We often wonder why something that was so potentially good for the world as social media could turn on us so dramatically, and end up being such a toxic place filled with hate, envy, ignorance, and monster-like behavior. It has its good qualities, of course, but it could have been so much better if it was designed to do better things.
Social Media is a tool that connects people, but it’s also an aggregator of public opinion and a display case for social relevance. It could have been a force for good, but because of the way that we build things around the ambition for profitability – social media serves only that purpose.
From data to advertising and value-add services, there is nothing that social media does that is specifically meant to inspire anything positive except when it happens by accident, or as a consequence of something it helps promote.
People will argue that social media is a utility, like a telephone, but it’s not. Social media is an extension of human consciousness, our brain and, increasingly, our very conscience. It’s normal for us to vacillate on important issues and moral questions publicly because we find comfort in the crowd, and also because we know we can easily shift to a different opinion on things as the social wind changes.
This is a real problem because it has already changed us in such a way that we are no longer responsible, we are just a part of a trend, and we expect that trend and the mob that it creates to make the impact we don’t even bother to completely understand. Social media is here to stay no matter what we do, and its flaws is its own protector. The disengagement from responsibility that it created has conditioned its users to set their default to crowd settings for everything, there is no longer a drive to rise above group-think because of the comfort and convenience of emojis, anonymity, and cut-and-paste. In this sense, social media has become a distribution machine for human programming, it has become the command line for those that understand its potential.
We all talk about hacking things and disruption, but even that is now limited to doing what the rest of the crowd is doing, and always within the boundaries of innovation created by just a few. This phenomenon can be traced back to the way we consume content and the way it’s distributed on social media, like a software update for the machines that manufacture exactly the same things.
But what if there was a way to use social media to actually do something useful in the world? And not just in a temporary way that social media engagement is limited to, but to take the habit-forming qualities of social media, instead, and adapt it for something that turns us into better digital citizens for the long term.
In fact, there has always been a way to fix things, it’s just that it’s not profitable in the way that we understand revenue. This is still happening even though “doing good” is an actual strategy for businesses that intend to stay relevant in the 21st century. There are countless studies by industry experts that say majority of people are engaged by things that make them feel involved in the world, or directly supportive of a cause that they feel strongly about. In fact, 84% of us behave this way on social media, and 66% of us are willing to pay more for products and services from brands that make a positive social and environmental impact. This is happening worldwide.
The ground has shifted beneath our feet while we were looking for new ways to make people crave more things they do not need. People will keep buying stuff, of course, but take a look at how fewer and fewer millennials are buying houses compared to previous generations. People in the business of selling houses believe this is happening because the new generation have no financial capacity to buy. Maybe this is true, to some degree, but nobody wants to talk about the fact that millennials are no longer pressured to buy things like houses because work, recreation, and social life is mobile. Unlike their parents, they are no longer tied down to a location where they can find the best jobs or have access to friends and family. The ground has shifted.
Another shift is that everything we do is mobile and everything we participate in is on a social platform we can access anywhere, anytime. This is why there is such a rush to build mobile platforms for work, education, and for moving money around in a way that can keep pace with human mobility. The lack of immediate need for physical relocation to do all kinds of things on a daily basis has led to a greater awareness about the impact of transportation on the environment, and the ambient awareness of the web that is available to every person on earth has made it possible for us to be more conscious of what’s happening to others. In spite of this, though, there is still no real platform for participation in socially beneficial things that can help elevate the social value of people.
We like to post pictures of ourselves in airports going to fancy vacations or even just with a cup of Starbucks coffee in the middle of the day, we want others to know that we are relevant. This is a 21st-century human trait that cannot be changed, but there’s no need to do that if we can shift our perception of value from the things we buy to the things we give. Of course, we will always have to buy things for ourselves, it is the nature of our existence, but at least add the habit of giving in equal volume to our habit of taking things for ourselves.
It’s not just because we want to be better human beings that we must do this, but because the more that we invent more efficient ways to corral public opinion and emotion the danger of it getting out of hand also grows in proportion. Without making human kindness or thoughtfulness a feature of our technology we are all in danger of becoming a victim of our own efficiency. This is not fear-mongering, or a scare tactic, but an observation of the way that misinformation and propaganda can very easily destroy the fabric of society, and even the culture of an entire people if we continue to allow social access to be a mere instrument like a loaded gun left on a dining table. Sooner or later, somebody is going to pick it up and do something unthinkable with it.
This is also not just a lame suggestion for somebody else to pick up the cause and do all of the work. The work is already done, there is a working platform for making social access become a better part of daily life. It’s still on the scale of a petri-dish, but the culture is alive and it is growing. I describe it this way because it really is a laboratory experiment to answer a very academic question: “can we make human beings adopt a habit of thoughtfulness using technology that is driving the spread of thoughtlessness?” The answer is yes, and it has been running for the past five years without any investment or marketing.
I’ve seen a lot of well-funded platforms launch with so much fanfare and with a high volume of initial users, only to struggle with user retention. There are many explanations why this happens, of course, in much the same way that there is a completely logical explanation why millennials don’t buy houses. But think, even just for one moment, and it’s easy to realize that after the novelty of most things fade away there is no real value to yet another way to share vacation photos and rants. And people are also just simply tired of gimmickry and have learned to separate the things that they want from the things that they actually need.
Houses are for shelter and vehicles are for moving around. In another time, the logical reaction would be to sell houses and cars, but then people discovered that they can share all of these things using just apps and social media. And now that more and more people are free of the burden of having to pay for these things, try to imagine what else they will want to share next. The ground has shifted, and what previously worked as the measure of a person’s worth is now slowly becoming a reflection of his lack of involvement in the world, or a lack of compassion, kindness, thoughtfulness, and many other human qualities that is now the currency of the new generation in a new century.
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