People, Not Posts: Part II

"Busy Market" by Haitian artist Dieudonne Rouanez

In part I of this essay , I asked why we call it social media and whether it’s different from social networking.

After some reading and thinking some more–thank you to @jesseplusplus.com for your thread and @jdp23.thenexus.today for your replies and the danah boyd reference—the question I’ve landed at this time is closer to, “what comes after social media?” and also the more leading, “what is the future of communication infrastructure?”

Since I have you here, let’s read some danah boyd. I was so lucky that Jon recommended this piece from April of this year, in which dr. boyd literally traces the evolution of the term social media. Spoiler: she and a collaborator coined the term “social network!” Let’s review:

Nicole Ellison and I ended up settling on “social network sites” ( boyd & Ellison, 2007 ) before the consensus shifted to “social networking sites.” Despite being fascinated by the language that others used, I learned that coining terms was not my forte.

Many people genuinely believed that these tools would allow people to meaningfully express themselves, connect to people across the globe, and work to strengthen democracy ( Papacharissi, 2010/2011 ). Others were focused on how digital social media enhanced physical connections ( Humphreys, 2007 ). I was especially fascinated watching teenagers embrace social network sites in unexpected and creative ways to push back against the everyday constraints that they faced ( boyd, 2007b , 2014 ; Marwick & boyd, 2011a ). What young people were doing online was inspiring. And it was very sociable.

The term social media started to emerge to describe the broader set of services being created in the aughts shortly after Twitter became a sensation at the 2007 South-by-Southwest (SXSW)-Interactive conference ( Burgess & Baym, 2020 ). Somehow, somewhere, in the coverage of Twitter’s rise in popularity, “social media” became the term that journalists, bloggers, and the public converged on to describe the collection of websites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube that people used to connect to others by posting content about their lives. I blame the dreadful term “micro-blogging” for upending the distinction between blogging and social networking. Over the next decade, “social media” subsumed all other terms. “Social media” also subsumed the very practice that term was initially attempting to label.

It was not inevitable that a few companies would create a small number of “platforms” that would dominate the diverse practices we imagined the term “social media” stood for, but that is what happened.

She goes on to describe how people’s natural forms of online communication and coordination became distorted by the financial incentives of consolidating, monopolistic platform providers, arguing that what was once “social media” has turned into today’s “parasocial media.”

The combination of algorithms, influencers, and corporate greed helped shift social media from a sociable space that celebrities and creators could leverage alongside everyday users into hyper-controlled platforms that rewarded those who could generate large audiences or create media that draws in large numbers of eyeballs ( Christin & Lewis, 2021 ). Social media companies keep altering their algorithms to incentivize (and punish) creators as they wish, always with an eye on nudging users to scroll more, even if they post less ( Are & Briggs, 2023 ; Caplan & Gillespie, 2020 ; Wu et al., 2021 ). After all, social media companies have discovered that keeping users scrolling is more financially profitable.

Shifting our orientation from social media to parasocial media is consequential. People can – and initially primarily did – use a wide range of social media to negotiate identity, strengthen relationships, build communities of interest, and find joy in the playfulness of interacting with others ( Brock, 2020 ; Gray, 2009 , 2018 ; Steele, 2021 ). In the process, they wove together a powerful social fabric, giving rise to tremendous dreams of social media’s potential to build solidarity, enable political movements, and connect the world. But those practices are no longer dominant, and because of that, what social media means has shifted.

Parasociality plays a more central role in today’s platforms than it once did. But parasocial relationships are a type of trickster. Attending to parasocial connections may be pleasurable for consumers, but doing so does not strengthen the collective social fabric. It is possible to experience loneliness despite spending hours emotionally engaged with others’ dramas if those interactions are not reciprocated. Even those who are producing content for the parasocial world struggle to navigate the contorted forms of intimacy that abound ( Glatt, 2024 ). Friendship requires reciprocity and compassion.

Reading that last bit on stream when I was drafting this last week was something. Uncanny, I should say.

Anyway.

