Social Media is No Longer Social
A shocking statistic caught my eye this week: only 7% of time spent on Instagram and 17% on Facebook involves consuming content from friends or followed accounts. The overwhelming majority of our time is now spent watching short-form videos that are recommended by AI-powered algorithms.
Initially, I thought those figures seemed really low. But they come directly from a legal filing Meta made in mid-2024 in response to an FTC antitrust lawsuit. A year prior, those timeshare figures were 11% and 22%.
I’m certain that those figures have dropped so much further in the past two years as more and more algorithmic content fills our feeds.
Do you remember when you could log onto a platform and see a message saying that you were “all caught up”? Today, the infinite scroll never gives our brains a natural signal that it’s time to stop.
Social media is no longer about seeing what our social network is sharing. It’s no longer about connecting with friends and family, nor is it even about the creators we’ve chosen to follow. Instead, it’s all about entertainment that the algorithm predicts will keep us watching and scrolling, mixed with ads.
I was struck by Paul Kingsolver’s observation in Against the Machine that the web and the net are, by definition, things designed to trap prey.
Platforms use so many tricks to keep us trapped. Have you ever seen an interesting post disappear the exact moment your feed auto-refreshes when you log in, baiting you to scroll to find it again but getting distracted along the way? Or watched a video that teases a climax that never arrives and just wastes your time? Or the intentionally confusing videos that get you to read the comments for an explanation, only to realise the content has no purpose other than to boost engagement? Even our notifications have been hijacked. Once, this was an alert that a friend had commented on your photo; now it’s more likely to be about something someone else is doing, which is unrelated to you.
Kingsolver quotes Iain McGilchrist, who reminds us that attention changes the world. It is so incredibly easy to lose entire evenings to the apps. But we are only fooling ourselves if we still think we are logging on to stay connected with the real people in our lives who matter. Once we open the apps, escaping the time trap is very hard.
It takes far more effort to say yes to eating together with others than to sit at home watching videos. But I think it is worth it.
Rachel
