If social media is over…

November 11-12, 2022

If social media is over, can we finally start critiquing Black Mirror now?

The Atlantic ran a story today about the death of social media. With falling profits, interest, and employment in that sector of the new economy, it asked if we should call an end to that paradigm too in case it wastes away with us all still on board.

As part of what was that social media generation, I think it's time to call it quits. What is more important than the platforms themselves is the ecosystems they supported in human behavior, and the behaviors they sparked amongst the generation of people who were practically introduced to literate culture through the now-defunct, we can now say, social media. Those behaviors are not going away, tho' social media may. 

I say, alongside this article, to react to the social media platforms' collapse by "embracing their ruination". The laying-waste to social media might - hey, you never know - reveal just how much influence my social feed actually had in those bad ol' days.

Black Mirror, for those who have seen the hits, is mostly about social media, but in a human way, that implicates depictions of those human ecosystems of behavior, I just mentioned. But it's worth a notice, even for the uninitiated, that the effective social media in those stories is a casual mistake, that the cops, from their perspective, can exploit, to catch malfeasors and scandalous rogues. From the perspective of a lot of these cop shows, and increasingly out there as reality catches up to science possibility, we are buried in a mountain of personal information that could serve as an accidental confession. This is no surprise to someone who has witnessed political radicalization on social media, and observe the social fallout for that person, or people coming out as gay or trans on the net, and that associated fallout. But for those who haven't, it's on TV too. Or it will be, after it happens. Real life leads art in all cases after all.

Black Mirror fully embraced, the three most life-changing, problematic paradigms of the Internet, but of those three, social media was the most powerful. But here's what has happened: the interesting points of social media, people or entities, have outrun the bounds of 140 characters, and outpaced the bounds of their casual social circle on the 'net.

What is the scope of this problematic in social media? One evaluation was dug up by the author of the Atlantic article, in a book called Zero Comments, by Dutch author Geert Lovink.

"In or out?" He writes.

"This book will prove, that, contrary to the "new new" hype, the position of new media in society is no closer to resolution than it was during the "old new" hype of the first Web bubble. Mass adaptation has led to a "statu anxiety" of an emerging discipline that is polymorphously perverse in nature. The in-between position is increasingly becoming uncomfortable. There is a multitude of talent going nowhere. Shifts in the integration of technological networks into the everyday have proven no guarantee that institutional change will occur. Despite all the talk, the Internet has not delivered the revolution it promised. Societies adapt to Information and Communication Technologies, but do not change in a fundamental way and prove remarkably flexible in staying as they are. Logically speaking, this means that the ideology, and not the world will have to adjust. So far, this has not happened."

The scope of the influence social media had for the longest time was always problematized by the sad effect that it was the retweet, or the share that got the attention and reward, rather than the creative creation act, and almost never the creator or progenitor of the idea. We had a revolution without attribution, and that meant we had a corporate windfall instead, while eventually the discourse itself was reduced to poverty. The results of the creators brought down social media, in part. If no one will see this anyway, then I'll make sure no one sees it. 

Integration of the net into every day reality resulted in a double movement across the border between the ins and outs, both toward, and then away from full scale, integration into social media, and then away from social media, in disillusion about its limits, or more properly speaking the limits of its discursive act.

Most importantly, here's the kicker: some said, if I'm writing about what I can't yet see, why can't I see it? And others said if I'm writing about what I can see why can't others see me? And thus there developed a problematique. 

This problematic implicated, not just a division in intellectual firepower, but a division in a social consciousness, and the social relevance of certain perspectives. 

"Should we believe in the power of the argument and continue the strategy of ideology criticism, knowing that such intellectual endeavors fail, time and again?"

Lovink again.

"Zero Comments was written in the firm belief that we have to work through issues. We have to study the patterns behind perpetual change."

There was a simple push-and-pull analysis in social media's history, especially the history of its fall. But the history of social's disillusionment is an archaeology of the limits of its discursive act. Are we re-examining what it means to be a writer and an author, in practical terms?

Michel Foucault writes (in the essay "What is an Author?") that the author, in a real sense, is distinct from another worker in that he is imprisoned by his own writings. However, there is another sort of writer that does the work for another reason; the relevant distinction being the "modes of characterization." 

Foucault notes that there is a "kinship between writing and death" which is linked sometimes to the "total effacement of the individual characteristics of the author" who sometimes becomes "transformed" into "a victim of his own writing". However, the "conditions" of the "spatial dispersion" and "temporal deployment" vary, and "the disappearance of the author...is held in check by the transcendental." There are other conditions which vary the situation of the author, based on role (we might also say social contract differences) as well as space and time. Foucault notes, in a transgressive, cheeky way we could notice that the character of an author can be found not only in his person but also in the characteristics of his body of work. And this could be not necessarily the same as the person of its authorship; tho' they should often be congruent, they may not always be completely identical. This can have merit in looking at the current situation with social media's decline and very perhaps, fall. On the one hand, there is a tension about losing a body of work by leaving social media, on the other hand, there is a suspicion about whether that work is or (even) was the same as how we really are. Where we all authors for using social media or were we not quite there? In essence, should we feel bad about it? Perhaps not. We should not forget about what we liked about it, that we should feel bad about, only if that happens. But its more like using social media was like taking a crowdsourced class. In what?  That's what we should be asking.