What is Social Media Doing to Us?

A two-part series

Preface: if you were one of the many subscribers who joined at the beginning of 2022, expecting a short story a day, I want you to know how grateful I am that you’re here. I also want you to know that I wasn’t able to sustain my initial drive to read a short story a day — or, rather, I couldn’t find a balance between reading them and writing about them and enjoying them. This newsletter, like me, is always changing and transforming. I am learning to go with the flow of that, and I hope you’ll stay with me. I’ll still write about short stores on occasion but they won’t be the sole focus here.

If you are enjoying it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and please do share it!

Follow me on Instagram so you can tag me if you share on social media! This really helps.

I’ve always had a contentious relationship with social media— even when I was just a baby gen x/millennial cusp teenager hanging out in chat rooms on my stepdad’s work computer. It was an escape, and I could lose myself in it. But in the past few years I have been investigating the tension I feel with my social media use. What is it that doesn’t feel right?

I can only intimately know my own experience and perspective, but I suspect I am not alone in feeling ambivalent about social media and my role as someone on social media. I have written a lot about social media in this newsletter (especially in the earliest posts, when I was taking an active break from social media altogether).

About a two months ago I went on TikTok and found myself transfixed. A whole WORLD! So many different PEOPLE! Hacks for creativity, productivity; anti-diet nutritionists, therapyTok, bookTok! Black foragers! A guy with a little machine that makes music from plants! There were more nights than I’d like to admit (okay, five in total) that I spent hours on TikTok, scrolling and exploring while also wanting to put my phone down but not being able to. I decided I loved TikTok. I made some content and one of my videos got a bunch of comments and likes. I made more content.

Then, about two and a half weeks ago, I deleted the app off my phone and haven’t gone back.

I don’t want to.

Was it the West Elm Caleb thing? Which apparently the algorithm thought I’d be interested in? Or was it my dissociation, which I felt viscerally as I scrolled? A sense of being totally out of my body, absolutely cerebral and driven by each dopamine hit produced by the videos?

There are so many implications of TikTok and the new way its algorithm rockets regular people to a kind of fame. How it makes fame, once a status reserved for a select group of people, more accessible, and how this accessibility drives people to orient themselves towards likes and comments, like a plant following the sun as it moves across the sky. I found myself doing this, too, because I am someone who’s susceptible to wanting other people’s approval and validation. But, aren’t we all, kind of? (I’ll be addressing the fame part of this in the second installment of this post).

This in itself doesn’t seem like a huge deal. We’re human. We do this. We look to each other for validation and/or approval with or without social media. But what of the performance of social media? And the trend of young people self-diagnosing mental health disorders, or autism, or finding content that promotes eating disorders or bigotry or extremism?

What of the algorithm, which feeds us content according to what we gravitate towards, rather than allowing us to choose what we’re interested in for ourselves? How does it affect our brains when we surrender to what AI decides, rather than taking our time and deciding with care?

I left TikTok because the images, the sounds, and the content were too much. Too overwhelming. There’s one video I came across; I can’t find it now but it depicts a woman going through her day with a soundtrack saturated with all the current trends on TikTok repeating, essentially demonstrating how these sounds, pictures, and ideas soak into the brain and create a kind of chaotic backdrop for the viewer.

As someone with ADHD, I found that the app exacerbated my symptoms.

---

For the past twelve years I’ve been doing a lot of work in therapy. I began therapy before my mom’s suicide, but after her death found it vital to my being alive. Slowly but surely extracted behaviors from my life that feel out of alignment with who I want to be in the world. Drinking excessively, using people for sex, and my eating disorder, to name a few. It’s been more of an effort to replace those behaviors with things that feel good, rather than just finding other, less harmful (?) yet unproductive behaviors.

Last winter I read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, which helped me get off social media for a while. While I was away, I noticed a few things. First, after I left social media, I started checking news sites way more. I deleted the news sites off my phone and blocked the sites that tended to pull me in. I realized that it’s not just social media, but the way that our phones and computers load information, allowing us to half read an article and immediately flip to something else without really absorbing or engaging with the information in a meaningful way.

After I deleted the news sites and there was nothing left on my phone to draw me in, I stopped checking it so much. This is when I experienced what I think are the effects of slowing down and untangling the mind from the fast pace of the internet.

My consciousness expanded. I found myself seeking out longer pieces of writing. I zoned out more. Not in the way I had with social media, but in a daydreamy way, my thoughts meandering and exploring. It was as if my brain’s threads had been all tightened up, each thread a story, and my brain filled to the brim with half-stories and assumptions. As time went on, I had less stories in my brain. To put it bluntly, I think I had a better grip of reality. My actual life, instead of me as someone on social media.

