What can we glean from the rise and fall of social media?
Social media is experiencing a protracted decline. It’s almost imperceptible but we can all sense it. Something feels different with each passing year, even if we can’t point to anything tangible as the cause, we feel like things are amiss.
Don’t take my word for it. The corporate consulting firm Gartner predicts that considerable numbers of people will reduce their social media time by 50% within the next year. Ian Bogost declared “The Age of Social Media Is Ending” in The Atlantic.
Writing for Forbes, Peter Suciu predicts 2024 will be the year AI is merged into the social experience. I’m skeptical. Who wants robots in their social spaces? Nonetheless, Peter admits that “2024 could also be the year that users firmly push back, and further call upon the platforms to address such issues of privacy and addiction.”
Monumental shifts are unfolding, as social media companies clamp down on free networking connections and throttle traffic to off-platform websites. With these shifts, memes spewing misinformation have supplanted links to legitimate news sites in our feeds. Social media is like reading just the dumpster-fire comments section — not the article.
Feeds are clogged with ads and recommended content most users didn’t ask for. With each passing day, we sense the social media experience degrading, plodding along the slow path to obsolescence.
Part of the looming decline is thanks to the rise of AI-generated content. Gartner’s survey found that seven in ten people are anticipating the proliferation of AI content making the social media experience worse. I’ve worried about this myself.
