How Social Media Is Devouring Itself

“Recommend ‘Heaven’ to your followers?” reads the punchline of a recent cartoon depicting a person who has arrived at the pearly gates. What was the name of your first pet reads a similar St. Peter cartoon about social media and the Internet.

While we try to  laugh, social media has devolved from its original promise of an online identity and the chance to find like-minded peers and express an opinion to what is sometimes an opportunist and capitalistic monster.

 Here are some of the ways it is devouring itself before our very eyes.

Why do so many sites ambush us with subscribe paywalls? Because so many people have embraced ad blockers! And why have so many people embraced ad blockers? Because of the succession of “try this miracle product” filibustering pitch people who blather forever – “Wait! Don’t go! – while you wait for your content. Skip this ad, retroactively!

Some say they wouldn’t mind forking over a modest amount to “subscribe” to a site but worry about giving Big Tech access to their personal data.

Question for the Big Tech sites: Is running irritating ads and then charging people to not see them your actual business plan as in – playing both side of the street?

Ever since it began, social media has redefined the word “friend” as someone bequeathed to you by a third party instead of someone you could find and connect with on your own. Hey, I can make my own friends some said in the beginning.

Soon, social media discovered related, lucrative “recommendations” – “Your Friend Susie Likes This Hand Cream; You Will Too!” – and the rest is social media history. See: “Recommend ‘Heaven’ to Your Followers?”

There’s a reason the injunction of not “preaching to the choir” was coined – the choir is already converted! Of course, your friends like you, your opinions and agree with you – that’s why they’re your “friends.”

Echo chambers of those who like you and agree with you have produced a distorted sense of power and influence and the losers are the posters. Social “influencers” with thousands and even millions of followers can derive a false sense of their ability to effect social change, exhibit A being no President Kamala Harris today. Instead of preaching to the choir perhaps activists should be pursuing “undecideds” and fence sitters.

By duping people into false feelings of power and importance, social media has created a “dear diary” phenomenon. Once upon a time, people who wanted to write about their battle with allergies or migraines, their mean mother and their middle school popularity struggles were confined to “vanity” presses.

Once upon a time, dads used vanity presses to publish their memories about growing up poor in the Ozarks or their eight grandchildren; the tome would sit on a living room shelf – with sprayed edges and a silk ribbon bookmark – to be sometimes plopped in unsuspecting  visitors’ laps.

Not anymore. Today, weepy, self-pitying “One Woman’s/Man’s Story” and “My Life So Far” memoirs dominate new publishing releases, occluding those with politically important stories to tell. Why? Because traditional publishers want authors with  “followers” and “friends.”

It is bad enough that social media is causing people to judge their worth on “likes” – which is, after all, codependence and “people pleasing” – it also has produced reactivity and grandiosity.

There was a time when if you disagreed with someone or they you, you could walk through the contretemps  – perhaps agreeing to disagree and see the other’s side of things. You did not “react” – instantly – with name calling, retaliation and cancellation.

And grandiosity? Just as desktop publishing made every John Doe a printer in the mid-1980s thanks to PageMaker and LaserWriter printers, today social media with its millions of newsletters and podcasts has made every John Doe a “publisher.”  And surprise – their friends like them.