Culture

The future of social media is sharing less, not more

We may never leave social media completely. But we will control which aspects of our identities we share, and with whom

I signed up to Facebook in the summer of 2007. It was a few weeks before I was due to start sixth form, and, having attended an all boys school, the idea of a mixed class represented a rare opportunity of reinvention.

Before then, I, like most who grew up on the internet, had gone through clunkier patterns of online existence. I started with a Bebo website that was mainly about the anime series Beyblade. I used anonymous personas on MSN messenger and on forums, where I would have to lie about my age in order to gain access. Even on Myspace, where I uploaded real pictures of myself, my image was heavily curated – reflecting the person I wanted to be seen as (in this case, an emo skateboarder) to a small group of friends.  

But Facebook changed all that. Rather than highly customisable backgrounds and features, everyone was given the same, finished profile. There was no more auto-playing music, no more hyper-personalised fonts, no more “Top 8”. The way to “reinvent” yourself through Facebook was by uploading more pictures of yourself, sharing all your thoughts and feelings in wall posts, and befriending more people on the platform.

The emergence of Facebook has been significant in how we conceive of social media. Almost every platform we use encourages us to share as much of our personal lives as possible, incentivising us with more features, filters and monetisation tools. Instead of the conscious curation that characterised social networks of the past, these platforms continue promising users that if they simply post more about themselves and their friends, they can have more fulfilling social experiences.

In recent years, however, public conversations around the darker elements of social media platforms – from data collection and privacy issues to fake news and propaganda – have led to more thinking on how we should use them (or if they should even be used at all). In the next decade, as we reassess our relationship with social media – and by extension, the Big Tech companies that run them – we will see more people leave public platforms entirely, sticking instead to small communities and friendship groups on more private platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal.  

But this will be a luxury only few will be able to choose. After all, for many of us, social media isn’t just an amalgamation of our social lives, but is also intertwined in our economic lives. Post Covid-19, as more businesses and companies expand to incorporate remote workers, social media will be essential both as a form of finding and applying for work, but also for vetting prospective employees and contractors well in advance of any formal interview.

So, what happens to those of us who have to be on social media in some capacity? Instead of sharing more, we may well go back to a more “Myspace” way of managing our online presences – with more careful and deliberate curation, not just of which pictures we post, as we already see on Instagram, but also what we write and how we present ourselves more generally. The desire for private spaces will mean that most of us will share to a small audience in more secure networks, rather than for public consumption. Meanwhile, our “public” accounts – the ones that are tied to our lives as citizens and economic actors, will be cleaner, highly managed and as neutral and inoffensive as possible. Rather than the personal, social, economic and political existing on the same platform and intertwining, the growing demands for spheres of our lives to be separated will mean that even if we interact with social media more often, our behaviour on platforms will depend on what accounts we use, and the context in which we use them.

This might sound a bit sterile. But there could be an upside. It might make the internet a fun place to be. Much like the culture of forums that defined the early years of mass internet access, the separation of online identities – some anonymous or pseudonymous – may facilitate a situation where users can set their own boundaries and parameters and curate their own identities, all while feeling more protected and free to express themselves. Of course, this will come with its own problems, but it may just facilitate an internet culture in which users will actually have to engage with each other again, rather than the amalgamations of data and networks that social media platforms have placed them in – and defined them by.

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK