Social media feels like an open-plan office.
Back in the day, I’m talking early 2000s, the Internet was full of small communities. I ran one myself, as well as being a member of different message boards, mostly around parenting and small business. Most of these ran on platforms like phpBB that were neatly organised by topic.
These boards were hosted on different websites and it was easier to keep the different topics separate. If I wanted to talk about why my baby wasn’t sleeping, I would go to the parenting forum, post and interact, then leave. If I wanted to talk about business, I would go to the business forum, post and interact, then leave.
Then Facebook and other social media platforms took over. All the topics were together in one place. In a newsfeed, there would be parenting, business, family, and everything else all in one place. Instead of feeling like topics were in distinct rooms, they were all in one place and, especially now with how the algorithms work, it feels like being in an open-plan office.
In those offices, you may be trying to focus on your work, but you can hear the phone call by someone on the next desk, the conversation of coworkers walking past, a client coming into the office, the beeping of the copier needing new paper, the kettle boiling, and so much more. It’s hard to focus on your work without everything else going on at the same time. Much of the noise, you try to block out so you can focus, but it’s impossible. You have no door to close.
I may be getting old, but I’ve been missing those old days of the message boards. Some of those communities were huge, but they didn’t feel quite so big as the topics were clearly marked. Thats what I miss about the old message boards. They gave us doors. For example, I had a baby born in January 2002, I could read discussions from other mothers with babies born in the same month without seeing posts from mums with babies born months or years earlier or later.
The social media algorithms feel like that open plan office. Even with groups, the newsfeed is cluttered with a bit of everything and so much from people or organisations I have never heard of before, and what better way to hide them than to actually follow them!
Back then, I went online looking for particular conversations. Now I open social media and have hundreds of conversations I didn’t ask for thrust in front of me.
