Waiting to exhale: Social media holds its breath

It feels like we’re on the cusp of a new version of social media. So what’s going to be the new way for an emergent generation to share pictures of their pet outfits or skin-care routines? And how will old people ruin it just by knowing what it is.
3 mins read

Somewhere close to the beginning of every year, a friend and I have a tradition of getting together to make a “vision board” for the year ahead. It sounds high-minded and virtuous and all that, but really it mostly involves a long evening jammed into a greasy booth at a beloved taco place, drinking a bit too much beer and trying not to drop guacamole on my iPad.

Some of what we put on this “goals roadmap” leans toward the frivolous (learn Blackbird on the guitar, go on a real holiday), and some is more weighty (career, health, financial stability, you know … the greatest hits). We check in on how we did on the stuff we’d set out for ourselves the year before – trying not to be too hard on ourselves for the failures, while enthusiastically celebrating the wins.

This year, however, I had failed so magnificently at one of one of my goals that I had to roll it over to 2025 for another attempt. And, oddly, it was one of the more innocuous ones.

Simply: “Break my phone habit.”

Even now I don’t have the stomach to call it an addiction – settling for “habit” as though I can avoid the spade still being very much a spade through a technicality.

For the past few years my problem has been Instagram – the social media platform for people of a very specific age bracket who stopped liking the Weird-Auntie energy of Facebook a while ago, but didn’t have the youth or energy for TikTok or the crazed hysteria of what we are now obliged to call X.

Instagram has swallowed more of my life than I care to admit, a little brightly-lit magic window of escape that I glued myself to when I should have been doing things like reading or going outside or trying to think up names for colours that don’t exist. And ultimately the amount of time I was spending on the platform was becoming noticeable enough for me to want to do less of it. Much less.

And it feels like I’m not the only one.

Echo chambers

Social media feels like it’s arrived at another inflection point – one of many over the past few years. Whereas before it was limited to one platform at a time (Facebook’s – ahem – “privacy challenges”, or Elon Musk’s takeover of what was then Twitter), this one feels more industry-wide. Facebook is a hobbling, half-blind granddad of a thing, useful only for buying a second-hand carpet or finding who of your older friends and family have gone absolutely nuts since you saw them last. Combine this with the recent will-they-won’t-they uncertainty around the (American) future of TikTok, the exodus from X without any viable emergent competitor and the increasingly hyper-curated cynicism of Instagram, and you’ve got a landscape that is more fragmented and siloed by age and politics than ever before.

This is not a new observation, but it suddenly feels more sharply acute – smaller and smaller circles talking only to themselves. It’s like watching the last gasps of skinny jeans or that person at a dinner party who absolutely refuses to take the hint that it’s over and could you please go home now.

Whether or not this means something new is gathering itself in the background or a complete reimagining of our understanding of what social media even is, only time will tell. But it does feel like a generational change is lurking in the future. “Sharing” – that thing we were all breathlessly told was the pathway to a joined-up future of understanding and togetherness where we all sing Kumbaya and make each other matcha bowls – has become less of an invitation to delight at other people’s small joys, and more of an anxiety-driven chore or an excuse to flag-wave in the faces of people or groups we don’t like. Considering that this is the landscape we’ve built for ourselves, who actually even wants a “digital town square” any more?     

Hi. It’s me. I’m the problem. It’s me.

It feels like Millennials and Gen Xers still yearn for a kind of monoculture, a shared experience that lets us all know where we fit into the grand scheme of the perpetually shifting noise and bombast that is the internet. Which is why the main social media platforms aren’t likely to go anywhere any time soon. It’s essentially our whiny voices pleading for everyone around us to like the things we like. Asking younger people to not forget our albums and our latte art and which Harry Potter house we belong to. Having your decreasingly relevant music and taste in beanies be relegated to “only nineties kids will understand” lists feels so panic-inducing that ageing internet users will desperately do anything they can to get the validation of anyone who will give a half-hearted nod of approval in their general direction. And the existing social media platforms will continually find ways to slurp up that desperation for hearts and clicks and engagement. 

So … I dunno, follow me on Instagram I guess?   

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Jono Hall

Award-winning filmmaker, writer, and cartoonist Jono Hall started his professional career as a multi-hyphenate “radio DJ-drummer for a quasi-famous rock band-magazine editor-pop-up restauranteur-taxidermist”. Though this isn’t a real career, it has given him a deep well of dinner-party conversation. His recent short film, Awake, has won a multitude of awards across the world and his first Netflix series will debut early next year.

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