The Daily Planet 2.0

Social media has become a part of our lifes whether we want it or not, and we can’t deny its impact on out dayly lifestyle. These last days, even weeks, we have seen how some particular social media has been suffering some changes by the hand of its new owner. I’m talking about the one with the blue bird. It is not the first time this has happened and whether it will survive or it will see its demise is still to be confirmed.

When I started writing a blog, I used a platform called MySpace, it was more or less like this one I am using now, but more social, so to speak. I had lots of feedback and communication with other users, it was fun. I cannot tell how and when it disappeared or if it is still working. As far as I am concerned, I cannot access it anymore. For how long? I cannot say. I can’t remember when I stopped using it, and when it got closed down. I do know I stopped writing as often as I used to, and thus using the website. I think I may be able to find the Hotmail user since I still use one of the email accounts I had back then. Although honestly I don’t see much of a point in doing so.

Back when I started using the Internet, chat rooms were very common. You could use the portals from the websites or softwares that were designed only for that specific purpose. I suppose the websites still exist. Maybe the IRCap also. I just remembered loosing interest in all of them and little by little drifting away from them until one day I didn’t even download the updates. Mostly the same that happened with MySpace.

The rise and fall of social media software and apps is not that uncommon. One that became the most used and then was blown into oblivion is Snapchat, which, by the way I still use. It became trending when a famous celebrity used it for its cat and dog face filters. Suddenly everyone had to have it and be able to post selfies with a dog face and other stuff. I can’t remember exactly what happened with that specific person for her to shame and stop using that app. It went from top to flop, and nowadays not many people I know use it. Basically only my fiancé and I comunicate with each other through it. I know some more users do, but I only use it with him. For the rest of the people there are other ways. I think it is fun because we can use bitmojis that represent us. (Emojis or avatars). The filters still exist and we do use them from time to time. Although we keep in touch with it, we also have WhatsApp for when the bandwidth or the signal needs better connection or even Telegram.

The latter I just installed a week ago and I must confess I don’t know whether it is a great app or not. I reckon I was getting fed up with WhatsApp belonging to the same big company as Facebook and Instagram. Communication tools and apps are important but sometimes you need to be able to trust whatever enterprise that is behind the use of it. There has been many bad news and bad reports on how they have been used to spread misinformation and fake news to people. In Europe we get less targeted but it happens. Having all the eggs on the same basket can be dangerous. Plus the fact that they tend to look the same and to pick contacts from one another also is creepy. Sometimes I don’t want the people from my WhatsApp to appear as suggested friends on Facebook.

The time came when it belonged to the same company. In France they complained a lot about that, although they didn’t use the communication app much, since there the text messages were free, so no need to use WhatsApp. Unless you have friends abroad you needed to communicate with and didn’t use the mother brand.

Living there I found fun to try to be someone on Instagram, have lots of followers and post lots of interesting and fun pictures, doing live videos and posting stories feeling as if anyone would be interested in them. It turned out that no one was interested in what I had to say or show. I still use it, for pictures of holidays, my collection or animals, but honestly I’ve lost most of the interest in it.

Same happened with Facebook. All those apps or social media make you think you are interesting, you have something to say and you have lots of people for whom you matter. The truth is that’s an illusion. People remember your birthday because they are told it is, and lately most of them just can’t be bothered to send you anything for it. All the anniversaries they share are just to remind you how fun it used to be and how lonely and irrelevant you have become. It’s all wishful thinking.

The social media can make you feel the best or the worst if you are not careful enough. I reduced my use of the Zuckerberg apps during the pandemic because I was tired of being submerged by fake news, by conspiracy theory followers and people that made me feel like shite. Instead of blocking them or unfollowing them I decided to use the algorithm (or the not use of it) to become as irrelevant as I could and I started using Twitter instead.

To be fair I must say I used all of them more or less at the same time. I remember I had a friend back then, maybe around 2010, that said to me Twitter is the future whilst Facebook will become obsolete like Tuenti did. So I found funny you could actually interact with others and with famous people too. Then as with everything, I lost interest once it became so trending that you would get lost amidst all the other tweets, so I just left it, I had my account but would not use it much.

During my time in France, I would use it only to post things I didn’t want to publish on Facebook and that was it. With the pandemic I found easier to block and manage the contents I wanted to see and acces in this social media, without the bad implications that unfollowing people meant on the other ones. Since I wasn’t using it often, people wouldn’t care whether we were friends or not. For me it was like the rebirth of them.

Years passed and it became really an interesting place to find the information the actual media wouldn’t give you. The app improved and the people became more close, but also more viral, in the wrong sense. It turned into a space where you had to be careful of what and how you wrote things or else you could get trashed by the users. Politics are everywhere and we know now that some parties used Facebook and other platforms to reach and brainwash people, here it is the same. Up to the point that some politics got banned from them. They could not use those media to spread their hate speech.

Fake news, conspiracy theories and hate speech in all their forms have always been swimming amongst those places. In some countries more than in others. Apps are being created constantly to offer ways for people to communicate and also to spread their thoughts, but sometimes this becomes rotted. The minds behind the softwares are what makes them hazardous or not.

Not so long ago we saw the birth and the explosion of TikTok, everyone uses it. If you want to be someone you have to be on that social media, if you don’t, you are irrelevant. The issue was when some governments wanted to ban the use of it under the suspicion that they were being used by their creators to gather information about the users for their political purposes. In this case China. Because if it is the Americans who use them, from all of us, it is OK.

I live in Europe so it is funny that they all argue about who is right and who is wrong, whilst both sides are doing basically the same. Until we don’t get something more local, or that compels completely to the rules that we have in this part of the world, we will have to deal with our data being used by whoever owns that platform and with what they want us to read or know. Until we have an European social media we have to pick up the less evil.

Governments try to get their hands on people through the social media. The classic ones are still here but with less power than before, so whoever owns them will be in charge of choosing the contents they sell. This brings me to what is happening to Twitter. Its new owner claims he wants a social media that has freedom of speech, but his first moves are to capitalise the use of this platform, fire the men behind the software and make sure that only those who pay can deliver the message. That message has to be approved first otherwise it won’t be shared and the account behind it will be banned. One person will have total control on what can be said and what is not to be published. I know some people see him as a saviour, a rich person that is willing to save the world from its demise. Like a real world Bruce Wayne. Unfortunately he reminds me more of another wealthy character from the same franchise but on the other side of the spectrum. He has the money, he has the power and now he owns the media. We all know how the story goes from here. Some users are even trying to find a plan B to migrate to and are fleeing the boat before it is too late and it disappears like others have done before, I’m thinking about Tumblr.

And just like that Lex Luthor bought the Daily Planet.

November 2022.