Structured Thoughts on Social Media

Neale James, host of the Photowalk, put out a call last month where he asked listeners to the podcast to offer some thoughts about social media. The episode that arose from listeners’ considerations is live and I’ve provided my (slightly edited) full response to Neale below.

By way of background, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about social media professionally in a number of ways, used it professionally to affect political change, and have also used it personally now for over 20 years at this point.

How do you use it?

One of my many positive early memories of social media is how, over 10 years ago, I and a series of cybersecurity researchers used Twitter to coordinate an incident response that led us to realise that the government of Iran was intercepting Google traffic being delivered to residents of Iran. That led to the resolution of the issue and stopped that government from conducting surveillance of its residents using the technique in question. So a good thing! Overall, up until about a year ago I used Twitter constantly for professional purposes.

However, the implosion of Twitter under Elon Musk, combined with moving into a privacy regulator’s office, has meant that I’ve stepped back from the same professional presence. I’ve trained the LinkedIn algorithm so it surfaces valuable professional content in my current role, but I don’t really use other social media professionally at this point.

Personally, the only truly valuable social media service that I use, and participate on, is Glass. It’s a small and paid photo sharing site. The community is positive and active, and it features interesting photography from around the world. I’ve also been blogging, now, since the 2002, and continue to keep that up as another outlet.¹

Do you engage more, or less, with social media than you once did?

Less than in the past. Some of this is time. Some of it is, as mentioned, due to changes in the networks (e.g., Twitter) or the scattering of the communities (see again: Twitter) and the changing of my job.

I continue to use Glass, however, with a high degree of frequency and visit once or twice a day to see new images and I post one image per day.

What is your favourite platform and why?

For photographic purposes, Glass. It’s not as interactive as some other services which is fine, really, because I can go in and see things/comments, and then leave. There isn’t an algorithm that’s trying to keep me interested in perpetuity. It’s a healthier way for me to interact with other people online.

Explain your feelings about the currency of likes…

They’re…not good? I mean, they give quite the dopamine hit! But it also interferes with why you might create work, or explore producing new kinds of work. We know that certain kinds of images will get more likes due to smaller screens and shorter attention spans as we skim images; removing likes — or at least deprioritizing them in the user interface — can have the effect of encouraging people to explore different kinds of practice and without a sense that the new isn’t less liked.

What has it done for photography?

It’s easy to say that likes have done bad things to photography. But I really don’t know that that’s fair or even necessarily correct.

There are a lot more people making photographs than ever before. And part of the process tends to be learning how other people tried to make images: how many of us spent time to figure out how to make silhouettes? And with the ‘like’ metric you can get a rough guesstimate of whether you’re getting better and better at this kind of classic image. The same is true for lots of other ‘standard’ kinds of images. I think that’s great! People are better photographers on average, today, than ever before. We should celebrate that more often than we tend to.

Where I think that likes can be harmful is that they can stunt photographic growth or exploration. Also, due to how algorithms work, ‘low like’ content might be hidden and thus prevent the artist from receiving feedback on positive areas to improve towards. And, of course, there can be mental health issues when individuals ‘bully’ one another by providing or depriving individuals of likes. All of those aren’t great outcomes.

What would the perfect platform look like?

Utopia and dystopia: both places that don’t exist in reality, and neither of which is a place that you likely ever want to end up in.

All of which is to say, I think there are different characteristics of social media sites and you can dial those characteristics up or down and you create different kinds of sites and experiences. A few ‘dials’:

• How ‘chatty’ or conversational is the environment? Does ‘community’ involve direct messages?
• How compressed are the images? Is it build for phone screens, tablet screens, monitors, or…?
• How effectively are you introduced to/able to discover new photographers?
• What is the information density — how much is on the screen at once?
• What is/isn’t made public? And how? Do you list numbers of followers, likes, etc?
• How much are you appealing to the masses vs dedicated photography enthusiasts?
• Monetized by users paying money, or monetizing the users?
• Is it a ‘hot’ medium (e.g., sound and video) or a bit ‘colder’ of a medium (e.g., photographs and text)?
• How personalized is the experience (i.e., lots of algorithmic engagement vs just find it on your own)?
• Is there an assertive and active safety team that blocks certain content from appearing on the site?

When you adjust just some of those dials you affect the nature of the site, the number of users that you need to be revenue neutral, and affect how people will interact with one another. What I think is better will be worse for others, and vice versa.

I actually think that there should, ideally, be a diversity of experiences. And that it’s fine if different little groups form across the Internet that enjoy their parts of the Internet differently. There’s no reason why a half-dozen different photographic social media sites cannot exist, as an example, nor is it really a problem if you aren’t engaging with all of them. Find a site that has the ‘dials’ adjusted to your tastes and you’ll have hopefully found an environment — and user base — that you can enjoy and thrive with.

Tell me about the good bits, the bad bits, and all the bits in between…

I’m sure that I could go on in more depth but won’t drag on. Suffice to say that I think — hell, I know based on my professional experiences — that social media can be powerful and important and enable lots of good things in the world. But, at the same time, it can foster anti-social behaviours, be used to fuel genocide, and just be a depressive hellscape.

This isn’t to say that technology is neutral, however: all technologies as they are designed have particular affordances. Those affordances are linked to how those dials are turned. And there are certainly some ways of turning the dials that are not particularly good for humans, even if we enjoy those sites like sugary food, and other ways that are better, which are more like a banana or apple or something that has a modicum of healthiness.

We shouldn’t demand that everything is digitally healthy — we should be able to enjoy cheeseburgers and poutine now and again!! — but the totality of our dining establishments shouldn’t be fast food and deep fried food. Because we know that it’s really not good for us.