Our social media landfills of garbage content
Hi there, welcome to The Dandelion Tiger. This is a weekly column on life & style, filtered through the lenses of business and culture, written from my perspective as an entrepreneur and management consultant living between London & Southeast Asia.
It’s all pretty fun most of the time, though sometimes it isn’t, but why don’t you come along for the ride?
Mind-numbing noise
We are deep, deep into the late-stage capitalist attention economy, and I DO NOT THINK I CAN AFFORD IT ANYMORE. My brain and I? And our last remaining two braincells? We cannot.
Everywhere I turn, there is so. much. noise. Everyone and their moms is trying to become an influencer. Yes, I respect the hustle, I do. I know the life changing impact of successfully monetising social media content, I know the statistics for rising influencers are disproportionately women, and I love that for us. I mean, I would want that for me too, I’m not gonna pretend to be above that.
The problem is, the byproduct of our being chronically online is that we are now met with an internet that is becoming more and more cluttered with garbage, mind-atrophying content.
This is not the fault of any influencer, the problem here is that because influencing is a full career, some influencers are banking theirs and their whole entire families’ livelihoods on social media platforms that are designed to harvest as much user attention as humanly, artificially possible. What that means, is that influencers are having to bend over backwards to create content that the algorithm thinks will retain highest volumes of human attention. Whether that content has any value, whatsoever, or not? As if that matters, mate, get with the program - this business is about volume!
The same almighty algorithm, as we know, that has the power to make or break a creator’s career overnight, with each tweak. The algorithm that leaves all our feeds filled with the exact same type of hyper-targeted content, its effects spilling over into the real world and creating a dystopian vision of various human characters walking around wearing the exact same internet skins.
More than anything else, I worry that we, and especially our young people, are losing our ability to practice critical thinking and form independent opinions.
Sorry if that sounds condescending or dramatic, I can explain.
If you have spent a healthy amount of time on tiktok lately (me, as an intellectual, spent a total of 9 hours on there last week), you will have come across a video format in which a strongly opinionated speaker is making very subjective opinion statements in a very firm, confident, matter-of-fact manner.
Generally goes something like, “Unpopular opinion, but if your friend is xxx then they are yyy zzz, and they’re not your friend, block them.”
I am a full grown woman, and I am embarrassed to tell you that I have absorbed some of these opinions fully, immediately, without even so much as a question, because they make so much sense and the speaker is so sure of what they’re saying they must know what they’re talking about right?! Only to realise, after some mental flossing, that these were mere opinions, not fact, no matter the level of conviction with which they were delivered.
And that’s the thing - any impressionable person could just as easily learn to absorb these statements as truth. Maybe for now they are on a relatively small scale, but some of these unsuspecting opinion statements are ultimately divisive in nature.
This isn’t something we can take lightly, on any social media platform - we are dealing with algorithms that have the muscle to swing entire elections here (we remember 2016, right?).
Content for contents’ sake, that’s the virtual space we are all now reckoning with.
The other day, TikTok prompted me to make 10 videos a week to get to 1000 followers. It lowkey felt like my robot overlord was testing my loyalty and obedience. Would I be a good little human servant, whose subservience he would reward by turning the algorithm in my favour? haha I was tempted, I won’t lie, but I had to throw in the towel on that one.
It made me think though - even if you were a full time content creator, surely that many videos a week would cause some fatigue? One of the great joys of social media, I would have thought, is that it allows creators to create, i.e. express their creativity.
It’s certainly why I feel drawn to vlogging. Can creativity be rushed and quantified like that, though? It’s a business now, I know, but is it too naive to think we could strike some sort of balance between business, integrity and creativity? When do we cross the line from creating because we genuinely have something to say, into putting out content for contents’ sake, only to stay relevant in an increasingly saturated, low-entry barrier industry?
I’d love to hear some input from active content creators here.
Final thoughts & further material
I don’t have any answers today, only that if you are reading this and you have been feeling the same way, know you are definitely not alone. Our consumptive habits desperately need to change, across both our virtual and physical worlds. We are consuming ourselves to death, and nobody can afford it anymore.
For now the best I feel I can do is to step back a little from all the street noise and focus on something, anything else for a little.
Some brilliant creators on Substack and outside have touched on this exact topic, in much more eloquent and informed ways, sharing some of the most thought provoking -
Damon Dominique’s 1 hour long video essay on ‘Why I don’t post anymore’ ****
Pattern Recognition by Tomorrowism, authored by
Fan-girling hard over Beth’s substack, everything she writes makes me go ‘YES, THAT. Exactly.’
Consuming Ourselves to Death on
The comments section here on
The “F*** You, Pay Me” Internet on
The Toxicity of BookTok: A Discussion on
- even authors are trying to please the algorithm guys, what is happening to us :’)- is building a new corner of the internet, designed to help structure and lessen the noise, a sort of living, collaborative virtual notebook. I signed up to the beta membership and loving it so far! (Apols Sublime team if I am butchering the description of this beautiful thing completely). Link here, if you would like to check it out:
A lot of food for thought here. I may have to respond with a Substack post of my own some day!
"It made me think though - even if you were a full time content creator, surely that many videos a week would cause some fatigue? One of the great joys of social media, I would have thought, is that it allows creators to create, i.e. express their creativity. When do we cross the line from creating because we genuinely have something to say, into putting out content for contents’ sake, only to stay relevant in an increasingly saturated, low-entry barrier industry?"
As a former(ish) content creator on Tiktok, this is something I'm constantly asking myself! The burnout absolutely is real – the only way I could eventually get around it was through batch filming, but of course doing that made it easier to tell when others were doing the same, which ruined the "organic" feel of the app to me.