This Experience is not Shared

The Social Trouble with Social Media

Suppose you have a dear old friend that you haven't seen in ten years. Suppose you are traveling and happen to be passing through the town where that friend lives. You contact your dear old friend while you are in town and the two of you meet up for an unexpected reunion. Now imagine two different scenarios for this meeting: 1) your friend doesn't use social media and avoids technology, so you haven't had any contact with them at all since the two of you last met; 2) your friend is a normal social media user and the two of you have followed each other on Facebook and Instagram, but not met in person or spoken on the phone since you last met. Imagine what these two different scenarios would look like and feel like. Which meeting with the old friend do you imagine being warmer? In which meeting would the formerly close friendship have been more preserved over the course of those intervening ten years?

I don't know how most people would answer these questions, but as for myself it seems intuitive that, other things being equal, the 'no contact in ten years' meeting would be warmer and find the friendship more finely preserved than the 'we follow each other on social media' meeting. But how could that be?

Sometime in 2020, while participating in regular family 'meet-ups' over Zoom chat (which many families did in 2020), I noticed a strange phenomenon. I began to feel more and more distant from the family members in the Zoom chats. The real, personal, intimate relationships with loved ones, developed over many years, were becoming shaded by these awkward, impersonal, superficial, and often frustrating Zoom interactions. The Zoom chats weren't keeping us close, they were pulling us farther apart. It was as if the relationship degradation inevitably caused by passing time had been enhanced, as if I would have felt closer to those family members if I were not talking to them at all rather than occasionally talking to them on Zoom. The Zoom chat was deleterious, it was accelerating the process of relationship decay. But the whole point of these Zoom chats was to accomplish the opposite! Was I imagining this deleterious effect? Was it only me?

As I thought about it, I realized that this deleterious effect on existing relationships is a phenomenon common both to digital communications generally (e.g. texting, Zoom chat), and to 'social media' communications especially. It is a phenomenon that I think most people today experience but are unconscious of. Until I became conscious of it, it existed for me only as a vague feeling of unease with social media interactions over time, a feeling that I could never quite specify or analyze. We naturally think that by using these convenient digital communications platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Zoom chat, and text messaging, we are maintaining our long distance relationships, when we are often actually degrading them. It is not merely that the social use of digital media is lacking the benefit we expect, it is acting as a detriment. In many cases, we would have maintained warmer relationships with the long distant people we were formerly close to, when we finally had the chance to meet with them in person and take up those relationships together again, if we had maintained no contact at all rather than the superficial relationship continuances provided by digital communications media.

This is non-obvious and counterintuitive, so allow the idea to percolate a little bit before you dismiss it.

Subsequent to my Zoom chat epiphany, and motivated primarily by other reasons (such as privacy concerns and not wanting to support monopolistic "Big Tech" corporations), I disconnected from all of my social media networks, transforming abruptly from an enthusiastic social media participant to a zero-use social media hermit. I still used text messaging on my phone, but deleted all of my social media apps and permanently closed most of my accounts. To my great surprise, it wasn't any sacrifice. I haven't missed the apps and social media networks at all.

But this is getting ahead of the story, so let me take a step back...

When I was growing up, in the 1980s and 1990s, my Mom or Dad would occasionally receive a phone call from a dear old friend that they had not seen in many years. These surprise conversations were always a thrill for them and usually went on for an hour or more. Though unexpected, often at inopportune moments, every phone call like this that I can remember my parents receiving led to an ensuing conversation that was warm, and exciting, and -- joyful. In every era of history before the telephone, this seems to have been the common experience of people meeting up with old friends or family after many years. You can read about it in novels, and diaries, and histories, and memoirs, and collections of old letters, even on cuneiform tablets. To meet up with your dear friend or family member again, after many intervening years, was a blessing and a joy! Even if many years had passed, when you finally met that dear friend or family member again, you could pick up the treasured relationship between you, long packed away, and carry it forward together again. This was, in fact, a historical norm in human relationships.

While traveling two or three years ago and getting back in touch with some of my own dear old friends, I realized that such an experience is not the norm for my generation, and even less so for younger ones. Our relationships cannot simply be picked back up and carried forward again together, having been safely packed away. The warmth of the relationships is often not preserved. Why?

The problem seems to be a combination of both the way social media affects our particular relationships and the way in which it affects our conception of our relationships. It cheapens and degrades both things. I've thought about it for years now and believe I can explain it:

Relationships are a product of shared experiences, and the social experience of digital media is not shared.

