✨ volume 7 -- the renaissance of social technology (pt 1)
✨ volume 7 -- the renaissance of social technology (pt 1)
evolution of digital fluency in the past decade sets the groundwork for the renaissance of social technologies to come
2020 and 2021 to date mark some of the most exciting times in consumer / social media, inciting innovation, funding, and excitement otherwise unseen in the last decade since Social 1.0. In this post, I will explore my personal experiences with social platforms and how its role has evolved in the past decade.
Prologue: Gaining Digital Fluency
I was in fifth grade when I started my MySpace account. Guiltily checking the “I am 13+” disclaimer at the ripe age of 10, I was on MySpace to (1) decide who was going to be on my Top 8 Friends (and ensure my standing on my close friends’ pages) and to (2) engage in absolutely meaningless discourse through wall posts and note-form questionnaires.
Blinking furiously on a separate tab, my AIM (AOL Instant Messaging) would flash yellow, as my best friends and I constantly chatted with each other, tracking each other’s online activity. “When can we hang out at the mall” increasingly became “when are you going to be online”. The ability to stay connected despite physical barriers was absolutely thrilling. It’s shocking to think about now but that level of instant connectivity was truly revolutionary.
Source: MIT Tech Review
Around the same time, Facebook became mainstream along with Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram and Snapchat shortly following suit. All of a sudden, I had several digital profiles to keep up with, constantly processing between artsy blog posts and photos on Tumblr, to over-processed filtered latte photos on Instagram, to sporadic random micro-posts on Twitter.
It’s sobering to think that prior to this, my mind was not “alt-tabbing” between so many inputs from thousands of voices on social platforms all at once. But this new normal is simply a byproduct of growing up in the social media generation. By the time I had graduated high school in 2014, my brain had evolved to constantly crave the constant digital connectivity and social affirmation delivered through my plethora of social platforms.
Source: Miriam J Johnson
However, as rapidly as my generation had adopted the mass influx of social media platforms, we quickly moved on from them as well. By 2017, no one outside of my older family members and family friends would post on my wall. Facebook had become a place where posts outside of personal milestones were few and far in between. For instance, it’s been almost 3 years since I graduated college, but grad photos / posts are the last posts I’ve been tagged in on Facebook. I haven’t uploaded a new profile picture in over 5 years. What happened?
Chapter 1: We Have Grown Into Our Digital Selves
I believe the acceleration of our digital fluency and maturity is responsible for our exodus out of Social Media 1.0, which only scratched the surface of how modern society seeks to connect and express. In our digital infancy, we were still grappling with the novel concept of instant connectivity and online communication. As we became comfortable with seeing our voice in text and our lives shared to millions through photos, the line between physical and digital realities blurred. Our digital profile transformed from a vessel enhancing real life connectivity to a reflection of our real, physical lives. Naturally, we became more self-conscious, more thoughtful and critical of the content we posted online. We began interpreting what we saw online as real life. Our digital identities matured.
During the height of this (mid to late 2017), we collectively pretended as if we had it all together because we could (if not only temporarily) shape our realities through social media. We brought thousand dollar DSLR’s to beaches to get the perfect shot and it was exhausting. Some of the marquee, early internet digital creators quit, while many others vulnerably shared the pressures of portrayed perfection. These glimpses into the struggle and realities of everyday life turned out to be wildly popular, ushering in the next wave of social media — the dare-to-be-you era. Taylor Lorenz’s article “The Instagram Aesthetic is Over” officially marked the end of this picture-perfect era in 2019.
Perhaps the “freedom to be” demarcates the greatest difference between the Gen Z and late-millennial generation. The truly digitally native Gen Z are growing up in this socially liberating era where our digital personas are encouraged to be real, authentic, and unfiltered. Rex Woodbury writes a great blog on digital natives, and his latest piece on the rejection of internet perfection encapsulates the zeitgeist of social accounts to date.
Chapter 2: Unlocking The Next Level
A friend and one of the best sales people I know once told me the greatest sales hack is to be genuinely invested in your audience and to be yourself. I think it’s no coincidence that just as we figured out how to be “ourselves” online, social media has evolved into the greatest sales engine powered by the most powerful sales force of all time -- influencers.
The best advertising is no longer an unattainable billboard, a distanced celebrity, but small influencers who look no different than your friends, giving you a peek into their real lives, providing life, friendship, advice, and occasionally recommending products and experiences. By unlocking this next level of our digital identities, we have unleashed the new era of social media. It’s an ecosystem. We are here to satisfy all our social needs as humans, from connection, friendship, and community to belonging, purpose, and passion. We are here to feed our ego, to nurture our soul, to learn, and to grow.
Social media is no longer an extended connection of reality, but a new reality, in and of itself.
I’ll admit this is a rather long-winded way of saying that our digital personalities have grown up. And now, we are asking more of social media platforms than just a one page profile with tagged photos, a timeline, and some an outdated text wall. We’re asking for live audio streaming, short-form videos, personalized news feeds, and real online communities. Specifically, we are asking for platforms that address social activities in out every day lives such as exercising (Peloton), music (Spotify), shopping (live streaming platforms, Pin Duo Duo), and the list continues.
As our personal identities have merged between on and offline, and the next generation of social platforms should be built as a reflection of social needs in the built world as opposed to simply providing space to facilitate interactions.
The contents of this piece are mostly anecdotal and ex-post, a casual compilation of personal experiences and insights growing up as the world downloaded its reality into the digital world. With this context, I will explore the rebirth of social media platforms and technologies brought forth in 2020 by Clubhouse, TikTok, Triller, Muze, Byte, among others in my next post. We are in the early innings of the next renaissance of social platforms.
What will those next generation social technologies look like and what problems will they solve?
What infrastructure remains to be built and how social platforms should be re-architected to mimic real life?
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