universe.

Best,

Jen

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Hey Jen!

One important thing to remember about social media is that it’s not inherently good or bad.

These networks are what we choose to make of them, and that means we can relegate them to whichever portions of our lives we like, custom-tailoring habits around their use to help us enjoy the positives they offer while diluting some of the negatives.

We can also extract them from our lives entirely if they prove to be useless to us, or if their pro-to-con ratio falls too far out of balance.

There are incentives in the world of social networks that inform how they behave, how they’re built, and how we interact with them. And some of these incentives can lead the companies behind them to conduct themselves in ways that are detrimental to their users’ health and psychological well-being.

Most social networks monetize attention: we click around, look at things, interact with stuff (liking, sharing, commenting), watch videos; and all of these behaviors allow them to then sell advertisements to people and companies who want to reach us with their offerings. They interject those ads amidst all the other media we consume and conversations we have.

Those advertisements are priced based on how many people, and how much of those peoples’ time and attention, they’re able to access.

So if they can get more of us consuming what they’re offering, and if they can keep us glued to our screens longer, they’re improving their monetarily relevant metrics. They’re able to sell more ads, and increase the prices on those ads.

What’s more, if they’re able to break their audience and those clicks into more specific, ever-more-granular chunks, they can then sell precisely the right kind of attention: feed ads to the exact audience the advertiser wants to reach.

Which means they can increase those prices even further, because fewer ad-dollars will be spent displaying ads to non-relevant demographics. Young people won’t see ads for life insurance, and older folks won’t see ads for vape pens.

Having more data about us, then, supports their bottom-line. All they have to do to get filthy rich is violate everyone’s privacy pretty much constantly.

In their minds, of course, they’re not creepily stalking us—they’re increasing the value they can offer to their advertisers while encouraging us and everyone else to be more participatory on their networks, for as long as possible each day.

Their ambitions, then, are not necessarily “wrong” in some absolute sense, but they’re also not generally aligned with ours.

Networks like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter are economically incentivized to keep us staring at our screens, to invade our privacy, and to keep us “engaged”—which can mean anything from outrage-sharing clickbait and harassing strangers with opposing political opinions to liking a band’s page and sharing your wedding photos.

My approach to dealing with these networks is not to assume malevolence, but to instead assume a misalignment of goals: I want to use these tools intentionally, to broadcast certain messages, to follow people who know things I don’t know, to stay in touch with people. They, in contrast, want me to stay immersed in their content at any cost, viewing ads and filling their coffers constantly and perpetually.

It’s possible for us to get most of what we want from this relationship without suffering the worst of the downsides, but it takes work. A lot of work.

And that work starts with taking a big step backward to sort out exactly what we want from each network, in detail. What role it currently plays in our lives, and what a more optimal relationship with that network—in terms of achieving our individual, us-shaped goals and feeling more fulfilled and healthy—would look like.

I personally love social networks, and many of the other tools on which we tend to foist the blame for our lost time, sense of overwhelm, and lack of robust relationships in the modern world.

It’s possible to build habits and structures that allow us to benefit from the good stuff, though—all the wonders of modern technology—without being drained of privacy and energy and focus in the tradeoff.

We just have to recognize that these companies and networks are behaving based on morals and values that are different from ours, and that we must act based on that knowledge; must support and protect our own priorities and interests.

It may also mean we need to introduce new habits and rules into our lives, like keeping all notifications on our phones turned off part of the day, or pruning our timelines to ensure we only see posts from immediate family and close friends, to achieve a healthier balance.

Perhaps most importantly, it requires that we take responsibility for how we use these networks. We have the power to define their role in our lives, if we choose to do so.