The Medium is the Message: how we communicate with each other and the world on social media

Anyone who writes about technology’s influence on society and culture will at some point reference Marshall McLuhan's famous quote, “The medium is the message”. I’ve done it at least once if not more in my writing. While it is somewhat cliche, there’s a reason it’s used so much. The platforms and technology we use to say things matter just as much as what it is we’re saying. They matter because the platform provides context for what you’re saying and shapes how it’s presented. You have to structure a message on TV very differently from one in a book. That structure affects how we consume and think about messages put in front of us. One of the first pieces I wrote here was about impermanence culture and how social media makes it hard for things to have staying power. Information moves so quickly on these platforms that nothing is in the spotlight for long. More recently, I wrote about how social media is performative and how that affects the way we act on it. Today, I want to build on those concepts, by looking at how we interact with one another and the world on these platforms. 

Social media was originally supposed to be about connection and interaction. In its current form, that’s not happening. The majority of us are observers there, passively scrolling through without ever leaving a comment. Our feeds have way too much content, it’s impossible to engage with it all. Liking posts is no longer intentional because of this, we just go through the motions of liking things without thinking about what it is we’re liking. This creates a dynamic where it feels like we’re constantly in the backseat of life. Large brands are okay with this because all they need is to make it seem like their content is popular, regardless of whether that popularity is from intentional or meaningful engagement. Just look at the comment section of any popular page, there’s no real communication, it’s 90% garbage and bots. It’d be one thing if this was limited to large companies but it’s bleeding over to our personal lives as well. We try to have real interactions with our friends by leaving comments on their posts, but it rarely leads to something meaningful. Their response is usually a quick pleasantry that took next to zero thought and effort. That’s not to say that anyone is wrong for communicating that way, we all do it because of how these platforms are designed.

Speed and attention take precedence over meaningful communication in the social media ecosystem. If everyone took the time to leave a thoughtful note on their friends’ posts then they would spend less time scrolling and seeing ads, which means less money for the platform. People would also feel more content after those interactions, so they’d be more likely to leave the platform afterward. Meaningful and extended exchanges between people are actually fulfilling. It’s why after having a deep conversation with someone you’re not rushing out to immediately have another one. This isn’t even limited to in-person communication. A long Facetime call can have the same effect. These intentional and fulfilling interactions are at odds with the whole attention economy, where the goal is for us to chase the next hit of dopamine by aimlessly scrolling through a feed that never ends. By making our personal interactions part of that feed, they lose a lot of their meaning. Our exchanges with one another become depersonalized and lost amongst all of the other content. 

Interactions with strangers on the other hand don’t just lack meaning but they can also be incredibly toxic. Especially for strangers who are famous. You can find some of the worst things you’ve ever read by going into the comment section of a celebrity’s post. I was listening to a podcast recently where a former NBA player was talking about the difference between playing today and in the past. Social media was the difference he was talking about. In the past, if you didn’t want to see anything negative you could choose to not buy a newspaper or not turn on ESPN. Now it’s all broadcast directly to your phone. Sure, athletes can turn their phones off or get off social media, but that’s not really an option for them or anyone who has a job like theirs. Part of the job is being a public figure and in today’s world that means having social media. With that comes a constant barrage of insults, threats, and just weird shit. The depersonalization that affects our personal relationships, is also why this toxicity runs so rampant on social media. In most normal types of communication, someone wouldn’t tell another person to kill themself because they didn’t make a three-pointer or that they weren’t the right race to play a character in a movie. Yet, this happens every day on social media. It’s because there’s no personal context around these interactions. Someone who’s angry doesn’t see their victim as a real person, because on social media that person is reduced to a name and profile pic. It all happens in an instant too. An emotion gets triggered, the person who feels wronged pulls out their phone, finds that profile, immediately types a hate-filled message, and hits send. Unlike a real conversation, there’s nothing to think about before or after. 

