Is Social Media Bad for Community?
“What’s the deal? Are you not on Instagram anymore?” the text read. I half smiled and wrote back, “Nah; wasn’t for me. What’s up?”
“Well how am I supposed to keep up with you?” she asked. “What have you been up to?”
I replied, “I can text you some quick updates, or we could meet for coffee in person and actually catch up.”
Plans were hatched and a week later and an hour over coffee in the books, Courtney and I had officially caught up and stayed connected. Just like the olden days. Fancy that.
Why I left Facebook and Instagram
Technically, I’m still on Facebook, I just never check it. I removed the app from my phone many years ago, mostly because I found it distracting.
I did the same with Instagram a few months ago, but went one step further and actually killed my account. It only took me two days to realize I didn’t miss it at all (and still don’t). It was a time suck (my guess is that I opened the app to mindlessly scroll at least 10 times a day; more on weekends), sometimes stirred up feelings of jealousy or anger, and overall I realized the company made money off of my attention and thus would continue to hone algorithms until it fully maximized my time.
But most of all, social media apps have been killing my drive to build real community.
Digital vs. Physical
It’s easy to reduce the imbalance here to one of the physical against the digital. Claiming that “real” community can only happen in person is short-sighted at best and ignorant at worst, especially as we continue to emerge from a pandemic whose defeat rested largely on physical distance and even isolation. As more work environments stay remote post-pandemic, relying on technology to stay connected to earn a living will become more and more necessary. Therefore, understanding, navigating, and properly using digital tools as part of daily life - and yes, community - will be mandatory.
Community is still best built in person, primarily for biological and social reasons, but physical contact doesn’t have a monopoly on the creation and maintenance of community. Digital community can be and should be part of how we understand and embrace our deep need to connect to others. Therefore, digital vs. physical isn’t a debate I’m interested in having, mainly because it’s not a debate at all. It’s not either/or; it’s both/and when it comes to how we create and grow communities that matter to us.
The debate to be had, especially when it comes to smart phones and social media is a bit bigger.
Shallow vs. Deep
The real issue at heart when we discuss if social media is bad for community is trying to decipher if apps and phones are shackling us to a shallow understanding of community, preventing us from running free toward deep, meaningful community. On the whole, I’d say yes - social media can only create shallow, and not deep, community. This is bad for us as it doesn’t help us build meaningful and lasting community that we desperately need.
What is social media?
For the sake of this discussion, I’m going to define social media with the following benchmarks:
Free to use (or at least a freemium model)
Designed to steal your time and attention
Gamifies or prioritizes weak ties (vs. strong ties)
All three of these characteristics are antithetical to authentic community. Here’s how.
Free to use (or at least a freemium model)
If you’re using a product or service and aren’t paying to do so, then beware: that means you are the product or service. So then who is the customer, the one paying? In the case of social media, it’s advertisers. For Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, advertisers pay money to reach users to generate views, clicks, and hopefully, purchases. Therefore, those platforms’ main goals (as capitalist, for-profit entities) is to generate as many views and clicks for those who pay them for that deliverable. That way, they can keep delivering more of that and earn more money and the cycle repeats itself.
Facebook and Twitter don’t have any interest in helping you develop real community on their platforms; they just want you to stay on their apps so they can get more cash for ads. The minute your connections leave their sites and start happening in person or via text or email, they start losing revenue. This may be great for authentic community for you but is bad for their shareholders and upper management. Which leads them to come up with ways to keep you hooked.
Designed to steal your time and attention
You know how when you pull down on your feed in a social media app and the refresh icon gets to work and starts spinning? Remind you of anything? How about a roulette wheel?
The same dopamine triggers in our brain that give us a rush while we wait for the roulette wheel to stop on red or black are also triggered when we open a social media app to see what’s new. What will our best friend have posted? Any new designs from our favorite brand? Who’s angry at who now? Trigger, release, repeat.
The most critical reality about time and attention is this: once spent, you can’t get it back. You can always earn more income when you spend money. But a minute or hour spent scrolling will never come back to you; it’s gone forever. Spending fifteen minutes in deep, meaningful conversation with another person that results in real community is priceless; spending fifteen minutes scrolling and double tapping on Instagram is worth exactly $0.02. So you tell me - what’s your time worth?
