picsmart / Alamy Stock Photo (Alamy Stock Photo)
The words were mutating little by little to adapt to a new reality.
People stopped having friends and began to amass followers.
Conversations disappeared to make way for trends.
In the United States, social networks (
social network
) began to be called social media (
social media
).
The platforms that served to connect with friends and family began to connect customers with sellers;
viewers, with content creators.
The walls were filled with advertising and videos of
influencers
, newspapers and celebrities, burying friends' posts in a constant stream of content.
The photos of the cousin on vacation in Cullera were replaced by those of Chiara Ferragni on vacation in Malaysia.
The witty thought of the high school friend, for the last viral dance.
Social networks stopped reminding us of birthdays to sell us shoes.
And so we began to lower our voices.
We start consuming content with cathode passivity and stop creating it.
We shut up.
More information
How to get social media out of the quagmire
According to a Hootsuite analysis, only 33.9% of TikTok users post on the platform, compared to 69.9% of Instagram users.
The trend is clear.
“There was a period, in the early days of social media, where we all shared a lot more,” tech analyst Matt Navara explains in an audio exchange.
“It was new and exciting then, but today we've learned that the things we share publicly online come with a number of dangers.
And we are more cautious."
It is the theory of the dark forest (a silent place, not for lack of life, but for fear of predators) that authors like Yancey Strickler have applied to social networks.
The fear of content going viral, an idea being misinterpreted or control over a photo being lost has led many to take refuge in more closed circles,
like messaging apps.
"This has been accompanied by a phenomenon in reverse," points out Navara.
“There has been a boom in the creator economy, where there are a lot of people able to monetize their creative talents.”
These two phenomena are not absolute, but they are magnified by the power of the algorithm.
Any social network is interested in promoting advertising content for obvious reasons, but also content that retains the user.
And the videos like "15 secret corners less than an hour from Madrid" are more engaging than the photos of Conchi's wedding, from accounting.
This was something that Instagram had already begun to realize, whose algorithm was assembled around the figure of the
influencer .
, allowing brands to build huge audiences.
But it has been TikTok that has changed the rules of the game, almost completely erasing friends and acquaintances from the equation.
Only 15% of the users of this platform communicate directly with their contacts.
But the thing works.
So much so that Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are trying to copy the formula.
How does it affect the user to go from an active to a passive use of social networks?
This is what Philippe Verduyn, Professor of Psychology at Maastricht University, asked himself in a joint study with the University of Michigan.
“Many have examined how social networks influence mental health, but few take into account that this depends on how they are used,” Verduyn explains by
email.
.
According to their results, active use “stimulates feelings of connection.
By reaching out to others, people can receive support or information from others.
In this way, they feel connected”, he points out.
Sharing photos, starting conversations and giving your opinion on any topic in a friendly way (“starting a fight on Twitter doesn't count”, Verduyn adds) can brighten our day in the same way as having a coffee with a friend.
Seeing the photos and conversations of others would be the same as watching that friend from afar drinking coffee without sitting at the table with him (although it may be less disturbing to do this in the virtual world than in the real one).
“Passive use harms mental health, as it encourages harmful social comparisons and associated feelings of envy or inferiority,” Verduyn notes.
However, on social media, we are more likely to gossip than engage.
"Some studies suggest that today passive use is approximately twice as frequent as active use," confirms the expert.
This can be explained by many factors: “To begin with, passive use requires less effort than active use and, furthermore, many people go to the networks to search for information and keep up to date with what is happening in their social circle”, he points out.
But there is one more reason: social networks have evolved to encourage this type of consumption.
When opening a Facebook account in 2008, the user was faced with a bar that asked "what are you thinking?"
and a button to search for his friends.
By starting a TikTok account in 2023, the user connects to a continuous stream of content chosen by the algorithm.
In these 15 years, social networks have realized that the best way to retain the user is not to ask them what they think, but to offer them viral videos.
And that is why they have gone from tracing two-way roads full of ideas and conversation to becoming superhighways of constant content.
Facebook launched groups, pages and
feed
news, encouraging users to share content published by others.
LinkedIn followed suit.
Twitter, already primarily a publishing platform, added a “retweet” feature, making it easier for content to spread virally.
Cyber psychologist Linda Kaye, professor at Edge Hill University and author of the study
Exploring the “socialness” of social media
(exploring the “sociability” of social networks), has been warning of this trend for some time.
She adds a third use beyond the active and the passive: the reactive.
“It would be sort of like reacting to other people's content, like liking it,” she explains.
And neither does it have as positive effects as active use, says the expert.
Continuing with the simile of coffee, it would be as if we greeted our colleagues from afar without actually sitting at the table with them.
And it is the model towards which we are going.
The social networks of the future look like a cafeteria with content creators sitting at the tables of adults while the average user walks around throwing greetings, hearts and thumbs up.
“Social networks have evolved to be more personalized,” explains Kaye, “which has mainly served to increase user attention and engagement.
The engagement is with the ads instead of focusing on the users through more two-way or interactive types of interactions, ”she denounces.
It is what the writer Cory Doctorow called in a
Wired
article the “crap process”, a growth model that almost all social networks have followed.
Once the platform has retained users, content creators, and media, and made them dependent, they begin to change algorithms to push paid content and dilute conversations into a constant stream that engages and generates revenue.
Doctorow sums it up in a sentence as concise as it is accurate: “Stop talking to each other and start buying things”.
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