Busy signals
Bell Telephone's late 1970s "Reach Out and Touch Someone" ad campaign rapidly achieved cliche status, so it can be easy to overlook how peculiar these commercials were: At their most basic level, they advertise the idea that talking to people is a thing worth doing, as if being social hadn't ever been possible before, and we needed to learn how to do it, and why. Wait, so you are telling me I should just say "hello" to someone I know?
Of course, the ads were specifically selling long distance calls, which were once itemized and billed by the minute (I used to get handed a Xerox copy of our home phone bill every month as a teenager, with all my calls emphatically marked with a highlighter). The ads cleverly lean into the telephone's weakness and present it as a strength: You can't physically touch someone, but that means it becomes easier to touch them emotionally with a thoughtful intervention. The dematerialized communication of telephony is represented as newly acute emotional presence, sanctified by its immediacy. We don't see the unscheduled intrusions of the phone ringing, the unwanted sales calls, the looming silences, the hang-ups, the busy signals. Instead we get a vision of the phone as a natural part of social relations that seems to abolish the distance between people rather than rearticulate and reinforce it.
It might seem as if "making a call" wouldn't ever have needed any sort of advertisement: People inherently want to "reach out" to loved ones because the desire for communication is fundamental to our nature. But these ads tell a different story: that forms of sociality are malleable and they can be guided technologically to suit changing conditions in the communications industry. What it means to "be in touch" can be worked over in all its dimensions: Who should one be in touch with? how often? by what means? what should one be in touch about? what qualifies as newsworthy? what occasions require contact?
New communication technology opens these sorts of questions to all kinds of answers, making it so that we are constantly being retrained in the norms of how to interact with people. There is no one self-evident way to integrate technology into supposedly pre-existing and unchanging social needs; instead the technology makes it possible to recalibrate those "needs" across different populations, based on access and demographics and aptitude and free time and a whole range of other factors.
I was thinking about this after watching this strange, sweaty performance by Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, which lands somewhere between Nathan Fielder and Nathan Thurm. He is trying to justify the changes being made to how Instagram works as if they were not simply a response to TikTok's success. "I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time," he congestedly declares (in a video conspicuously posted on a text-based app), as if Instagram itself weren't capable of directing what kind of content it hosts. "We're going to need to evolve because the world is changing quickly and we're going to have to change along with it." Most disingenuously, Mosseri says that Instagram will keep your friends' posts at the top of your feed "whenever possible," as if everything that shows up in your feed wasn't directly under the company's control. Uncontainable, unknowable forces (i.e. the forces of capitalist competition) are demanding that Instagram show you videos you didn't ask to see.
Meanwhile in an earnings call statement, Mark Zuckerberg claimed, "It was good to see positive trajectory on our engagement trends this quarter coming from products like Reels and our investments in A.I." The message to users is "the world is making us do things; video has been revealed as the truth of what you really want"; the message to investors is "the company can successfully drive users to engage with these products through automated forms of coercion." And while they haven't yet optimized Reels for monetization, that means there is room to grow again in the face of the company's suddenly declining revenue.
It's not like Facebook hasn't tried to pivot to video before. Why the obsession with video? The official answer seems to be that the technological advancements that have made video easier to record and transmit have also ineluctably led people, "Gen Z" especially, to "share" vis this intrinsically superior medium. But when you look at TikTok, which is all video and algorithmic sorting by design, it's clear that "sharing" is not all that relevant to how it's used. Video is a more immediate medium to consume, but it is far more cumbersome to make. The expertise it requires quickly sorts would-be "creators" from people just trying to connect and keep up with friends. The supply of "creator" content is easier to manage and can be directed by platform incentives. The demand for it can be more readily shaped than, say, the demand for "friendship," which you would hope is still somewhat more idiosyncratic and specific to the friends involved and doesn't respond to a third party's economic incentives.
