What does it mean when you find an exponent atop impermanence?
We’ve entered an era of new-school platforms where Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram no longer hold all the cards. Through scandals, missteps, and market share losses, the monopoly seems to be loosening as user’s attention is directed elsewhere online. People may still hold accounts with the giants, but they are increasingly likely to step one foot in a different direction, for ill and for good.
To experience moments captured by friends and influencers, trendy apps like BeReal, Journal, and Vero have appeared. Public discourse alternatives to the toxicity of Musk’s misadventure have proliferated with apps like Mastodon, BlueSky, and Threads. Discord and Reddit still hold large audiences captive with their community and information-centric approach to media. TikTok and Lemon8 continue to engineer scarily persuasive algorithmic content for the masses.
Every one of these apps adds time, attention, and data to the arsenals in the Valley. Each one subtracts time, attention, and data from our lives, making them less meaningful and more full of meandering.
Our itinerant use of these platforms is a formative part of who we become. We place precious life-energy into a digital persona that dies within a hype cycle or, worse, metastasizes throughout our online presence to create a false reality we can begin to believe.
As more social media options emerge, as both our inputs and outputs online increase, as the way we interact with the internet becomes increasingly more trivial and banal, what will be left of our minds and hearts inside this new world? Will we continue to engage in more digital spaces that dilute our contribution and identities? Or will we start to create authentic places that encourage our humanity and creativity?
