This video is brought to you by Sched 35. Have you ever thought to yourself, “I love Tick Tock or Twitter or Instagram and it loves me back”? Well, if you’ve been feeling some anti-platform hostility recently, you’re not the only one. There has been tons of media analysis about how each platform from Instagram to YouTube to Snapchat to more recently Twitter and Twitch and Tick Tock have all gotten kind of crappy. With Twitter recommending Nazi adjacent accounts, Tick Tock freely sharing data, and favorite streamers threatening to leave Twitch, it’s easy to wonder if it’s time to pull a digital Irish exit.
However, for many of us, social media isn’t just a way to waste time, it’s a way to make new online-only friends or build communities. So, how did our favorite friendships get held hostage by the likes of Elon Musk and what does this conundrum say about contemporary society? Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition: Is the Age of Online Friendship Over? We’re living in an era where people are talking more and more about psychedelics, their potential clinical applications, and their ability to treat depression and anxiety. It can be a bit confusing for those of us who were raised in a time where psychedelics were heavily stigmatized. That’s why we’re excited to partner with Schedule 35, who have a lot to offer if you’re interested in learning more about psychedelics and the culture around them. Plus, if you grab anything from their website, use code WISECRACK for 15% off. If you have any questions about Schedule 35’s work, they told us you can reach out to them via their DMs or email them.
Now, let’s look at why friendship is getting harder. It all boils down to the question: what do we do when our friendships are mediated through online platforms that are becoming increasingly sketchy? To answer this, we can look to journalist Corey Doctorow and his catchphrase for this effect: “Notification Vacation”. According to Doctorow, every platform - including social media platforms - goes through the same life cycle. First, they make themselves valuable to users, then they leverage user growth to attract business customers, and finally they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves, before eventually dying.
To explain this further, Doctorow uses Facebook as an example. In the first phase, Facebook needed users, so it offered things like the News Feed which aggregated all the content you wanted to see from your network. This was genuinely valuable and free. In the second phase, Facebook started to leverage its user growth to attract business customers like advertisers or publishers. To the advertisers, they said, “Remember when we told our users that we were never going to spy on them? We changed our mind - we’ve got a ton of surveillance data on them and we will let you use that really cheaply.” To the media companies, Facebook offered a funnel to drive traffic to their own website via media posts and links with excerpts. Suddenly, the user’s News Feed started to be populated with ads and media posts they never asked for, and Facebook stood to make a lot of money from their eyeballs.
Doctorow summarizes this second phase: “We’re going to be good to our business customers at the expense of the users, of course.” Finally, in the third phase, Facebook started showing Publishers content less frequently unless they posted more content - especially content that could be consumed entirely on Facebook. This led to the infamous pivot to video that so many media companies attempted around 2015. Advertisers were eager to get in on it, so Publishers invested heavily in video. By 2016, Facebook admitted that their average daily views were more than one billion.
To be clear, this is the same thing that Wisecrack tried. It’s unclear if there are still any videos that we made for Facebook, but you can try to find them and see which one you think was dumb and which one you think was good. ite a sense of belonging and identity
When I first figured out how to plug my dad’s work laptop into a phone line and log onto the internet, it was a wild west situation. In the early 2000s, blogging and personal homepages had given way to nascent social media sites like Six Degrees, which I didn’t even know existed until recently. By 2006, Myspace had a hundred million users, but Facebook overtook it by 2009, thanks in part to the popular news feed. By 2012, Facebook had fostered 125 billion friendships.
At the same time, Twitter started connecting people to the entire world, rather than basing their network around an existing community, and most new social platforms followed that model. According to professor and game designer Ian Bogost, social media as we know it today is primarily about using diffuse connections to facilitate the flow of content. Scholars took note of the real world implications by 2008, with David Beer arguing that social networking sites had begun to shape understandings of friendship more generally, especially for young people who were more likely to seek out peer connection and tech-adept.
By 2015, 57% of teens said they had made new friends online, with 29% saying they had made more than five. While connecting with others online used to be the sole terrain of tech-savvy hobbyists, it has become increasingly common to make friends online and have those friendships convert into in-person interactions.
A new study even showed that parrots can form strong social relationships over Facebook video, which actually improves their health. Paul Byron argues that social media use has expanded friendships practices, meanings, and dimensions by offering new experiments and sharing, supporting, and feeling supported through single acts of disclosure to one’s broad networks. Before social media, it was impossible to instantly tell all your closest friends you were depressed and hopefully get a pile-on of love and care. Byron’s research has found that young people report receiving more mental health support online than from families, schools, and professional healthcare settings, especially for queer youth. As youth culture and technology expert Dana Boyd notes, friending someone on social media is akin to community building and can help facilitate a sense of belonging and identity.