Social Media now is just algorithmic broadcasting

I’m not entirely sure when it happened exactly, but at some point a few years ago Social Media stopped being social media. The logic of person-to-person, one-to-one connection was replaced by a one-to-many model. Social became parasocial. That was the first change. A parasocial relationship describes a one-sided, psychological connection where a person feels a deep sense of intimacy or familiarity with someone they do not know in real life. The other person, the creator, most likely isn’t even aware that the consumer of their media exists. This is the logic of, say, a film star, or increasingly content creators online. The other change was that Social Media was turned into an algorithmic distribution channel. Rather than being built around strong defaults of mutual connection (“following”), it instead was revamped completely. Today, it’s mostly engagement-based algorithmic upranking: Content that is consumed and interacted more with will get even more distribution, which leads to…

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