How Social Media Got Lost in Translation
We’ve been living in the metaverse for a while, the only difference is that we’re now exploring how to transpose it from 2D to 3D.
What does the term “social media" actually mean to you? In theory, the concept of social media is simple: a tool used to digitally connect people across the world. And for a while, it really was that simple. The preliminary days of social media could reasonably be traced back to early-internet forums where people could connect and discuss topics centered around a product or purpose.
Inevitably, these discussions would side-track into more personal conversations, especially as internet strangers became internet friends. Soon, we started to realize that the real power of these forums went beyond the ability to discuss products or purposes, and into the creation of community as a separate entity altogether. In the words of TV tech entrepreneur Joe McMillan, “It’s the thing that’s get you to the thing.” All you had to do was create a space for people to share their interests and morsels of their lives, and the users would take it from there. Thus began the study of online community building.
At its most basic level, the evolution of social media is not unlike the evolution of society. Unsurprisingly, the internet is largely a reflection of ourselves. Humans banded together into communities, used their combined brain power to innovate, all the while cooperating to create entertainment and commerce. We did the same thing with social media. What started as small internet communities scattered across the internet quickly turned into the modern powerhouse of social media. And of course, there’s a price to living in a society: taxes. To reside on social media, we pay taxes in the form of our attention and the data that comes with it.
That’s the thing: you put enough communities together, and all the sudden, you have yourself a country, or better yet, a world. In case it’s not obvious, we’ve been living in the metaverse for a while now. The only difference is that we’re now exploring how to transpose it from 2D to 3D.
So what even is social media? Well, what even is the US, or any country for that matter? It’s a vague, generalized interpretation of a commonly-held idea. We all have a subjective opinion on what it is, but we can only start to form an objective outline once we break it down into categories. We have geography, represented by borderlines. We have an economy, represented by commerce. We have rules, represented by politics. We have culture, represented (largely) by entertainment, and so on.
When we try to understand a problem with a country, we use these categories to help us better locate and define the particular issue. Of course they are all related, but to think of everything as a whole is too complicated. And therein lies the problem with social media: we try to think of it as a whole.
Open your social media feed and you’ll find personal content shared by friends, family and strangers. But you’ll also find entertainment and commerce, and these two use-cases have quickly become the dominating share of content. The complex inter-weavings of social media have led it to become a vague, generalized interpretation of a commonly-held belief. Basically, it’s subjective, and defined by what each user primarily uses it for.
So when a report comes out about the harmful effects of social media, we’re all translating it into our own interpretation. That’s not good. For example, when discussing the body-image concerns over social media usage, are these concerns driven primarily by content from our friends and family, entertainers, models for clothing brands, etc… Again, these are likely all contributing and compounding, but to try to solve it all at once will be nearly impossible. Especially when each of our experiences with social media are so subjective. If we can better define each type of social media, we can begin to form an objective outline.
Not only does each social media company have various forms of content, but social media companies as a whole are vastly different. For instance, what kind of social media is Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter? Are Snapchat and Pinterest social media? Clubhouse, LinkedIn, Reddit, the list goes on and yet, they’re all such different spaces that are lumped together under one category, “social media”. Therefore, when we hear social media has a problem, categories would allow us the ability to be specific about which ones are causing problems, and which companies have those categories.
An example of a problem that gets lost in translation is data security. I’ve been studying social media usage for the past four of years and what has become clear is that people do not actually know why they want their data secured or what they want it secured from. It’s become a hot topic and tends to be towards the top of the list of people’s concerns over current social media platforms. But in my experience, most people either can’t tell you what they’re concerned about their data being used for, or the answers are so different that it tracks back to our subjective interpretations of social media. How can we begin to solve actual data privacy if we don’t even know why or how we want it to be private? There needs to be more education, transparency and delineation over how data is used across all sub-categories of social media, along with the implications.
Global warming is a powerful example of a field of study where we recently made a lot of headway in breaking it down and making it more digestible and actionable. In Bill Gates’ latest book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill chooses to divide global warming into 5 parts: How We Plug In, How We Make Things, How We Grow Things, How We Get Around, and How We Keep Cool and Stay Warm. Others have chosen slightly different variations, but the important thing is that we’re starting to come to a consensus on how to view global warming so that we can understand the scope, divvy up our focus and get to work.
Categorization serves as a tremendous tool to inform the general population, which in turn reduces confusion and misinformation. It could be argued that better defining global warming has been the most productive thing we’ve done thus far, as far as generating interest and participation from the masses anyway. We can’t solve a problem until we can effectively explain it.
Social media tends to still get treated like it’s this cute little new age thing, but the truth is that it has expanded to the point where the whole picture of social media is painted across a canvas too large to see all at once. It’s like trying to understand global warming without the five reference points Bill laid out. We need to prioritize breaking it down, as we do with any major field of study.
The most basic way to begin this process is by mapping out social media and making the delineation between sub-categories more commonplace. Instead of speaking on social media as a whole, we need to group into more digestible and actionable insights.
Another way of proceeding, and one that I am becoming increasingly interested in exploring, is dividing the social media categories into separate spaces, or even apps altogether. Essentially, social media has become too big for one app, so why not split it up into more? There is certainly a convenience in having all “social media” content in one place, but is that really the only solution?
Take for instance Instagram. It has become so convoluted with content, use-cases and ways to create content that it feels like a hodge-podge of social media categories Frankenstein-ed together. At this point, Instagram itself is hard to define. It’s a microcosm of the problem with social media, and frankly, poor positioning from a marketing perspective. With every additional feature added, the future for it looks more and more like an eventual death by a thousands cuts.
What if Instagram were to explore dividing up its offerings into separate apps? Disentanglement. An app for entertainment, an app for buying stuff, an app for connecting with communities, an app for connecting with friends, etc… That way each one can focus on being the best version of itself, instead of a compromised version as a whole. This can benefit the consumer by creating better versions of each use-case, which in turn benefits the company by providing clearer data with less noise, which in turn helps society better differentiate and denote each category. Now that would be the rare win-win-win.