With video entertainment content dominant, viewers are rendered more passive, more receptive, more programmable. They accept the requirement to move at the video's pace, to focus where the video focuses, to consume things at a given speed and in a single direction. Accordingly, platforms can more throughly dictate the kinds of interactivity available to users, as typified by TikTok's "duetting" functionality and its copycat-content genres of dances and challenges and repeated music syncs. These are by and large reaction videos that reinforce the primacy of the more professionalized content on which they are based. They are ads for the content that users are already being driven to watch in their algorithmically populated feeds — the kind of content Instagram is now planning to show to users regardless of who they have chosen to follow, material that has been vetted as recommendable by its statistical performance and which makes any content from people they know appear as somewhat boring and derivative by contrast.
As Mosseri stresses, you can fine-tune the platform's recommendations (you can channel-flip) and you can even temporarily suppress them, but you can't opt out of them entirely. Letting the platform tell you what to consume (letting it "help you discover new and interesting things on Instagram that you might not even know exist") is how you are now supposed to use it; the idea that the app exists to help you see your friends' vacation and baby photos has been nullified. Now the goal is to "help creators find their audiences." In other words, the goal is to make sure you think of yourself primarily as an audience for professionally made content when you open the app.
Hence one of the objections to Instagram's TikTokification is that it forecloses on the sociality the app once afforded and pushes people to become spectators (and constrained commentators) on what are effectively mass media spectacles. As Ryan Broderick frequently points out in his newsletters, sociality in this media configuration takes the form of hostile and conflictual fandoms organized around the various main characters offered up in the trending content. It does not take the form of reaching out and touching someone and just saying hi.
But perhaps "social" has just moved on from media. Taylor Lorenz argues that users rejecting TikTokification are trapped in a kind of false nostalgia: "People think that bringing back the 'old' Instagram design, or a chronological feed will somehow recapture the magic of using Instagram in 2014." Her point in part is that platforms co-evolve with their users along a one-way path of development; to want to go back to a lost form of a platform's use is like fetishizing face-to-face communication as the only "real" way of conversing. "We" want to "express ourselves and connect in modern ways," Lorenz writes, but this gives too much agency to users and portrays tech companies as mainly reactive. Those "modern ways" don't simply emerge from nowhere or independently seize upon the technology that corporations benevolently lay at our feet.
The normative modes of communication have changed, but that change needs explanation, it can't just be presupposed. We are inundated with the equivalent of Bell Telephone's ad campaign, with streams of promotional material purporting to reveal to us how everybody out there is really communicating. Often we are told that Gen Z is calling the tune and platforms are just heeding their command, but the youngest generation of users doesn't automatically have some special insight into how best to use technology in a "modern" way. Far from slavishly trying to accommodate them, it's just as likely that tech companies put their most gullible and persuadable users forward as role models to try to bully the rest of us, all while saying it's young people's fault (and not the competitive pressure internal to capitalism) that everything must be changed.
The problem for Instagram is that there is now less to be wrung from getting people to "share" than getting them to consume. Lorenz is right that "we don't forge personal connections by sharing or commenting on highly personal public-facing photos that are permanently displayed on a grid anymore," but that is not because everyone spontaneously decided that it was no fun anymore. Various institutions and commentators and "creators" and platforms and "generations" have become incentivized and mobilized and driven by competitive advantages to push that way of communicating out of fashion. And something as basic as Apple's privacy changes have radically altered how platforms can monetize their users, triggering dramatic shifts in what they will compel those users to do.
Facebook's platforms were originally premised on idea that users needed content from friends and family to make them stay on the app; that idea still lingers in its attitude that the most "authentic" content is people posting for each other for no reason but the fun of it. But that ideal was superseded long ago, because content made for the fun of it by amateurs could not compete with incentivized, fully subsumed content — content made for and favored by algorithms, made for and favored by advertisers, content that harmonizes with the way the platforms' interfaces are now designed to work. Recognition from friends has been replaced by recognition from the algorithm (it knows me so well!), which only needs loads and loads of content from reasonably proficient creators — any random people will do — to operate efficiently. This is how platforms can "give users what they really want" while actively reshaping it.
It seems like the conventional wisdom is becoming that "social media is dead," and it will only be a matter of time before that will become "social media never even existed in the first place; it was always mobile reality TV." Maybe we will forget how aggressively social media companies tried to capture and direct our sociality; maybe we will overlook how that effort has managed to take new forms, with new balances struck between what seems public and what seems private, what is media and what is communication, who are friends are and who is simply entertainment.