Traditional Social Media Sucks

I thought about this subject a lot because I really did consider that I might just be pulling a boomer thing. Y'know, like, when they said that Radio would kill music and then MTV would kill Radio and then the internet will kill TV. 

So far all of those predictions were true, by the ways, it's just that none of that shit ended up really mattering.

So for a while I thought that that was just the way evolution worked.

New cool thing pops up, boomers get mad, but the new cool thing is way better anyways and then the old shit dies out or, if the boomers should be so lucky, becomes a relic.

This is what I genuinely believed in until one day I was sat at my computer playing sims and I wanted the family to spend a nice day together, playing outside and maybe gazing at the clouds. I clicked on the grass and then I realized...they can't cloud gaze.

I was stumped. I swore my sims could cloud gaze. I tried again to no success. Eventually, I just convinced myself I probably just imagined it. And then a few days later I stumbled upon a video on youtube titled "50 Fun Details of Sims 2" and suddenly I was reminded that sims 2 was significantly less limited than sims 4. Sims 2 characters felt more alive.

And sure, the build and character design of sims 4 is amazing and so well developed, but does that make up for the lackluster gameplay? Sims 4 felt so limited, it made you wonder if technology just hasn't developed well enough to allow your sim to drive a car, or jump on the couch, or cloud gaze. And then you remember a game you played in literally 2005 could do all those things on the base game. Hell, in 2005 you could build a grocery store in the base game.

This weird occurrence gave me the sudden realization that truly, progress isn't linear. What could have been easily done ten years ago, may not be possible now and it all depends on who is making money from it.

And for a while it really did seem linear.

As we recovered from the market crash of 2008, there was really no way but up, and as we ventured on the path of recovery, we just forgot what we left behind. Smartphones became normal. No more buttons needed! Bigotry was so uncool that saying anything controversial could get the entire room to look at you like you grew a second head. Everyone loved Obama, and Zuckerberg was a young genius! The tech industry was booming and the rise of smartphone apps told us that the future would guarantee us perfect ease. Don't wanna drive? There's an app for that. Wanna make a funny meme? There's an app for that. Don't wanna pay full price? Everything will be subscription based!

And now everyone's getting laid off. I can't decide if Trump's era and Covid were sent to humble us, or if things would have turned out this way anyways. The fact that Hilary was the only other option tells me things wouldn't look too different. Ironically the crazy apps are what lead us to this inevitability.

And now all these apps and social media pages exist and their creators are trying to figure out how to be the best vessel to sell you something.

Social media now sucks because I can't seem to find a place where I can see what the local townies that I give a shit about are up to- or other people around my age- I can't find a place to just say some shit I wanna say without someone watching me in a corner trying to figure out how I could be best used as a vessel for sales. I can't say a bad word, I can't be too weird or too cringe.

And everyone wants to sell themselves. I love the internet. I love the way it's raised me but it feels like no one likes anything just to like it anymore. Everyone wants the best opinion, or the most unique one. Everyone wants to take little parts of things that are cool and attach it to their own identities, not putting much thought into whether or not they even like it. It isn't about expression as much as it is about perception anymore. It isn't, "here I am, love me!" it's "I have compiled all the information necessary to make you love me." 

And I very well could just be a boomer, but maybe you are right when you realize you don't truly know what your personality is. How could you even develop one when there's a step by step guide on how to be your favorite person at every corner of the internet? How do you have time to when all you do is plug into the information-funny-satisfying machine all day?

Is there a point though? Does it matter? What does it mean to develop a personality at the end of the day? Haven't we all just compiled information we liked and turned it into who we are all these years? I think so. But I also think that we weren't constantly bombarded with qualities we need to acquire. There were magazines and books and movies and tv shows we can look at from a distance and decide to ingest. I guess TV is quite similar to tiktok because you just turn it on and it feeds you information- but even then you chose whether you wanted to watch food network, or cartoons, or reality shows all day. Also most people did not just bring tv everywhere with them, at the very least they would have to wait until they are home and or indoors.

Tiktok is just a stream of content, ranging from the saddest thing you will see all day, to the most stressful, to the cutest to the funniest, to the most beautiful people you will never meet in real life, and the only choice you have is to keep scrolling. Scroll up or scroll down or refresh but at the end of the day it's just content going in your brain. You didn't choose the videos, they were chosen for you. Info Info ad Info info ad.

And maybe that's just how things are bound to become. Maybe I'm just having trouble adapting. Maybe I will never get over the older days, and the young folks of the future will listen to my memories fondly, going "aww," because they think it's just so precious that life was the way it was in my day.

They will find that the idea of choosing to like things without a purpose behind it to be pointless and brutish, but also lush and interesting like how we see feet binding and crop rituals. Maybe their brains won't overheat and overload the way mine does, and they will be perfectly built for the future ahead.

All that being said, this is really me just saying stop trying to sell me shit.