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So dr. boyd reminds us how we got here. But where do we go from here? This is why I jumped from academia into building. Because to build something different, we have to know where we are, but then we have to put things into practice. I always wanted Germ to be the place we wanted to be with our friends and communities, not somewhere we had to be to find them. A place we wanted to be, with tools we wanted to use, that helped us live the lives we wanted to live, not coerced us into its mediated shapes and structures. Of course technology and the people who use it are always in an emerging dialectic together, shaping and being shaped, but I think today's discontent with social media is a sense that it's become overly determinative of how we gather and communicate—how we commune. I'd be interested in reading more about the history of communication technologies and the social formations that surrounded them... I've touched on these themes in this blog before..but let me push forward. Because:

This post is motivated—it’s not scholarly, I’m thinking through how my company builds software for social life in this moment. I want to gather a couple company artifacts for us to look at.

First, our values . One of them is utility. Here is how we define it:

Utility. Germ makes it easier to be social. Our tools make it fast, simple, and trustworthy to make friends, set boundaries, and stay in touch.

My cofounder Mark and I wrote our values together early on. Looking back at this now, I find it a little sneaky, in a way that I like. There’s a subtle tension between “utility”—which implies minimalism, a lack of ornamentation, only what is necessary to function—and “social,” connoting togetherness, relationality, humanity, even frivolity. Perhaps there is even a gendered tension there, masculine utility and feminine sociality, a reflection of the two perspectives or even personalities that Mark and I bring to Germ, even as we both deeply respect the other side of the coin.

But what I want to push at more here is the idea that there can even be a utility for socializing. At Stanford they called the STEM and humanities majors “techies” and “fuzzies,” respectively. There’s a sense in our culture that what we do together as humans is itself ornamental. But isn’t sociality the core function of what it means to be a human being? What we know in the humanities and social sciences is that everything we call “STEM” we have learned by being social together. There is no no measurement, no scientific method, no technology, without people communicating in communities.

Here’s another artifact from Germ: our chartered public benefit, written into our founding legal documents as a Public Benefit Corporation.

The specific public benefits to be promoted by the Corporation are to help people communicate in healthy ways, achieved by prioritizing transparency, privacy, user control, accessibility, and empathy in our products, services, governance, and partnerships. [emphasis added]

The purpose of Germ is healthy communication. We are a utility for socializing in healthy ways. What does it mean for a tool to help you build your social life? For those of us building on the AT Protocol, is anyone doing this yet? Helping us find each other, not just each other's content?

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I want to back up again. Last time I talked about the difference between social media and social networking. I suggested that “social media became the pretense for social networking” – that being social around media artifacts gave us an excuse to simply build networks, online, with each other. People are shy—content is something to talk about. I suggested there are 3 core activities we do when networking online:

Discover - find who you’re looking for across the different parts of your life

Coordinate - respond, resolve, and make plans faster and more consistently

Actualize - track and improve your wellbeing and skills alone and with friends, professionals, and your devices

What do we do across the big services we call “social media” today?

share text, photo, audio, and video media, created by others and by ourselves, and talk about them

have smaller spaces for communities to talk about content, but also more locally relevant news and events

have profile pages for individuals and communities to do all the above and showcase who we are

talk in small groups in DMs

What else might be seen as social networking when we zoom out and look at all the ways people coordinate online? What has been excluded from this thing we call social media?

First, dating apps. People looking for people to date are socially networking around a specific need. We’re now seeing dating-app style products for finding friends, for finding people to do hobbies with, and also a new slew of IRL-style apps that get you meeting people IRL. These are all, obviously if you give it a minute, forms of social networking.

Keeping track of each other: FindMy and Life360 are social networking. Locating our people on maps has become part of how we build and manage our networks online. Maps are also underneath dating apps. We coordinate through space. There is a spectrum here of how safe and empowering these tools are that I have a lot more thoughts on, but let’s just hold for now that spatial networking is now a part of social networking.

A bit more spicy: I contend that marketplaces are also forms of social networking. People are looking for goods and services, but what they’re really looking for is other people, selling their goods and services. Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are obvious here, but there is a lot of work done to make us not notice that marketplaces for rides, food delivery, or home services are also us socially networking. Because that would make us think about the people on the other end, which would make us think about their working conditions, and none of that is in the interest of profitability. Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart, Thumbtack, Mobbin, Airbnb—all of these are two-sided marketplaces that seek to streamline and therefore own and rent-seek off of the coordination of buyers and sellers looking for each other.

