State of Social Media 2023: Goodbye Scale, Hello, Magic! 🔮
A major shift is happening... can you feel it?
My article "The State of Social Media 2023" discusses the changing landscape of social media. It notes that the focus is shifting from scale to "magic", meaning the creation of more meaningful, empowering experiences online. The article highlights the importance of trust and compensation for creative works online and the changing power dynamic between builders and creators. On a personal level, users are being asked to take responsibility for their online consumption and be more reflective and intentional in their use of social media. The article also touches on the big tech backlash and how social media platforms have dominated the lives of adolescents and perpetuated white cultural domination. The article calls for a new era of social media that prioritizes creativity, self-accountability, and reflection, and that provides meaningful, serendipitous experiences.
Hello! It’s me again! The one with the telepathic connection to the algorithm! How are you? I’m good except for the fact that I went viral and everyone called me a man!
Now that you’ve read my last piece about social media’s flop era, the questions remain, “Where is social media headed? Where should I be investing my resources?”
Social media is changing. This piece focuses on how users, creators and businesses can get ahead of it.
TLDR: We are letting go of scale and making room for magic.
The key drivers for the next phase of social media is focused on building trust and providing consent, credit and compensation for creative works online.
The catalysts for the changing social media landscape are: the shifting power dynamic between builders and creators, product roadmaps serving creators as businesses (not users), social media regulation, and decline in performance for advertisement-based business models. The reason is that their current iterations have become out of step with our cravings for magic serendipitous moments that somehow empower us when the world is in crisis and trust on the internet is completely broken.
On a personal level, we will need to take responsibility for how much time we waste using social media, mindlessly scrolling, reacting and promoting. Consumption online follows the same trend as food consumption. We only imagined that we had the time and space for our brains to consume the junk food filler that feeds the #trends. All this consumption did not add to our lives in meaningful ways. After the pandemic, it became clear we need healthier immune systems. No more junk food (real life and online). No more wasting our days watching the life *we could have* if we logged off and got to work.
On the creator side, we are not going to settle for re-uploading, re-cutting and reformatting every piece of content one by one to each platform anymore. Through the next few years everyone will have to answer: What would you like to do with your gifts? How are you taking accountability for them? These questions must be asked for both our ability to generate new creativity as well as self-accountability for the time needed to consume it.
Those without accountability and a proper lens of reality will inevitably drown in the stream, encompassed by the algorithm, stuck as consumers who never became creators. We are all being asked to be reflective and intentional about the use of our time online. We are here to learn, grow and evolve. To experience life. This is your reminder that the accumulation of information is not learning. You can be confused about everything in the world but do not be confused about your own value.
Social Media’s Product Roadmap & Big Tech Backlash (1990s - 2022)
What’s wrong with where we are now? Since the internet’s earliest days, Silicon Valley’s top builders have dominated social media’s product roadmap while centralizing entire industries of creatives and commerce in the name of growth, scale and profits. Early in my career I interviewed to be the assistant to the CEO of a major social media platform and was asked if “I’d be ok never actually speaking directly to him”. Sounds a lot like how social media followers work, doesn’t it? None of us are actually speaking directly to each other.
A metaphor for this backwards approach to product development of social media’s past would be like having Santa Claus create a haunted house because he knows a lot about “holidays”. Like, maybe we’ll get free gifts if we play along but ultimately Santa is a patriarchal construct who, by the way, gets all the credit for work overwhelmingly done by women.
As digital platforms scaled, social media became a ubiquitous central element in the lives of adolescents. Upwards of 96% of youth (8-17 years old) report using social media such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook at least once a day and indicate doing so for an average of more than 4 hours. Researchers found that the significant role social media plays in youths' understanding of the world around them, coupled with the vast majority of the demographic composition of the tech industry as white (63-74%), means white cultural domination has been built into the infrastructure and interface of online spaces (and our youth). (Frey, W.R., Ward, L.M., Weiss, A. and Cogburn, C.D. (2022)). These social platforms are not built for the needs of a multicultural society.
There’s no doubt we can feel this in the design and habits social media platforms re-enforce upon us and the lack of safety tools, keeping us stuck and miserable. Only bonding over the misery that is the technology we are being force fed to adopt. The group of teenagers who formed a self-liberation from social media group, aka The Luddite Club, were recently featured in the New York Times, citing a longing for a life without a phone. This is one of the many areas we can see this trend cry for help.
The Magic of Surprise
“If you carry technology out to its full fulfillment, and you keep creating machine after machine to do everything you need at the push of a button. So that eventually you never have to worry or do anything yourself anymore. What you will wish for in the final version of that format is a button that says “surprise”. - Alan Watts.
For creators who are only attempting to fit their work to the machinations of the algorithm on their platform of choice, they will continue to chase the platform’s goals rather than expressing their own voice. This is a lonely and miserable journey. When I was running @girl on Instagram, I had to keep the page’s performance up in order to sell advertisement slots against my organic content. This meant creating a massive amount of similar-but-different enough content that could pierce through Instagram’s algorithm and not content I actually wanted to be creating. However, when I focused on creating connections among my audience, the page exploded. One content series we did was called “Secret Admirers”. Followers sent in their crush’s handle and a message. @Girl would repost the message and tag their crush without telling them who sent it in. For @girl’s young teenage audience, this was magic.