Why people are getting upset enough to say unhinged comments about trivial things is also a question that needs to be asked. Again, the medium is the message. Social media runs on moral outrage and groupthink. The more outrage there is, the more engagement with the platform there is. Miserable and angry people aren’t new, it’s just that they used to have to be angry and miserable alone. Now, they can convince other people to be angry and miserable with them. All it takes is for someone who knows how to craft the right message and use the algorithm to their advantage. All of a sudden their message is everywhere. We’re wired to follow the tribe. So if we see “our” tribe going after someone, often we will too. Past events like the Salem Witch Trials were a lot harder to spread outside of small communities. If social media had been around back then we might have lost a significant portion of Women during that period. We would have seen Twitter posts detailing how to tell if someone was a witch, and what the best way to build a stake was. There also would have been the pro-witch side doing their best to show that they stand by witches without ever lifting a finger from their screen to help. 

With that last sentence, I don’t mean to demean people who stand on the right side of history. It does mean something that someone believes in what’s right. Social media though has skewed what it means to take a stand. Take the summer of 2020 and its massive Black Lives Matter movement. We saw mobilization unlike anything else this century. Plenty of people joined real protests and showed solidarity, but there was also quite a few people who joined just because they wanted to follow a trend. The black square situation was emblematic of that. One day that summer, you saw every white person you knew (me included) post a black square because it was supposed to be some sort of statement. This didn’t sit right with a lot of people doing actual civil rights work because there was no real thought or effort behind it. People’s hearts may have been in the right place but ultimately it didn’t mean anything. It was just a way to show others that you were part of the trend without risking anything. Movements that erupt from social media don’t require any real planning or effort. People see something that elicits an immediate emotional response, so they take action. Which don’t get me wrong is great, the issue is that the emotional reaction often dissipates just as quickly as it came on. The movement can’t last because there wasn’t time or effort put in to build a movement. Just like our personal communications, it’s all depersonalized and fleeting. People had to be invested in the movements of the 60s, that’s why those movements made the gains they did. In 2020 people just had to change their profile pic, show up for a day, and post a black square.

Trying to figure out solutions for all of this is tough. The next generation will know social media as the main medium in which they interact with others and the world. We’ll see what happens if new technologies emerge and how communication changes with that. For now, we just have to encourage meaningful and intentional connections however we can. In-person experiences with one another are great but aren’t always possible. We need digital tools that allow to truly connect with one another. This is where I think Apple has really stepped in. iMessage, group chats, and FaceTime seem to be some of the best digital ways to foster connection when not in person. Through these tools, you can have real and intentional conversations with people. While iMessages can still be brief there’s more to them because of the context in which they’re sent. They’re not being sent among the noise of social media. Instead, we send them in a dedicated space where we’re communicating with one or multiple people. There are also various tools like reactions and stickers you can use to enhance the message to add more context. That seems to change the way we send and receive messages. The same can be said of Facetime, where you may not be there physically, but again you’re in a dedicated space where you’re intentionally talking to someone. It’s also easy to know if someone isn’t actually in the conversation with FaceTime. Communication tools like these are important if we want to continue to have meaningful interactions with people in the future. We can’t rely soley on sending each other TikToks and liking posts. 

Real connection requires intention and effort. We have to think about the other person and what we’re going to say to them. Our conversations need context around what we say and who we are as people. Mediums like social media miss this because it’s all a part of the feed. Everything gets flattened into easily consumable information devoid of meaning and context. With that, our connections get flattened. We can’t have real conversations that way. Our ties with each other will become weaker unless we make an active attempt to have meaningful conversations with the tools we do have. Even the good things that social media does, like connect us to like-minded people or show us what our friends are up to, fizzle out because of how the platforms are designed. It doesn’t have to be this way. Platforms are designed by people. Right now, they’re designed with shareholders and attention metrics in mind. If we shifted that though, we could create platforms with people in mind. Where we could realize the original goals of these platforms. We could have conversations across the globe with people we cared about and strangers alike. We could build movements that last. We’d still see posts with cute dogs and weirdly intriguing TikToks looking for likes, but there’d also be meaningful and fulfilling connections.