Early this year, I had one of those ghostly life experiences unique to social media. A friend who’d moved to the other side of the globe deleted all his accounts. My absent friend was real and true, not a passing digital acquaintance. Someone who was comfortingly once there, a daily presence despite miles between us, was no longer. I felt his absence deeply. Whatever the digital equivalent of grief is took hold.
A persuasive viral moment is happening across social media. I’m sure you’ve noticed. When Elon Musk bought Twitter for an eye-popping $44billion, it felt like a natural page-break to pause, reconsider and possibly reset the shape of our lives online. Musk is the perfect reminder that socials are full of infuriating pests.
This week’s news of 11,000 redundancies at Meta further loaded the mood-swing against the flimsiness of online friendships toward the weight of real-life affection. Everyone seems to be asking the same question. Is it time to ditch my socials?
For its first few years, social media presented as a kind of exciting, virtual This Is Your Life, intermingling previously unconnected strands of our lives. Now we can see why. Online life is full of someone you once worked with and secretly hated. Randoms from nightclubs you’re reminded of four times a day. Schoolmates you rolled no deeper with than cadging a cigarette off.
Were we really meant to know the complete domestic arrangements, political leanings and curious fashion palette of someone we had a one-night stand with in 1992? Maybe these ghosts weren’t all meant to exist on one amorphous doom-scroll, approved and disapproved of by you, playing omnipotent grandmaster with your ‘like’ button.
Twenty years into engaging with socials, through hours of wasted energy on Friendster, Friends United, MySpace, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, that pause to reflect has ignited difficult questions. How social is social media? Is it performing anything more usefully or pleasingly functional than keeping you locked into the job you do and people you don’t really know 24 hours a day?
I began to rather envy my old friend in taking the plunge, joining a new digital elite who’d escaped the neediness of social media. We finally connected, in a series of old-fashioned email exchanges that we should’ve started years ago: rich, personal, intimate, unhindered by the rules of what is and isn’t acceptable in crowd-speak. Self-publishing has its place. But aren’t all our timelines starting to look a bit knackered by now?
I used to think of socials as just a glorified version of the telephone, a quick, easy way of keeping up with other people’s lives. After 20 years, they’re starting to chafe. The human hand is hovering over something the algorithm cannot control: the delete button. Contrary to his own profile, King of the Future Elon Musk may just have blown $44billion on the distant past.
An unskippable lesson
Halfway through the latest chess move in Harry Styles’ career pivot to becoming a bona fide film star, My Policeman, I realised that it didn’t matter what I thought of his performance. The film has been reviewed terribly but this is the kind of story that needs telling, lest its central message of a government-endorsed, police-enforced closet gets lost forever.
A silenced community of LGBT+ pensioners who weathered the British change from establishment hostility to acceptance should have their tales told, in whatever form they take. We should stuff libraries and cinemas with this material. If it takes Harry Styles disrobing to get kids to listen to the torturous tales of lives lived outside of the law on account of their sexuality, so be it. I’ll take these history lessons where I can get them, in whatever form they’re delivered, given the years of hearing the resounding thud of nothing said about them for most of my life.