---

I am not proposing that people leave social media. I’m there again. I understand now that the internet is essentially a public space, as much as a city is a public space, with parks and sidewalks and advertisements, and we are all walking in the public space of the internet, passing each other. Except many of us are, in passing, waving our arms at one another, trying to get each other’s attention, to sell our time, our knowledge, our image. So, in that way, the public space vanishes and the internet becomes a store where we are all trying to sell ourselves.

Which makes me feel super gross.

I don’t think that’s our fault. We live in a culture of commodification, and it makes sense that late stage capitalism would result in us voluntarily commodifying ourselves, packaging ourselves up in order to be consumed. And to package ourselves up and be consumed profitably, we must smooth out our rough patches.

That’s my issue here.

The niche, and how having a niche — one thing that you are known for — increases the likelihood of success/fame on social media.

---

---

In Whitman’s long, existentialist and naturalist poem, he explores the idea of self. Above, he invites the reader to join it his exploration. I am not a poet, and having been in my MFA program with many poets who know poetry much more deeply than I do, I am hesitant to write about poetry at all. But poetry was the first form of literature that truly drew me in. I still have a thick, moss-green fabric-bound book of Emily Dickinson poems my grandma gave to me when I was a teenager. Her inscription “Tally ho!” encourages me to become the writer I knew I was.

What I know about poetry is this: a poem is a mysterious being, shaped by one person, but whose contents, like all content, arises from the cultural location of the writer. When one reads a poem, one brings their own cultural background to the poem, essentially merging with the poet, but never truly merging because that’s impossible. A poem can rarely be fully understood from the writer’s point of view. I think it can never. But that’s the magic of the poem.

As a creative writing student and teacher, I am often surprised at people’s hesitancy to read poetry, but as I write this I realize I expressed my own hesitancy above, which makes me smile. There is so much fucking pretension in literature, and poetry is sometimes the most toxically pretentious. That’s because it can be interpreted in so many ways. I think of a poem as an aura. As a room. When we read a poem we enter a room, and reading the poem is reading the room. When I read a poem I notice what comes up for me as I am reading. I read poems many times. Some poems I “get” and some I don’t. Some poems I like and some I don’t.

The magic of the poem is its expansiveness. Its openness. And this has nothing to do with how oblique a poem is in its language. Joy Harjo, one of my favorite poets, tends to write in very grounded language. Her poems could be called “accessible.” Whereas other poets may write in more airy language patterns, leaving large gaps of meaning, evoking images rather than concrete linguistic meaning. Either of these modes can lock the reader into the point of view of the poet, or leave things open. It’s like comparing a romance novel to Toni Morrison.

There’s one end of the spectrum, say, like Rupi Kaur, whose use of ambiguous and general language almost seems to staunchly refuse engagement with specificity at all. Then there’s the other, say, Amanda Gorman, (I am purposefully choosing two well-known poets), whose specificity and detail creates an entire collective vision for something new.

What does poetry have to do with social media’s focus on “niche?”

I want to be clear: I don’t think social media is evil. I understand that human progress means change. Everything we do was once an invention that scared people. But. I see a narrowing of our collective understanding of each other, specifically in the context of TikTok (which started with Instagram), through the aggressive way it forces its creators to find their niche. Without a niche, there’s no clear way to be shot out into the “correct” algorithm. So, creators find their niche and they make video after video reinforcing their niche.

This started to really bother me. Not only because I am a “creator” (or, rather, a writer), but because I saw myself wanting to find my own niche, so I could get a fuck ton of followers and perhaps make some cash, which is something I need to survive in our world (as we all do). But I couldn’t do it. I don’t want to do it. And I don’t want other people to do it.

Think of it this way: everything we create as humans is a product of our brains. We are locked in to the way our brains work. We make things that come from our brains, and we can choose to make things that enhance our brains and expand our minds, or to make things that soften the precision of our brains and narrow our minds. TikTok does the latter.

First of all, it takes away our ability to choose, instead opting for an aggressive algorithm that inevitably lulls us into a drone-like state of scrolling. Second of all, it does the thing our brains all do, which is to categorize us. TikTok is, essentially, biased thinking. Bias = cause to feel or show inclination or prejudice for or against someone or something.

THIS IS LITERALLY WHAT TIKTOK IS.

If you scroll through TikTok, you will sometimes find lovely content made by creators like ecologists, therapists, educators, scientists. But mixed in and overpowering all of that content is the good old capitalist and distinctly American binary: GOOD vs. BAD.

Creators on TikTok paste negative comments on new videos and react to those comments, enhancing this binary to create more engagement. TikTok trends lean towards pitting one “bad” thing against a “good” thing.

It accentuates the worst of social media, and I fucking don’t like it, and more than that, it scares me.

Especially when I think of young people using this app, and the way it’s changing their brains. But it’s certainly not just about young people. (and, from my experience, I know that young people can find their way, given the right tools).

Does it…scare you too?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments. I’ll be sending out a second part to this on Sunday.

With love,

Stacy