Social Media is Now Anything but “Social”

Social media nowadays is anything but “social”.

The year was 2007 (I think). I dropped my bag on the floor, went to my computer, and logged into my Orkut account. (Honestly, unless you are either Brazilian or Indian, you probably don’t know what Orkut is — but to abbreviate this post, it was the biggest social media platform in these two countries during my childhood.)

First thing I checked was the list of people who visited my profile page. Of course, you wanted your crush to be among them. She wasn’t. So, let’s stalk her for a few minutes.

Well, after that, let’s check if anyone else joined my group: “Eu conheço o Mauricio Takashi Kiyama” (I know Mauricio Takashi Kiyama). Looks like only my 13 friends are part of the group.

Once that was done, it was time to hop on whatever online game I was addicted to at the time and spend the rest of the day playing with my friends online.

That was the extent of my experience with social media back in my teenage years. (I’m 31 now.) Today, the online websites that internet gurus invented to connect the world, create communities, and unite people of different backgrounds look a lot different from what I think their original vision was.

Recently, I caught myself spending 3–4 hours in bed, scrolling through hundreds of 60-second videos, feeding my brain with extremely useless information. One was “a list of things Madison Beer is watching on Netflix” (who is Madison Beer???), another was a video of a guy falling off his bicycle, or even one with “Pokémon if they were real” (that one was actually pretty cool).

I spent zero minutes socializing on a self-proclaimed “social” media platform.

Now, I don’t think that social media is necesarilly all evil, and honestly I am able to connect with people, be inspired by great reels, and laugh my ass off on other ones. Moderation in all things, including moderation right?

While there are millions of things to be said about social media — its impact on our attention spans, how it’s rewiring our reward system — for this post, all I want to do is remind myself that: