Reflections from 2034 : On The Social Network Boom

Reflections from 2034 : On The Social Network Boom

Cameron Byerly

Published in St. John's Epoch, October 2016

In those idyllic years before The War, when both the millennia and I were reaching our teens, a cultural explosion rocked the world. The Social Network Boom, as it is now called, was to human communication what the American Gold Rush was to westward expansion; it completely engulfed the public’s imagination, and thrust those fully romanced unto uncharted territory. It was a fascinating and chaotic time; its madcap experimentation would create the spine of modern communication and thought. And yet, there is little discussion today as to how this Boom began, how it existed, and what factors would cause it to, inevitably, end.  

To fully understand this dramatic adolescence from past to present, one has to know what the world was before, and what the world has become nearly 20 years later. The beginning point of The Boom, ignoring its failed precursors, was once The (definite article, singular) Social Network; Facebook.

Before the teens, beginning around the year 2008, give or take, the world had a singular idea of what a social network was, and that idea was Facebook. Before Facebook there had been anonymous accounts that commented on certain platforms, forums, and messaging boards online, but never before had there been a successful website with the explicit goal of transparent communication (ignoring the dreadful Friendster and MySpace). What was odd about Facebook was that if a modern child were to ask what it was ‘meant to do’, the honest answer would be ‘everything all networks do today’. Facebook didn’t have a specific function, such as discussing films or discussing current events or posting pictures; it was designed to do all these things, and in consequence, did absolutely none of them correctly. 

Facebook, as with every social network in this retrospective, has no love lost from me. Its design seen through a cultural perspective was a bland, characterless proof-of-concept for what was to come later. It’s relevance to social networks today is similar to the earliest arcade games in the 1980’s were to later works; the joy in both seems entirely derived from the child-like fascination that they were new, and shiny, and that through some miracle they were actually working well. Facebook had ‘statuses’, a non-tiered ‘friending’ system to build your connections which required manual addition and subtraction (with absolutely no differentiation between a work-acquaintance and a family member), a forgettable profile system, an okay group system, and a ‘news feed’ that pummeled you relentlessly with whatever garbage anyone you were connected to posted. 

Facebook offered outlets to do or say anything, in theory, but as the site didn’t encourage particular behavior or restrictions on the user base, nothing cohesive emerged. Most everyone had separate interests and agendas, as seems obvious now, but the network offered no encouragement or tools to find others that shared their interests. Users were asked to connect with people they knew in real life. And with the exception of un-customizable ‘group pages’, all posts were public and equally valid to the central newsfeed. 

Some users were there to post pictures of themselves, others would only use it for scheduling events and invitations, still others would try to post political articles to discuss with others. Unfortunately for the more cerebral types, posting an opinion or even just an article that discussed a topic in a certain light summoned reactionists and homophobic grandparents like moths to flame. Having a community based on ‘people that you have seen at least once in your life’ was a hideous idea for anything but the most basic peripheral contact and simple updates, which, to be fair, was what Facebook eventually settled to becoming for most people. And so the environment that took shape was a place of cheap laughs, intense personal vanity and presentation, clickbait, and nonsense, all of which culminated to paint a bleak, sterile future for networking. The primitive design asked nothing with its archaic mechanics, so the compromise was a newsfeed that presented a sea of smiling faces. 

Every aspect of Facebook was directionless and safe. It’s only interesting design elements were in its haphazard aspects added in later years to try and compete with other networks (including a ‘trending topics’ bar at the page’s right side that can be most kindly described as repugnant). The posts had a ‘like’ button, but no ‘dislike’ to match it; the designers were well aware that the tone of the network would dramatically shift to the apocalyptic if users were allowed to express negativity so easily. Because the site’s users and interface had no direction, such as ‘discuss classic and current games’ or ‘build an impressive resume’, the Facebook collective was asked only to enjoy the shared wonder that a network could gather such an audience, and pictures and posts were updated from people as they grew older, even occasionally type what was on your mind. 

This was a matter of simple psychology. If you want a thousand answers from a person, you don’t ask them the same question repeatedly, you have to create new questions that keep them interested and thinking smoothly. Facebook’s approach was both broad and impersonal; seeing ‘what’s on your mind?’ repeatedly is nowhere near as interesting as personalized new questions such as ‘What was your favorite film as a teenager’, or ‘Was your last vacation worth the price?’ that most networking outlets use today. And when your answer could be seen by relatives or employers, Facebook couldn’t expect anything interesting or honest. Facebook was a place or personal presentation, and people prefer to be asked a question that allows bragging, rather than placing individual brags in an empty conversation with everyone.

