When I was young, I used to spend countless hours on those sites that let you create your own webpage. I didn’t know what I was doing and the pages were ugly, but I was having a lot of fun. I enjoyed filling them with pictures of things I liked. They weren’t aesthetic masterpieces, but creating them was an act of self-expression which I guess technically qualifies as art, even if the end result could be considered a crime against good taste.
The most popular social media at that time was MySpace, and just like my website, everyone had their own page that they would customise to make their own, and just like my site, most were quite ugly. But they were personal, and when you went to someone’s page, you would get of sense of what that person was like. What their interests were and what sort of styles that they identified with.
Today that sort of personalisation has disappeared almost entirely from social media. What you get on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky etc is a profile picture, and if you’re lucky, a cover image. When you upload something, you might get the chance to select from some premade filters. This makes it a lot easier to upload content and make a profile, but the individuality and personality suffers as a result. Modern social media has removed individuality in the name of user-friendliness.
It’s not just social media. Most technology has been dumbed down in in order to make it user friendly, and nowhere is this more apparent than with our phones. Our phones and the apps on them are so easy to use that a small child can operate them without issues, which they frequently do. Young people hardly know how technology works anymore, some of them don’t even understand what files are, and where they might be saved or live, because modern technology has built such extreme abstractions that devices have become magic black boxes.
I am not against making things easy to use, but maybe we have gone too far. Did we have to remove all individuality and personalisation from social media? What we have created is a kind of bland sameness. Twitter, Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon are practically identical, and none of them permit you to make the experience your own, or to express yourself. The only choice you have is what sort of content should the algorithm feed you with.
A lot of modern technology has become like ultraprocessed foods. Hyperpalatable experiences that will never challenge you or make you think. Simple dopamachines that hack your brain to keep you engaged. But it doesn’t have to be this way. While the modern internet has become massively centralised and lost its original spirit, the old internet is still out there. If you can handle the short-form video withdrawls, you can choose to log off and go exploring the internet for the interesting experiences that are still out there.
The other day I logged on to my Bluesky account that I hadn’t used for a very long time. All I saw were things that upset me and made me angry, and the content was hurled at me at speeds that almost made me dizzy. I decided that I don’t need this kind of thing in my life and deleted my account. Well guess what, you can too.