One of the things I keep thinking we’re all going to “miss” if we’re not all on social media is the immediate satisfaction of posting something off the tops of our head at 10:32pm on a Tuesday night, and then seeing five likes and one person responds with an emojii.
That’s the dopamine hit. The rush. Insert your coin (write something, upload a photo), pull the lever (hit send), and watch what happens.
Over and over we do this, for fucking years. Half a decade. Or more. On different platforms.
We post, we hit like, we reply, and this somehow how keeps everyone coming back.
Because if we post something on our blog (like this), there is no response. I can’t see the immediate feedback, the reations, the comments (they’re turned off), the traffic.
I also think how if a few of us got together and started some sort of “group blog,” posting things through the day that we find interesting, it wouldn’t be enough.
We need to sit there, hit refresh, and see the new thing. The fresh post.
I remember the allure of the Christian message boards I used to frequent back in like 1998 or 1999. You’d hit refresh and there’d always be something new at the top, whether a new post, or a new reply.
With Buzzgrinder in 2001, I thought, “why not put the message board on the front page?” I mean, I thought I was smart shit, but the blog had already been invented! Hah.
But still, with a small crew we posted every hour on the hour, usually from 8am through 4pm, no matter what. There was always something new when you came back because we weren’t on websites for HOURS A DAY like we are now.
And hell, I made a concerted effort to avoid Twitter today and I think I was still on there like three hours total. Fucking christ.
And with that whole, well… websites just aren’t interesting enough to keep coming back to, that’s why we keep being pull back to social media.
Have we thought that maybe we weren’t meant to keep tabs on every news outlet, video feed, music stream, and entertainment stream all day and night?
How much is enough?
We’re already spending two, four, six hours a day on these sites. At what point does a social media platform come along that can match the pull? The rush?
I just don’t think we’re meant to be this connected to the fire hose of updates. I love my friends, but I don’t need to see the coffee they got on Tuesday afternoon, because I’m trying to keep up with 300 other friends, too.
But to what end?
At the end of the day there’s no destination, and the entire journey is made of fast food and cheap jeans.