As the adults and older generation came to spend more time networking on Facebook, the younger generation led a mass exodus to newer sites. The social network wave was evolving with newer technologies and smart phones, and designers were curiously prodding the rather unpopular preexisting ‘forum’ format that had never attracted a sizable audience since their inception nearly thirty years earlier. Herein lies the seeds of the upcoming revolution shift; Facebook proved that social networking could garner a willing audience, and that there were particular needs not being addressed by that plastic prison. For starters, it would be nice to be able to talk naturally and joke online about topics that interested them without their aunt watching.

And so new options began to take form. The fundamental design of new networks, such as Twitter and Vine, at first seemed to have unnecessary hindrances on Facebook’s existing framework. ‘Who in their right mind,’ the world asked, ‘wants to send pictures that could be seen for ten seconds at most, and then disappear?’. Millions of Snapchat users, apparently. And most didn’t have the patience for a full ten seconds. 

‘Who would want a purely image-focused network, when Facebook could do that and more?’ Millions of Instagram users, it seems. The list escalated from one or two new niches to dozens, propagated by the new methods of dialogue their designs encouraged, and cemented by the fascinating new communities and environments.

Now a beautiful, chaotic, if rather primitive social new continent had been discovered, and on that vast new land, every hole of the human condition suddenly was finding a matching peg. Say you wanted a quick teenage hook-up, but Facebook’s design didn’t compel that behavior with its mechanics. Then there’s Tindr, a thoroughly unsubtle dating app that moved from point A to point B with such laughably primitive anti-romance that cavemen would ask to slow the process. Perhaps Facebook wasn’t the place to organize your resume and see what was happening in the world of employment? Then there’s LinkedIn, with the clear intent and mechanics built to do just that. And what if Facebook wasn’t as quick at connecting you with whatever celebrities you were currently stalking? Then there’s Twitter, a messy yet surprisingly brilliant system that allowed large voices to communicate in quick sentences to the masses with updates, jokes, and hourly photos. What made Twitter awful was in large part inseparable from what made it work; the 140 character limit was a seemingly ‘stupid’ design choice that fostered the environment for millions to flock to with its quick catch and release thought process. Twitter was so good at what it did, it accidently gave a head-trauma inducing shock to human society for years; for an awful period, news stories were simply explaining high-profile arguments over the damn thing. 

But Twitter had proven itself ‘better’ in a specific niche than what Facebook could provide, in this particular case usually stalking celebrities and reacting quickly with pound signs. And this was a step forward for human networking… even if the User Interface was atrocious to the modern eye, and you strings of tweets had to be read in backward chronological order. Twitter’s strength was on focusing on the big names, and leaving the common man to wallow in their shadows. Subtlety of design, and more complex formulas were being tested in these new networks, and these inventions could find and set up shop in niches as they were invented, or perhaps more accurately, discovered.

The line between ‘social network’ and ‘popular area with social elements infused in its design’ became difficult to differentiate, and eventually melded together completely. A place that is not particularly remembered as a social network, but in all ways of diagnosing became a social network, was YouTube, a video sharing site that actually began in 2005, but grew into a popular platform for anyone with a video upload to find an audience. To the popular eye, YouTube first seemed the place to watch historical speeches and cat videos, but due to a complete lack of competition by other video networks, and changing ad-revenue formulas that shifted demand on the creators, it evolved into a network of video-essayists, lets-players, vloggers, reviewers, commentators, and many others. 

YouTube snuck up from behind as a social platform, and what is interesting is that the comment sections of these videos are to this day the most toxic and moronic internet collective I have seen in my entire life. Yet despite the public input, the actual content creators began creating an interactive community amongst themselves worth millions. It included reviewers who debated others views, lets-players who reviewed games as they were released, even simple commentators who spoke to a camera on recent events (slowly evolving a news-casting element). Other social networks were in some ways beholden to Youtube for many of their most valuable links, as a good YouTube video would be shared on Twitter and Tumblr, and then eventually stolen by the inferior video players by Facebook and Tumblr. 

