People you would have previously met once and never talked to again, you can now stay in touch with without needing to remember to get ahold of them. Their stuff will just show up in your feed
You can get to know someone gradually rather than all at once. Meeting someone at a party, talking for 10 minutes, and immediately giving out a personal cell number or email is a big leap. You have more control over socials
Vibe check, especially when dating. Lots of manipulative people say they don’t have social media because they’re trying to hide red flags from potential partners.
Convenience. If someone spends most of their time on Instagram, having someone close to them who’s mostly on Twitter makes it a lot of extra effort (relatively speaking) to stay in contact with them.
Branding. Especially in the US, we are expected to find a stereotype that we identify with and then lean into it. You’re supposed to make the image of yourself easy to consume and understand. In a lot of tech bro circles, this is done consciously to retain a “brand” as a worker
And all of this is by design to an extent. People were creating ways to sync your Twitter, Facebook, etc, in the early days so that your connections could carry over, but the companies wanted exclusivity because you can’t control and centralize attention if you don’t have complete information about that attention.
When you have the urge to share something and have a behavior pattern that’s been crafted and reinforced by your platform of choice, that urge makes you want to get on that platform and share it with “your friends”. Prior to that, you might have thought of specific friends who would like it and share it with them personally. Now the platform is the middle man. So whether or not your friends keep you in the forefront of their memory is determined by the algorithm and if you aren’t in the pool of their friends list, people will just forget that you haven’t shared a bunch of their experiences with them. Because the platform tells them that the link or post has been shared with “their friends” and if the fact that you’re exempt from that list isn’t on their mind, they won’t even think about it
Social media serves a bunch of purposes here:
And all of this is by design to an extent. People were creating ways to sync your Twitter, Facebook, etc, in the early days so that your connections could carry over, but the companies wanted exclusivity because you can’t control and centralize attention if you don’t have complete information about that attention.
When you have the urge to share something and have a behavior pattern that’s been crafted and reinforced by your platform of choice, that urge makes you want to get on that platform and share it with “your friends”. Prior to that, you might have thought of specific friends who would like it and share it with them personally. Now the platform is the middle man. So whether or not your friends keep you in the forefront of their memory is determined by the algorithm and if you aren’t in the pool of their friends list, people will just forget that you haven’t shared a bunch of their experiences with them. Because the platform tells them that the link or post has been shared with “their friends” and if the fact that you’re exempt from that list isn’t on their mind, they won’t even think about it