Back to the Blog
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It has to be said: social media has gotten really bad. Worse, it has made itself addictive.
I have some understanding of addiction. I’ve never abused drugs, alcohol or tobacco, but there is a history of alcoholism in my family (a history which ended two generations go). My father and I both have fearsome sweet tooths and our justification of, “well, there are worse things to be addicted to than sugar” is only half a joke.
So, when I see myself flipping through reel after reel on Facebook or short after short on YouTube, craving these little nuggets of flashy content before suddenly realizing that I’ve been at this for an hour and I’ve been doing nothing else, alarms trip in my head. Admittedly, I am exhausted, given all that has happened this year, and my reaction may be not much different from slumping onto the couch at the end of the day, back in the day, and tuning out in front of the television. However, the social media giants have distilled this instinct into its purest form, and I feel that they are actively trying to suck me in.
Worse, the quality of Facebook’s written posts - the means I’ve used to stay in contact with friends and family and to promote my work and my employer’s work - has diminished substantially. Have you noticed how many ads and “sponsored content” have crept into your feed? Think hard: are there people you were previously close to who you haven’t heard from for months, only to look them up and see that they still have an active social media feed; you just haven’t seen their posts? Have you noticed that some of your posts appear to connect with a lot of people and get a lot of likes, while others aren’t noticed at all?
That’s the algorithm talking.
We joined Facebook to spend time online with our friends, to share our triumphs, commiserate over our tragedies, to connect, but we paid nothing for this product that Facebook offered to facilitate this. That’s because we are the product (hat tip Cory Doctorow). And now that we are hooked (and I use that term deliberately), Facebook wants to serve up as little as what we actually came for as it can, while shovelling as much sponsored content as it can get away with, including flashy baubles that will draw us into its more lucrative offerings, addicting us, while separating us from each other.
This pattern has been discussed elsewhere (see “enshittification”, again hat tip to Cory Doctorow) and it’s hardly limited to Facebook. Just about every other corporate social media structure out there is either run along these lines, or run by a crypto-fascist, or both.
I’d like to say “enough”, but it’s not easy. Social media is a big part of my job, and on a personal note, if I want to promote my upcoming novels, I have no other realistic option but social media. This is what happens when you allow a small number of corporations to monopolize the space. We used to break up companies for a lot less. In Canada, we used to buy up bankrupt competitors and run them in competition with the would-be monopolies as non-profits. I’d support doing that today, though I don’t see that happening any time soon.
But if I can’t stop my addiction to corporate social media, maybe I can find a way to slow it down.
Do you remember the blogosphere? Some of you might not. It has been at least twelve years since blogs were a thing. For those who don’t remember, many of us used to have websites where we could post our everyday thoughts every day. And people would visit and comment. And we’d have conversations and make connections. These could be individual web pages on websites called Blogger or WordPress, or if you were somewhat technically savvy, you could install your own blogging software (like Movable Type) on domains that you bought, and people would actually come to see what you had to say. There were communities of blogs on their own websites, connecting blogs from multiple websites. There were political blogs, and while there were echo chambers, there was no single algorithm that blocked content that you didn’t immediately agree with. You were still able to step out of those chambers and encounter content that differed in opinion to your own without it being the work of a troll.

What happened? Well, many of us joined Facebook and other corporate social media to connect with friends and promote our blogs for free, but that same corporate social media sucked the communities out of our blogs. Commenting and other participation dropped precipitously. Readership followed soon after, and one by one, many blogs became dead sites. Social media wanted our readers, our connections, and they took them.
My own site has flirted with dead status many times these past few years. Some blogs remain, though, like Dave Simmer’s Blogography or Steve Munro’s Transit and Politics site or the Candid Cover’s Canadian YA Book Blog, or author J.M. Frey’s blog, or Kerry Clare’s Pickle Me This. Near as I can tell, bloggers like these are focused more on their own writing and are content to let their audience come to them. They deserve a wider reach.
Do you have links to active personal or writing blogs on the Internet? Feel free to post them in the comments below.
We need to reduce the influence that corporate social media has on our lives. We have to open ourselves up to searching for connections that don’t come quite as easily. And we need to make use of some of our older technology such as RSS Newsreaders, that corporate social media has striven to replace.
If you are a Mac user and you want to read blogs, download NetNewsWire now. This app searches for and highlights new entries in your favorite blogs. Simply enter the web address of any blog, and the application should be able to give you a list of the most recent articles you can read, and highlight whenever a new entry comes online. It even reads and serves up the feeds of peoples’ Mastodon accounts. Using this application, you’ll never miss anything new without the need to constantly schlep over to each individual website - a feature corporate social media promised but then reneged on in favour of ads and sponsored content. Windows and Android users can check out this web article about RSS feeds that they can use (and do you have other Newsreaders that you enjoy? Post links to them below).
The point is, if we want better ways to connect with each other on the web, we’ve got to make them. I’ll still be making videos on YouTube; I’ll still be posting on Facebook, but I’ll try and make more time to write to this blog. Maybe if more of us take these steps, we can carve out a bigger space for the Independent Web.
I’ve promised myself and others that I’d write more on this blog before, and I’ve reneged on that promise. It’s hard to keep a journal going when you’re exhausted, but there are rewards if I can make the effort, and I intend to make the effort.
I hope you’ll join me. And if you do, consider leaving a comment below.
https://bowjamesbow.ca/2024/09/09/back-to-the-blo-1.shtml