When everyone is in survival mode, we don’t have the time, thought or bandwidth to put ideas together. People are much more creative when they feel comfortable and safe. This information isn’t new, it’s timeless. In 2002, Harvard Business Review published a piece citing people were 45% less creative when they felt time pressure. In times of crisis, when the world feels a bit shakier and markets are down, we retreat to private communities. Online and offline.
People participate in online communities for a wide variety of reasons—to find emotional support and encouragement, to explore ways to contribute to the greater good, to cultivate interests and skills, and use the information that they see to reflect and form/change their own identities..
Many brands and creators ask me, what makes a great online community? What does it mean to be a community builder?
Building a community online means providing a safe space via interest based tribalism where magic can happen. A place where we can make a new connection, teach and learn something new, mix and meld our real lives with our online lives. Social media and technology should be tools that make our lives better, not suck the life out of us. The communities who facilitate these magic moments between its members, taking simple tools and flipping them on their heads, will win.
I’m not talking about everyone hanging out in a Chipotle or Honda discord together. Nobody wants to be on the GEICO website, let alone inside of a GEICO Discord channel. Communities will establish themselves as drivers of and a platform for conversation, not places for brands and creators to control the conversation around certain interest groups and subcultures. Collaboration, connection and to engage with a creator, celebrity, brand or someone of influence, will mean a two-way dialogue and a shifting student-teacher relationship. Where both parties are learning and growing from each other.
The question creators, talent and celebrities will have to solve for is: how do you measure intangible relationships in a way that makes investors and Wall Street happy? Online will be only one sliver of this.
The Rise of Pronumerism (Professional Consumerism)
Turning ideas into action comes with ease in the digital age. Consumers are more resourceful and creative than ever. Seeking ways to channel these ideas into actual business ideas. With productivity and creative expression tools like AI, Squarespace, Fiverr, Anchor, Shopify and more, it’s become easier than ever for us to become business leaders. In a study by Adobe, researchers found that there are 303 million creators globally (up from 200 million in 2020). This is a 51% increase in social media users who consider themselves creators.
As tech companies and social media continue to sell ads and monetize views, clicks and engagement rates, the economy has placed the highest value of human attention as a resource. This pushes more people to become media producers and master media and content themselves. Social media is no longer inherently social, but instead are promotional hosting platforms to display our content to the masses. Building content catalogs on social media platforms is like dating a narcissist. Both reward, incentivize and drain you for your time and attention.
Copyright, Ownership & Creative Rights
As more social media users turn into creators, they will inevitably be forced to ask themselves “what is the point of posting all of this content on these platforms for free? What is the point of making my work public if it is just going to be scraped for AI to use without getting my consent, giving me credit or compensating me?” The lack of available ways for online creators to directly profit from their work only magnifies this issue.
The conversation around copyright, trademark and our intellectual property rights will continue to heat up. Gone are the days where we willingly hand over our rights to the largest corporations in the world. Clout and followers don’t pay rent and social media platforms shouldn’t be the arbiters of copyright regulation. The most valuable creators will be the ones who create unique and original creative and creative formats. If your work can be copyrighted, it is valuable and you should do everything to protect it.
Litigation over digital artists' ability to comment on social constructs will continue to heat up over 2023. Cases to watch: Hermès, Jack Daniels, Getty Images and more. Modern creativity and lack of monetization tools for creators is in direct conflict with existing copyright law and I expect many more creators to get smarter about the rights over their original creations.
Creatives and rights holders must continue to fight for consent, credit and compensation for the use of their works.
This topic is my life’s work and I will continue a deeper dive into what this means in my next piece.
Rise of AI Tools & Copyright Litigation
The promise of AI is the promise of being more efficient with our time online, perhaps even making creative faster. I remain a skeptic of AI until we can be equally excited about the possibilities as we are about discussing the pitfalls..The efficiency of AI as a tool to help us is exciting because it means I can spend less time online. AI is also helping establish new mediums and forms of self-expression. For a footballer, his medium is the game of football he plays and his tools are the ball and the boots he wears. Now, he may have an imagination but the world is richer with tools for him to execute.I’ll be watching the space closely. Especially if AI can help me reformat one single piece of content for every platform across social media so I don’t have to do it by hand.
Google’s Bard is positioned as “Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics”.
It all feels very manipulative. Did you give consent to companies like Google and OpenAI to use information you posted to the web to develop their large language models? and then to charge a subscription for it? I sure didn’t. As AI technology gets more advanced, expect more copyright lawsuits like that of Getty Images.
The bias built into our current technology via social media mentioned above should cause us to stop and pause to think about what happens when information is served to us through AI vs manually searching for information ourselves.
Do we really want these companies building AI tools that completely erase any credit or attribution to our work? While “synthesizing” complex topics to reach mass audiences. The synthesizing of information undoubtedly carries biases of the developers who create our technology. Do you know who else distills complex information for mass audiences? The Bachelor Franchise. How deep and nuanced can we really go if what’s being served to us is meant for *everyone*? The dangers of AI on search can be seen in the very misinformation highlighted in Google’s very own Bard Announcement.
We have a long way to go here but I’ll save this for another piece.
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*whispers* If you’re looking for TikTok trends and what’s going on there, that piece is here.