Social media began as a window. New, intriguing, a little wild, and nobody knew where it would lead. That was exactly its charm. Somewhere along the way the window turned into a stage, and the stage into a marketplace. Sharing became content. People became brands.
Many people now seem to live mainly to be seen living. Life is aimed at the lens, importance is staged, and a circle of followers applauds, because they need the illusion just as badly as the one performing it. Where does the person end and the mask begin? Perhaps they no longer know themselves.
Take dinner, for example. The pasta goes cold while the plate is pushed aside, the lamp is turned, the fork rotated a quarter turn. The company waits with rumbling stomachs, silent, extras in someone else’s film. Then the photo goes out into the world, and eyes go to the screen: how many thumbs up already? The heart beats faster with every new little heart. The lasagne is cold, the conversation is cold, but the likes are lovely and warm. Nobody remembers how the pasta tasted. But it scored brilliantly.
Then come the labels. Boomer, Gen X, left, right, a spectrum that has apparently become sacred and, strangely enough, very sensitive: before the conversation has even started, a label is already hung around your neck. Once you have been put in a box, nothing you say sounds like your own any more. It sounds like what your box would say.
So there is no room left for the in-between. Why can you not take one thought from one bank and another from the opposite bank? Some ideas from the left are genuinely good, just like some on the right, but that does not work in a political spectrum or debate. Whoever holds ideas from both camps does not belong in the group.
Most thoughtful people are a mixture. But a mixture fits in no group, and groups are exactly what the platforms reward: algorithms designed to keep the addiction going. Thinking out loud, doubting, leaving things half finished: it has become a gamble.
Humour suffers most from this. A joke needs a little trust and some room. When everyone is quick to take offence, and even quicker to show it, that room is smothered. Lightness needs people who assume the best of others, and they have become rarer, just like tolerance. My yardsticks here are George Carlin, Ricky Gervais and Monty Python.
That does not make the technology of social media bad, and not everyone behaves this way. But what began as a bridge to connect has all too often become a racetrack to win.
Perhaps the answer is smaller: a quiet corner, a handful of real conversations, a work that speaks for itself. Not everything needs to be posted, not everything calls for a position, not everything needs explaining. Some things can simply be: without a label, without a brand, and all the more authentic for it.