But a person with a car and a person needing a ride are looking for each other just as simply as two horny people are looking for each other. Where you need to go and what your sexual tastes are are both just parameters for a matchmaking algorithm. The rest is UI.

So all the world’s a marketplace. This is the realization that pulled me out of academia, but that’s another post.

All the world’s a marketplace. Everyone is looking for something. We go into the public to find it. We declare what we have or what we’re looking for. We stand there screaming, or we walk around looking down at what other people are screaming about.

Feeds, lists, and swipes are all digital user experiences that make sense of this agora. Now agents are promising to do some of this research for us. Agents let us spawn off digital workers that trawl the agora for us, like a servant in the 1001 Nights who goes out with a basket and instructions and brings home who or what we need.

This work is very ancient. Cuneiform, the basis for Indo-European alphabets, was invented in the marketplace. Chinese characters were invented in the temple. Ritual and trade—these are the axioms of human civilization. These are the behaviors of healthy civilization, the dao of humanity, the way we bloom and blossom as a species. No value judgement, just observation: this is what humans do, the way waves crash and mosses spread.

We go to the marketplace to find the people we’re looking for. Once we find them, we negotiate. We talk. We form relationships. We stay in touch, or we move on.

All of discovery resolves into the chat. Chat is the foundation of civilization. I believe this with all of the seriousness of my being. This is the other realization that took me out of academia. The center of our true lives, on and offline, is conversation, because conversations are relationships. That’s why communication and community are the same word. I have a PhD in this. But as dr. boyd points out, the center of the advertiser-backed social media platform business is not exchange, it is entertainment. And so the financialization of social media turned us from fellow travelers into performers and voyeurs.

How do we build tools for healthy social life? How do we build infrastructure for the work of communication, which is the substrate of all community? How can we support people, not coerce them, in doing what is it, elementally, that they, we, really need and want to do?

self-express and self-declare

discover, matchmake and coordinate

talk in groups of different sizes

learn and grow

After working on this post the other night, I went upstairs from my office with an optimistic thought: maybe the Facebook era of social media will be remembered as the messy, chaotic beginnings of what it meant for humans to bring our civilization online. Maybe the digital agora won’t always look like Times Square or Squid Games. Maybe the sci-fi movies will all have been wrong—and the advertisers, the silo’d platforms, the rent-seeking were just the seed conditions to get five billion people and their computers networked and running together. Maybe we'll remember this as the Bronze Age of social networking—rudimentary, inelegant, yet revolutionary, a something where nothing had been before.

I won’t pretend I’m making a dispassionate argument, so I’ll end, instead, with a wish, a wish I’ve put all of my life on the line to make real.

I wish that the future of social networking is free roads to a free agora for a free civilization. Where people decide how to show up, what they want to buy and sell or give and take, who they want to associate and do rituals with—and that when they want to go home with the people they met, the people they claim as theirs, to keep talking, they do that freely, too. I dream that we can build the open rails and materials that make building this world possible for everyone who participates in it. To be seen, and to be invisible; to be massively networked, and to be private and alone; to practice our cultures, and learn about others; to make exchanges, and to say goodbye.

I’ll end with the Dao De Jing, because I’ve been thinking of it already. I lingered on sutras 53, 65, 68, and 80, but I’ll leave you with these. Translated by Stephen Mitchell, which is not the most faithful translation but is the one I live with.

We live in the real world, now, but we also live on the internet. Our homes, our neighbors, our borders, our roads, all of these are digital now, too. Here’s Sutra 57 of the Dao De Jing.

If you want to be a great leader,

you must learn to follow the Tao.

Stop trying to control.

Let go of fixed plans and concepts,

and the world will govern itself.

The more prohibitions you have,

the less virtuous people will be.

The more weapons you have,

the less secure people will be.

The more subsidies you have,

the less self-reliant people will be.

Therefore the Master says:

I let go of the law,

and people become honest.

I let go of economics,

and people become prosperous.

I let go of religion,

and people become serene.

I let go of all desire for the common good,

and the good becomes common as grass.

And here's Sutra 75:

When taxes are too high,

people go hungry.

When the government is too intrusive,

people lose their spirit.

Act for the people’s benefit.

Trust them; leave them alone.