When I post a photo on Facebook, and an old friend comments on the photo, we are each having a separate experience, not a shared experience. We are not experiencing the photo 'together', we are experiencing it in different places, at different times, and in a milieu of different people (their social media 'network' is not the same as mine). I don't witness and feel their emotions over the photo as they happen in the moment of sharing it, and they do not witness and feel mine as they happen in the moment of my seeing it. So, there is a connection between us over the photo, but a subtly estranged one. It is as if we had gone to the same cocktail bar on the same night, and seen each other and nodded politely, but kept apart and not spoken to each other while we were there. There was a link between our individual experiences, but not a shared experience. A digital 'social interaction' over a 'shared' photo, in the same way, which is already superficial, can become less than nothing. As a non-shared experience between the two of us, a connection without the element of togetherness, it slightly deteriorates the intimacy and closeness that formerly characterized our relationship. Imagine how different it would be if the old friend and I had never followed and liked each other's photos over Facebook, but met up in person after a period of years and shared some of those special photos with each other. Wouldn't that be very different? But the one experience precludes the other.

There is an illegitimacy to our social media relationships. The intimacy arising out of unique shared experiences begins to be transmuted into mere familiarity, based on communicated but non-shared experiences. Perhaps worse, this mere familiarity is exactly equivalent to that which we share with casual friends and strangers. Digital media interactions, including everything from Facebook posts to text messaging, are very similar if not exactly identical to the casual online interactions we have with strangers (e.g. on Reddit), customer support agents, and even machines. The warmth of our close relationships, taking the same form, is chilled. What was once genuine starts to become counterfeit.

This is no big problem for relationships in which we continue to be close and share new experiences (in person, together), but is a big problem in our long distance relationships over time. When we 'keep in touch' in this superficial way, in the 'social media' way, we can't just pick up where we left off again, because we haven't ever quite left off, but we also haven't actually shared any new experiences together.

The problem is exacerbated by the narcissistic qualities of social media and digital communications tools like texting and Zoom chat.

Consider texting, for example. When you text back and forth with a friend, how much time do you spend thinking about the texts that you receive compared to the time you spend thinking about the texts that you write in reply? The time you spend composing your reply is often much more than the time spent reading and absorbing the text from your friend, isn't it? This is one of the core appeals of texting, we can respond at our leisure and compose our response as carefully as we feel like. I know, for myself, it's not uncommon for me to run a text message to a friend past my wife before sending it, "Hey, look at this, does this look good?" Although I sometimes think deeply about the texts that people write to me, the amount of time and energy I spend composing texts is hugely disproportionate to the amount of time and energy I expend reading and thinking about texts that I receive. In a live conversation it is simply not possible to have this huge disparity. My friend says something, and if I have something to say in reply I have to say it, in real time, in the moment, I have to focus on them almost as much as I do on myself and my own words -- it is a shared experience and the focus of the shared experience is that friend and that experience, not myself and what I am choosing to write at my leisure when I feel amenable, rested, or in some other way ready to put my best foot forward.

It makes me think of another strange thing I have noticed, which is that video chat is less intimate than plain old talking on the phone. Why is that?

One reason, which my wife pointed out to me, is that when people video chat they generally spend a lot of time looking at themselves. We have to make sure we are staying in the field of view of the camera, after all, and since we happen to have a video of ourselves to watch, and can see in real time how we appear to the other person and make adjustments to it, it is hard not to watch ourselves while we talk. I'm certainly guilty of that, even when I make a conscious effort not to watch myself in the video and to try to visually focus on the people I am talking to. As with text messaging, not to mention things like Facebook, the medium feeds our narcissism. If we video chatted constantly, would we frame ourselves in the camera automatically and eventually get sick of looking at ourselves? Would this problem resolve? I'm not so sure about that. And again, there is a larger problem that the experience is not entirely shared.

A video chat is more shared, more mutual, than a text message, it is shared at least as much as a phone call is, but it is still not equivalent to having a conversation in person. The context of our experience on the video chat is not shared. We are in different rooms, in different places, with different devices, under different circumstances.

Imagine this, you get into a car wreck while you are video chatting with a family member in another part of the country (assume aren't the driver!). Is that car wreck an experience that the person you are video chatting with shares? A car wreck is an intense experience! It is probably by far the most significant aspect of what happened during your conversation, but it is not shared, only one of you experiences it.

If you had been talking together, in person, if the person you were chatting with had also been a passenger in the car, the experience would have been shared between you. This is a profound difference. So much of the material that becomes the structures of our relationships is what happens to us in the moment, unexpectedly or unpredictably, while we are doing things together. Do we have a car wreck? Do we see a rainbow? Does a good song come on the radio or a bad song? Do we see something ridiculous out the window and laugh? This is the substance from which our relationships are made, or at least an essential part of that substance.

