Digital Media Issues post #5 – Social Media
My name is Sarah, and I’m a social media addict.
All jokes aside, it’ a legitimate issue I keep hoping to resolve, until the news cycle takes a break long enough for some silly videos to recalibrate my algorithm for an hour or two. As a middle-millennial, my exposure to social media began with friends discussing their MySpace accounts, Tumblr, and a platform called NeoPets (dearly missed, never forgotten). This was before my age group discovered AIM (the social chat platform, AOL Instant Messenger, also dearly missed, never forgotten).
Social media use at that age was heavily monitored by my parents, and email was the best way for friends to have semi-private conversations with me. Email is also the platform I used to land my first boyfriend, nbd 💅. My folks took some time to begrudgingly allow social media to enter our lives, but by the time they did, I’d already secretly launched my own Facebook account. This was the era of “I Can Has Cheezburger” memes – arguably the birth of the meme, although one could also argue Happy Bunny products and other retail companies were the originals out in IRL.
By the time I had embraced Facebook, it had just gone public. At that point it was an entirely different experience than it is today. The status update was a way to connect with friends, “Sarah’s feeling…,” and the photos were uploaded via computer. In high school and through early college, Facebook was the dominant platform for me and most folks my age. We shared albums of nights out, so many photos of parties, and videos of our nieces and nephews. The GRWM era was so far into the future, and Vine hadn’t even been conceived of yet.
At this point, the only social media reaction option was a like or a comment. Tagging people in comments or posts was still not anywhere near the experience it is today, and Facebook Chat had yet to launch. Once the chat function became available, it changed the game for us young, millennial users. Seth C. Lewis and Logan Molyneux note in their article A Decade of Research on Social Media and Journalism: Assumptions, Blind Spots, and a Way Forward that shortly after its public launch, Facebook was used to begin circulating news content as a way for recession-ridden news outlets to revive their businesses – this was certainly not common place for my age cohort to seek news (we really weren’t interested in the news yet), and was absolutely not on our radar at this time.
During the initial use-case for Facebook in my life, it was a place I could go that my parents could not monitor my messages, and would not break the bank (we still had T9 text limits and a set number of minutes, nothing was unlimited yet, except the use of AIM or FB chat). Over the course of this old-facebook use, I was able to talk two high school boys out of suicide more than once. That is the power of social media platforms with a focus on connection.
Instagram became popularized shortly thereafter, as a photo-based platform marketed toward artists and family oriented folks. Around the same time, Vine revolutionized social media in my eyes, and became the catalyst for bite-size media. (Yes twitter existed, but Vine was much more viral for my age cohort because of how fun, accessible, engaging, and “cool” the content was.) Vine was a place to laugh and be silly. Vine did not show starving faces from children in war-torn countries abroad. Vine birthed the social media dance trends with the “Harlem Shake” and planking. This platform became a tool for shaping millennial culture and a tool for building connections across groups within our general age cohort, while Facebook and the original Twitter began shaping exposure to news, celebrity media, and political discourse for the older age groups, planting the earliest seeds of polarization. As uncovered by Daniel Kreiss and Shannon C. McGregor in their article Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle, this polarization was actively designed by platform policies, staff members, and algorithms alike, as a way to influence that age group’s voting behaviors.
Shortly after Vine was acquired by Instagram (again: dearly missed, never forgotten), content creation started to really shift into the perverted behemoth it has become. Social media shifted from a way to stay connected to a smaller social group, to a way for companies and organizations to stay connected with their broader audiences, a way for partners to secretly pine after others, and yet another way for news to circulate widely, swiftly, and with significant bias. Each of these creator groups found ways to harness the algorithms and platform architecture not just to reach, but to engage, learn, and respond to consumer behaviors – finding ways to stand out from and cut through all the noise of not just their competitors, but the entirety of their audience’s feeds, as the research reviewed by Cait Lamberton and Andrew T. Stephen confirms in their article A Thematic Exploration of Digital, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing: Research Evolution from 2000 to 2015 and an Agenda for Future Inquiry.
The through-line for my personal social media use has been to maintain meaningful connections with my local community, and to have fun doing so. While that through-line holds steady, during COVID, that shifted a little to encompass broader community connectedness. Digital media, particularly social media, was the best way to stay in contact with each other, to feel closer to those far away or sequestered next-door. Since we all collectively shifted society digitally during the lock-down, social media became addictive. We were already chronically online, now we could get updates from the Whitehouse immediately. My age cohort became “real adults” during that time, and staying on top of the news was boring until it became necessary. Social movements took place online, activists began using it as a tool for organizing and mobilizing – and this time period was where my age cohort began to understand, feel, and see plainly the mechanisms of each platform and their roles within not only marketing schemes, but political discourse, as well. An experience of both the phenomena explored by Lamberton and Stephen, as well as Kreiss and McGregor.
In recent years, I have used social media to announce performances, the birth of my nephews, the death of my pets, our elopement, layoffs, my acceptance into grad school, my divorce, and my journey returning to myself post-marriage. I also curate my news significantly, to make sure the sources I am exposed to are relatively reliable and unbiased (as news sources are in this time period), and I also make sure that my algorithm is full of silly Vine-like content to break up the noise. This engagement in personal platform architecture optimizes my daily experience – an exemplification of all three consumer labor types laid out by Kjerstin Thorson and Ava Francesca Battocchio: Immaterial, Informational, and Visibility (p. 17-18).
Looking into the future from where I am sitting, this infighting between tactics and statistics used by marketing and political campaign leaders and the tactics of the individual to curate their experience as diametrically opposed users will grind the use of social media into obsoletion. My cohort moved away from Facebook to avoid the ads and negativity. Now that Instagram is becoming inundated with ads and news and polarizing content – without more platform architectural controls, we will likely shift away again. More and more, the trends I hear are people (of ALL ages) moving away from social platforms toward other modes of connection.
Daniel Kreiss & SHANNON C. MCGREGOR (2018) Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle, Political Communication, 35:2, 155-177, DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2017.1364814
References:
Kjerstin Thorson & Ava Francesca Battocchio (22 Aug 2023): “I Use Social Media as an Escape from All That” Personal Platform Architecture and the Labor of Avoiding News, Digital Journalism, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2023.2244993
Lamberton, C., & Stephen, A. T. (2016). A thematic exploration of digital, social media, and mobile marketing research: Evolution from 2000 to 2015 and an agenda for future inquiry. Journal of Marketing, 80, 146–172. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.15.0415
Lewis, S. C., & Molyneux, L. (2018). A decade of research on social media and journalism: Assumptions, blind spots, and a way forward. Media and Communication, 6(4), 11–23. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v6i4.1562
Thorson, K., & Battocchio, A. F. (2023). I use social media as an escape from all that: Personal platform architecture and the labor of avoiding news. Digital Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2023.2244993
Sarah Wingfield 
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