The internet is evolving
Sorting through the wreckage of the attention economy
As an old millennial, I feel a sense of responsibility. My generation was the last to grow up without the ubiquitous internet. In high school we used AOL instant messenger, talking to each other in the evenings from a desktop computer, dialed in through our telephone lines. When I first started using Facebook, you had to have a college email account.
I’ve always been ill at ease on social media. At first it was just an odd feeling: Why write a public message on someone’s Facebook ‘wall’ rather than send a private message? As the influence of social media grew, so did my discomfort. I don’t like putting fragments of myself “out there” on platforms designed to cannibalize attention. But I feel isolated when I try the life of a digital hermit. So there’s a constant tension.
The internet, thankfully, is not a static thing. It is co-created by entrepreneurs and human behavior. At the macro level, in terms of cultural and political influence, the attention economy has been dominated by a few large platforms. At the personal level, the internet is what you make of it. And it’s getting easier to find your niche without the old titans, Facebook and Twitter.
During the first generation of social media (2006 - 2022)1, Mark Zuckerburg's grand vision of the power of “sharing” was unleashed into the public. It launched, peaked, and then imploded into social and emotional chaos. During this era, hashtag movements failed to bring about substantive political change. We started to notice a youth mental health crisis. We elected a reality TV show host as president. We lost our minds during a pandemic. For the first time in United States history, we didn’t have a peaceful transfer of power.
We can’t blame all of our problems on social media, but it’s fair to conclude that Zuckerburg’s utopian vision didn’t pan out.
The ending marker for this era (maybe) was Elon Musk buying Twitter. I don’t know what Elon is thinking. He says he wants to create a transparent and fair digital public square — one that is more conducive to free speech. Maybe he thinks he is revolutionizing public discourse, but his trollish behavior suggests the quality of public discourse on Twitter will remain unchanged.
Musk, through the “Twitter Files” release, is trying to expose the nefarious practices of the old Twitter. He is meme-ing his way through the transition, creating narratives with the help of Blake Masters, battling left-wing tyranny to the delight of right-wing populists who spend a lot of time on Twitter.
Twitter is a driving force in our politics despite stats showing that only 23% of Americans use the platform. A quarter of the accounts produce the vast majority of tweets. These frequent tweeters punch above their weight in influence because Twitter is where journalists hang out, and journalists create stories consumed by a wider audience. Substacker Freddie deBoer explains the effect:
When a big story breaks, there’s an initial feeling-out period where the media talks to itself and decides what the consensus opinion will be. As time has gone on, this process has gotten faster and faster, so that now the media consensus and the expectation that all decent people will glom onto it develop in a matter of minutes.
One reason, possibly, for left-leaning slants in the “mainstream media” is because mainstream journalists follow left-leaning accounts on Twitter, and activists can easily amplify a narrative.
Rational-minded conservative people don’t tweet very much, and they don’t have armies of digital activists retweeting everything they write, so there’s not a counter-balance of perspectives on Twitter.
There are signs of a changing ecosystem.
Axios reports of a media startup creating a system for text alerts about Congressional news. Other news companies are brainstorming ways to deliver timely snapshots outside the twittersphere.
We might be entering a new era of decentralization.
Substacker Noah Smith recently wrote an interesting piece called “The internet wants to be fragmented.” His theory is that Facebook and Twitter have played an oversized and unnatural function in the digital age.
Facebook became an all-conquering corporate behemoth, and Twitter managed to stay profitable and secure from competition in spite of being notoriously poorly managed. But almost immediately after the great centralization of the 2010s, I started noticing that something was wrong with the internet I had come to know and love.
What was wrong, according to Noah, was that instead of finding your niche in a corner of the internet, everyone was being thrown into the same conversation. Instead of smaller communities moderating themselves based on community values, a centralized system of content moderation took shape. Originally a great place to connect and share, the internet became a place to fight and argue.
Noah observes signs of a return to decentralization. Fewer young people are using Facebook and Twitter. More people are socializing on group chat services like Signal and WhatsApp.
Taking aim at Twitter’s foundation, Noah rejects the lofty vision of founder Jack Dorsey, who saw it as an experiment in global consciousness.
People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many. And the internet works when you can exit — when you can move to a different town if you don’t like the mayor or the local culture. This doesn’t mean we need a world where nobody talks to anyone we disagree with — instead of thick walls, we need semipermeable membranes.
In my view, the fundamental problem with behemoth platforms is the monetization structure. Facebook and Twitter rely on eyeballs to advertisements for revenue. Their features have changed over time, always aimed at increasing engagement at any cost.
The cost has been high.
Other websites have emerged as competitors to Twitter. I made my way onto Post. There’s no character limit or ads. There’s a token system to tip writers and pay for paywalled articles, although the monetary functions are in the developmental stage. Mastodon is a social network whose server is crowdfunded.
For its part, Substack has revived the blogosphere. With its paid subscriber function, Substack is also a viable financial platform for independent writers and journalists. This is a healthy development. I think it has already changed the media ecosystem in subtle and positive ways.
For the first time in a long time, I am feeling slightly optimistic about our digital future. Healthier digital networks won’t fix everything in the real world, but they will help us get our feet back on the ground.
2006 marks the year when Facebook opened up beyond college students, and also when Twitter launched. My definition of social “media” is that posts are public for the world to see. Private messaging services are certainly social, but not exactly a type of media.