The problem with Social Media
A Reflection
The last two decades have seen the raise of Social Media.
The good part is: (mostly) everyone has access.
The bad one: everyone has this feeling of entitlement about mostly everything. A lot of noise, signal not too much, please, it's daytime!
Social Bias
The (social?) medias makes the informations and skews the knowledge on the grounds of barely understood and badly aligned incentives: number of clicks vs real progress, sick curiosity over facts, food over tought, money over culture.
But further than the noise and the surveillance problem that it creates and that could be somewhat 'incidental' (it isn't) the problem with Social Media is that it gets in the middle.
I don't know how to put it, but if you can produce some important piece of information and the only way you have to get it out in the world is to make a twitter thread out of it... we have to admit that we have a problem.
How the hell would you conceive an argument and have it splitted over tweets that you cannot articulate into a single text document that you post somewhere?
Volatility
I read twitter threads that are awesome, very profound reflections and informations impossible to find anywhere else. And yet, while we preserve the memory of ancient scriptures vergated with archaic instruments and tools, all those precious tweets will soon be gone when the platform does. And it won't be further away than a man's lifespan.
Is it owning a blog the problem? Is https everywhere scaring you?
And, do you really need that much of multimedia to scream to the world: "I'm here, and I feel something, there is war, trouble, whatever, but I do exist regardeless."
Trading words
Why would anyone write on Medium over starting an own blog? Is it for the money? How much Medium makes you rich that you risk giving them all you have and lock your face behind an unconfortable paywall?
Does it give you the financial freedom to walk away and make a difference into this world?
Social media is a problem rather than a solution to one, and while it might be unavoidable, it is strikingly uncomprehensible how we fail to realize this simple truth.