Facebook, once the kegger party of the young college crowd — at its start, you needed an .edu email to even get in — is now decidedly geriatric. The descending order of social media platforms in terms of age is, roughly: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. YouTube is that weird cousin of indeterminate age, possibly an actual vampire: simultaneously a radical faery who brings you exquisite gems like a lost Indian silent film from 1929 in its entirety and your MAGA Uncle Joe raging against immigrants. MySpace and LiveJournal, mostly gone, were at least once filled with impossibly sweet and hopeful promise and musings that you shared with friends, in an age long before the tidal waves of toxicity swept the internet. Tumblr, sometimes interesting and always confusing (like a beta TikTok in its bursts of uncredited sets of quotes in sequences impossible to decipher) is that guy you had a crush on in high school but who has not aged well, his head filled with jagged memories of long-ago rabid, internecine battles, stumbling around and popping in to ask, mostly on Twitter, “Heeey, so does anyone remember the big DonutHookerTailgate Blowup of 2018??” When there’s no response, he stumbles back out into the night muttering, “If you know, you know. Losers.”
The unacknowledged truth about social media is that every platform ages along with its key demographic. As in the plot of an old-fashioned Star Trek or Black Mirror episode, we age quickly, our “social media presences” aging and wrinkling right in front of our eyes. What starts out as a vibrant fifth-grade class filled with bright young things and shiny new ways of being in the world turns, over the course of a mere five years, into the east wing of a retirement community filled with elderly grouches who can’t seem to unstick their way out of the all-caps mode.
But ah-ha, you say, I’m on TikTok and sure, TikTok may seem the place to be these days. Every publisher and social media “expert” pushes writers to get on BookTok or any corner of the platform, but in a couple of years from now its frenzied and frenetic pace will seem tired and worn out. TikTok’s gradual upping of its maximum video length, from the original and snappy 15 seconds to a full 10 minutes, is at least one indication that its users and audiences are changing: aging millennials can’t take the pace, and they need glasses to keep up.
What comes after TikTok? In the future, I predict, we’ll all have a chance to become spectacularly famous and maybe moderately well-off in and for 3 seconds. The new medium will be mostly air: a bubble of an image that you carry everywhere with you as a hologram, its intensity modulated and powered by the combined exhalation of your followers.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: “Close,” Yasmin Nair, 2022.