I wonder how much of these problems are just me, just a projection of my own personal experience, but when I look around they don't seem to be just me. It's not my impression that they are. It's my distinct impression that the same things affect mostly everyone, and in mostly the same way.

Although, there is a generational difference that, thinking about those long-lost-friend phone calls my parents used to get, is significant. My parents still occasionally have phone calls like that, even with people that they are already reconnected with on Facebook, but for millennials and younger generations it is hard to imagine. That's because our conception of our relationships has changed.

What is a long lost friend? After disconnecting from all social media for a couple of years, I began to have the impression that some long distance friends, when I reconnected with them in a direct and more personal way, resented it. After all, I could have kept in touch with them on Facebook, couldn't I?

I actually feel closer to the people that I never reconnected with on Facebook, old friends I mean, than the long distance friends that I did reconnect with. The them, to me, is the them that I knew when we had a relationship, when we were close and shared experiences, when we did things together. The them that I know of the old friends I have 'kept up with' on Facebook is quite obviously not the same person that I knew, and also not a person I know anymore, but someone I am sort of familiar with. And the me that they know is not the me that they knew. It's an abstract me that they have a distant affection for and who they no longer know, and who they know that they don't know. When we meet in person again, after a long time, there is some sense in which we meet as casual acquaintances not dear old friends.

Imagine you are a Generation Z person. You have friends and family that have moved far away, maybe you yourself have moved far away -- why shouldn't you all 'keep in touch'? If someone doesn't keep in touch with you on social media, that's their choice, isn't it? It's like a slap in the face. So what is a long lost friend except someone who chose not to keep in touch with you? What is a long lost friend except someone who chose not to stay a part of your 'network', part of your life? Long lost? They must not even be much of a friend. So you won't be having any thrilling, warm, joyful phone calls from long lost friends that you haven't heard from in ten years, that wouldn't even make sense. If they didn't love your pics on Facebook or on Instagram over the years and say, "OMG, CONGRATULATIONS!!!" when you had a baby, then they weren't much of a friend. That's how it seems to be. And it makes sense, doesn't it?

There's something else about the digital interactions that we often call 'social media'. They're fake. For almost all of us, the life we present is not the life we actually lead. We present our best self, or what we think is our best self, or what we wish was our best self. After all, why shouldn't we put our best pictures up from our vacation if we are going to put pictures up from our vacation? It's perfectly natural, and maybe the only reasonable option, but it doesn't communicate accurately to anyone what our vacation, as an experience, was actually like. These little fake mementos of our lives pile up year after year, so that the person our long lost friends online "know" is not the person that we are, and the life of ours that they know about is not the life we are living or have lived. It wouldn't be more honest to post bad photos from our vacation, that's not even the point. Most of us aren't intentionally trying to distort the appearance of our lives, although most of us probably err on the side of distortion. But this digital image of ourselves that we control -- the video of ourselves that we watch while we film it, the carefully composed text messages saved for the moment we feel like composing them, the curated photo feeds, the curated 'shares' of tiny slices of our lives, the curated 'thoughts' and curated expressions of emotion -- doesn't even have the potential to be shared by someone else because it isn't a genuine reflection of our experience of life.

It's a big problem. And I'm not sure what the solution is, or even if there is a solution. It took me years to articulate the phenomenon, and some of you readers are probably coming to the end here thinking that I haven't even done that much, that the idea is invalid or all mixed up. Well, ask yourself, do you think social media brings you closer to the people you care about? I'm old enough to have experienced both worlds, both the world before social media and the world after it. People seem much more emotionally disconnected from each other today. There are no external reports that young people today, in college or in high school, are socially closer and more connected than ever; the reports are always the opposite. It seems to me that social media facilitates our superficial relationships but cheapens our profound ones. We trade gold for silver, or even copper.

It doesn't seem realistic for most people to simply turn their social media off, but that might be what's best for them. Or it might only isolate them more. I do not know the answer to the conundrum. But I'm pretty sure, at least, that many of us have forgotten how important it is to live life together and share genuine experiences with the people we love and are close to, or who we want to be close to, which means experiences together in person. There is no substitute. These shared experiences, really shared, together in person, in real time, in reality, are the foundation of all our personal relationships. A foundation left undisturbed can sit and wait for a long time, until the builders come to build it up further or build on top of it, but if it's constantly disturbed, over a period of years, and the builders never come and never fix it up and never build on top of it, then it doesn't sit and wait but gradually crumbles.