I joined Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2007, and Instagram in 2012—and I loved them.
asserted
I → join → them
There was a time where my interior monologue happened in tweets.
asserted
monologue → be → tweets
No one is sadder than me to say it, but social media is over.
asserted
media → say → it
Those platforms still exist.
asserted
platforms → exist → ?
So do newer contenders.
asserted
contenders → do → ?
But they bear little resemblance to the mediums I fell in love with.
asserted
I → bear → love
You are reading Sex & Tech, from Elizabeth Nolan Brown.
asserted
You → read → Brown
In Reason's latest print issue, I've got a long piece that attempts to grapple with why and how this tragedy—yes, I'm calling it that unironically—happened.
asserted
I → get → it
To keep it tight, we focused mainly on political factors that have hastened social media's decline.
asserted
that → keep → decline
So I'm going to use today's newsletter to wax a little nostalgic, flesh out a few more theories, and share some fun commentary from others that didn't make it into the final piece.
asserted
that → go → piece
How it Started…
asserted
it → start → ?
First: the nostalgia—a little for nostalgia's sake, a little because understanding what we lost requires understanding what we had.
asserted
we → understand → what
And what we had felt, for a while, fun and friendly and magical.
asserted
we → feel → while
A little scene setting, courtesy of the print piece:
When AOC, my friends, and everyone else made these videos, no one was monetizing this content.
asserted
one → make → content
The goal was to have fun.
asserted
goal → have → fun
People posted pictures of themselves "planking"—lying face down in weird locales, like the kitchen counter—just to be a part of a trend.
asserted
themselves → post → trend
They dumped ice water on their own heads and posted it, allegedly for Lou Gehrig's disease awareness but mostly just because it was the thing to do.
uncertain
it → dump → awareness
They posted old photos on #ThrowbackThursday, lists of accounts they liked on #FollowFriday, and the results of whatever BuzzFeed personality quiz was new that week.
asserted
quiz → post → FollowFriday
There were wedding, party, and conference hashtags, so everyone at an event, or following along online, could catch all the pictures and updates.
uncertain
everyone → be → pictures
If you ran into friends, made new friends, or just saw someone you vaguely knew at an event, you absolutely had to take and post a selfie.
asserted
you → run → selfie
We tweeted about where we were going out, and "checked in" to coffee shops on Foursquare.
asserted
we → tweet → Foursquare
We made surveillance so easy, and we were too caught up in the hype of constant communication to care.
asserted
we → make → communication
We were all in a big poly-parasocial relationship with one another, but the lines felt blurrier.
asserted
lines → feel → one
It wasn't that weird for online friendships to eventually spill over into real life.
asserted
friendships → spill → life
And it wasn't weird to know—and genuinely care—about the lives of the people you interacted with online.
asserted
you → know → people
(Perhaps the key to that sentence is "interacted."
asserted
key → interact → sentence
Social media was a much less passive medium then, and the parasocial-to-just-social bridge gets much shorter when you're mutually interacting day in and out.
asserted
you → get → social
Before it became a platform for fighting, Twitter was a platform "where you had conversations with people and tried out ideas," says Ben Smith—lately of Semafor but once editor-in-chief of that bastion of the old internet, Buzzfeed News.
asserted
Smith → become → internet
People turned away from it and many of the old-school platforms "because they became toxic and horrible.
asserted
they → turn → platforms
But also, remember how nice they were?" he asks.
asserted
he → remember → ?
"Like, I feel like I know you and we're total strangers.
asserted
we → feel → you
I used to really enjoy your tweets, and you would DM me once in a while and be like, 'great story!' or whatever.
asserted
you → use → while
And I made a lot of really good friends on there, and it felt like all those interactions were real."
asserted
interactions → make → friends
Smith also shared this tidbit, which I must pass on because it's such a perfect distillation of the kind of things that happened on the early-21st-century internet: His Buzzfeed colleague Ze Frank, a vlogger, would encourage people to make an "earth sandwich" by finding "someone who lived in the exact antipode of where you lived and each put a piece of white bread on the ground at the same time."
Absurd and pointless?
asserted
you → share → time
With the social web, we had these radical new ways of connecting, and we were testing their use cases, feeling out the parameters, figuring out by trial and error what they might be good for.
uncertain
they → have → what
It's tempting to conflate that era of the internet with particular platforms.
asserted
It → conflate → platforms
But it was also an ethos—of optimism, silliness, possibility—combined with an astounding acceptance of the idea that social media was and forever would be our new normal.
asserted
media → combine → idea
In its early years, social media felt omnipresent and etiquette around it emerged to favor that feeling.
asserted
etiquette → feel → feeling
("I think the way that we interacted with social media, once upon a time, was a quintessentially Millennial experience," says author and Substacker Freddie DeBoer.)
asserted
DeBoer → think → time
If you met someone new in person—at a party, at a work event, at school, wherever—the thing to do was to friend them afterward on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
asserted
thing → meet → Facebook
…and 79 more, not listed.
The Aporia
