Social media – you know all the common platforms – can serve a very useful purpose. They connect people and build communities in ways you can’t easily do without them. Overdone, as with anything, they can have the negative side effects of isolating us from divergent thoughts and reinforcing our initial beliefs and interests without us even being aware of it. They can prompt us to double down on our own views, rather than try to understand alternatives. The community building aspect is great; the community isolation and reinforcement aspects can have more mixed results.
Increased divisiveness aside, modern social media platforms are engineered at every level to direct you attention to where they want it to go in an effort to keep it for as long as possible. They are not designed to let you come in, get the information or make the connection you need, and then be on your way out. (Think for a moment what a web designed on that premise would really be like; it’s certainly now the web we have.) They are designed to suck you in and keep you there as long as possible. It’s called persuasive web design and it’s everywhere on the web, and ubiquitous in social media platforms. There is not an element, a font choice, a color selection, a button placement, that is not there for a particular reason related to grabbing and holding your attention – prompting you to do something they want you to do rather than what you want to do.
So, as much as I appreciate the benefits of reaching an audience of like minds and building a cohesive community, I can’t support the existing platforms. In my current thinking at least, they cross the line from necessary evil to – well – to just not for me.
Full disclosure: I am building a YouTube channel (you can find the link via the header menu above) and they, too, are a platform that works very hard to direct and retain your attention. I also dabbled in Twitter, and am now rarely there. I am on YouTube to explore ways to get my thoughts out to a wider audience and to see if my training material can make the transition to this kind of format: small on-demand units in lieu of in person, interactive, dedicated sessions. I never ask viewers to like, subscribe, and turn on notifications (and it’s the latter that I find particularly distasteful in terms of trying to grab your attention), but I admit that this is a small concession to feeding the beast. It’s hard to stay away completely and YouTube allows me to try out a new format without having to invent the infrastructure behind it. I don’t play the YouTube game to get exposure and that means, the channel will probably never take off, but that’s OK; it is serving the experimental purpose I need it to. Ultimately, I want to build my own video platform for my material, and that will take time, but hopefully can I offer content to a large number of interested viewers without playing tricks to keep their attention past where they would otherwise give it.
There are private platforms that you can use to build communities without all this greed for your attention and there are blogs like this, discussion forums, chat groups, mailing lists and other means. I’ve already got the blog; I’ll probably get something else going when I find the time and the right platform. Comments and suggestions welcome!