Gamifies or prioritizes weak ties (vs. strong ties)
Every social media app has a hallmark stat easily viewable to all: a friend or follower count. The higher the number, the better, happier, more successful you are, right? Better get to requesting and tagging and liking so you can boost those numbers. The more the merrier, at least according to Zuck.
But behavioral theorists have long held that 150 is the magic number for meaningful and productive communities. Most humans can usually maintain about nine friendships and connections before those friendships and connections begin losing power and mutual benefit.
Worst of all, social media puts a priority on content and users that drive outrage. Want to keep someone engaged? Piss them off (Fox News wrote the blueprint on this one). Sow seeds of fear and anger and reap a crop of viewers and followers that will come back for more. When we’re angry, our primitive brain kicks in and we keep coming back for more content that confirms our fears and justifies our rage.
Of course, communities built on destruction, rather than depth, aren’t good for us. They eat at our better angels, make us suspect of others, and end up depriving us of the chance to get to know someone different than us. Communities of fear build walls; communities of hope build bridges. And social media is designed to build walls so that in your rage you can knock them down (and then build more walls and someone knocks those down and then the cycle repeats itself while hedge funds cash dividend checks).
Let’s go swimming
All three of these characteristics result in shallow community - weak ties where we “know” someone remotely or distantly, casually checking on what they ate for breakfast recently, what the clouds looked like outside their airplane window last week, or how big their puppy is getting. All fine information for us to have, but on its own are just droplets of shallow community when what our souls need is a downpour of real connection.
This sustenance can only be found if we’re willing to jump in deep, to get not just our toes wet but every hair on our head soaked for the sake of true community. It’s scary as hell; you can’t see the bottom, you’re not sure how good a swimmer you really are, and dammit maybe you’ll drown.
But it’s the only way you can actually swim.
For years I spent so much time in the kiddie pool of community. I was content to amass followers and feed them a steady stream of my highlights: pictures on stage, delicious food or cocktails, media mentions, and workouts completed. And it was comfortable because it was safe and shallow. No one saw the opposite moments, when I wasn’t riding high, experiencing success, or having the time of my life.
And I didn’t see anyone else’s. I kept people at an arm’s length, all of us shouting across the crowded shallow end of the pool called community, one-upping each other with a carefully curated highlight reel that we passed off as real life. No one was getting better at swimming as we simply stayed ankle-deep. (Navel gazing is so much easier that way)
But then I looked over and saw the high dive and the deep end below it. It wasn’t crowded. There was plenty of room. The only requirements to enter were vulnerability, an ethic of risk, and transparency. Anyone could take the leap and slowly, more and more people were there to rescue anyone who slipped in too deeply to start or wasn’t sure they could do it.
And one by one, we all started swimming. We kept each other afloat. No one drowned. The deep end offered a freedom that only comes when you’re willing to jump. Once you do, you realize you were made to float, buoyed by the connection created from deep community.
So where am I now?
I made the leap, mostly from Instagram, and I haven’t looked back. Every once in a while I’ll hear from co-workers or my wife about something someone I really care about (a family member or colleague) posted and I’ll ask to take a look. But when I do, I find myself then reaching out - via phone, text or email - to make sure I stay truly connected to them rather than remaining content to glance at their life from afar.
I text and email now more than I used to, using those tools to stay anchored in the deep end of meaningful relationships. I am still active on Twitter and LinkedIn as those seem to be (for now) decent platforms to spread my message of deep community. But there may well be a day (and a day very soon) where neither serve those purposes for me and I’ll bow out of those platforms, too. For now I continue to push myself over and over again into the deep end when I see a LinkedIn update from a connection so that I go deeper into community with them rather than passively click an emoji to let them know how I feel about a life update.
And that’s what deep community comes down to: it’s learning to swim over and over again. You were meant for the deep end, too. Don’t be content to stay shallow. Visit the kiddie pool every once in a while if you must (it can be quite fun), but don’t live there. Wade out into the water a bit. Feel the cool rush of community all over and get lost with us in the thrill that only comes from embracing the breaking tide of deep community.