Perhaps the most clairvoyant network for the future would be the website Reddit, a strange structure with an unspeakably ugly interface but a surprisingly organized community. What we would recognize today as completely separate social networks were called ‘subreddits’ to Reddit; isolated and well isolated places made to discuss anything from building computers to sailing to Batman. These separate pages were entirely separate from one another, and could be ‘subscribed’ to for updates as they were posted. What made Reddit different, and in retrospect ahead of its time, was in its slick revitalization of the primitive ‘forum’ and introducing it softly to the realm of social networking. It succeeded for many reasons, but perhaps the most obvious was the handling of its user-base (well-pruned with a vicious voting system) and the surprising interest from higher tier celebrities, even President Obama as early as 2012. Time hasn’t been kind to its design, unfortunately, so much so that it is practically unusable today. While Reddit used the same simple mechanics for every discussion topic, modern day technology makes it much easier to sort and differentiate between long-form discussion, breaking events, polls, and many other mechanics it was forced to express using links and words. But its architecture and its early community demonstrated a purity of intention that had not been realized by other networks, the dream that the world-wide-web had been imagined with at its start; the idea of people taking the time to actually read online, share news, and discuss topics in a level-headed fashion. It is useless to discuss these networks for their communities and content, but their structure impelled certain content and communities, and Reddit demonstrated a purity of formula, if not community, that helped foster healthy discussion topics in particular areas.

How to correctly compel an audience towards particular intent is a legitimate realm of study today, and many books have been written on the philosophy. After dozens of social networks were created in the Boom, there was a short period of time in which new social outlets were created every other day, and would be replaced by the next. Many forgotten services were secondary compliments to a larger network, but still remained a platform in themselves, such as ‘Imgurs’ relationship with Reddit, and ‘Vines’ relationship with Twitter and Tumblr. Things spiralled out of control, and an eventual fading of public interest in gimmicks and ‘Privacy Paranoia’ would settle the environment into most all the categories we understand today.

A binary social network system would cement in the aftermath of The War; one half of the networks would employ a central, public profile that could exist in separate environments for discussions and public persona, and the other half was the far more interesting, grimy world of Anonymous Networking. These two worlds are in some ways the only two existing social networks, though each have many branches. The world of social networking today is a far more intelligent, pleasant place, but one sometimes misses the madness and creativity of the Boom. The person of today has one public profile that goes to a site for fitness and nutrition, for therapy and discussion, for gaming, for film discussion, but must always be shackled to the same central profile. These branches of networking rise and fall every handful of years, to be replaced by a ‘better managed, cleaner’ new website that claims to have replaced the old network’s corruption, but settles to being nearly the exact same state in a matter of months (Here’s hoping you’ll break this cycle, Atlantis). 

The Boom was a bizarre time to live in, and the chaos would manifest in strange ways. A Tweet with a Harry Potter fan theory would be stolen in an hour and posted as a screenshot on Tumblr, then a screenshot of this screenshot would be put on the Tumblr ‘subreddit’ of Reddit, then seen and taken as inspiration by a YouTuber and finally made into a video. And all this is assuming that the original thought isn’t just stolen without credit to its original source. The decision to create profiles on separate sites was a major decision at the time, as different places required time and offered for entirely different communities and worldviews. Placing the a person in front of a computer and telling them they could only use Tumblr, and never even look at Twitter (or vice versa with any social network) would slowly evolve them into entirely different people by the end of a year. Tumblr was, at the time, a place where a predominantly progressive audience resided, and while I have nothing but contempt for the god awful reblog system and most of the self-deprecating humor, its user base shifted from being casually laughed at to a place of legitimate respect as a generally well-respected idealist audience. The small victory of Tumblr’s public image alone made The Boom a compelling shift to live through. All these networks mentioned had different rules of etiquette, different moderators and tools of moderation, different languages with which to express thoughts; and if you had multiple accounts, which nearly everyone did, your Tumblr account and your Reddit account were entirely unconnected and often vastly different in appearance. No modern networks exist that offer such vastly differing user bases as Reddit and YouTube commenters.

It was a time of vast exploration that was not anchored in the guarded, privacy-conscious presentations of today. It was a time of laughably simple formulas to determine what the user would see, instead of massively complicated and intentionally misleading calculus formulas that mask the influences, often nefarious, behind hourly updates. It was a time where you could actually run out of interesting new posts for that day, and then you could revisit the page an hour later to see that barely anything new had been put up. Such a situation is unthinkable today; modern networks pull up new things from the past and other language zones and every place imaginable to convince you to stay on their circuits. 

Yes, these primitive networks were quite ugly. They were opportunistic, and loud, and more often than not, reprobate in their design. But ignoring these elements, it was also a fascinating and invigorating time to have a connection to the larger world. Before the Boom, when I saw a new trailer, or news story, or even had a clever thought, I would sit and muse on it myself. Today, I immediately rush to the ideal network to see what others think... and in consequence, what I should think. The rise of social networking has changed absolutely everything about how we think. And considering this past, one can’t help but wonder what might have been, had we all been aware of the consequences we were causing during The Boom.