Subtle Revolts

Ways to resist (not abandon) social media platforms

Apr 13, 2023

In The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters, author Priya Parker shares her dreadful experience at an event intended to celebrate the 250th annivesary of a liquor company. What could have been a fun evening turned almost mutinous because the company made no effort to care for the guests. The event “was a celebration of the liquor company, by the liquor company, and for the liquor company. Everyone else was a prop.”

I love the way Parker recounts “a small, if subtle, revolt” among the guests at the event: “texting under the table, rolling their eyes, mock-eating their own arms.” Because the organizers weren’t considering the audience’s experience, the audience rebelled against the attentive behavior expected of them, finding their own ways of connecting with each other despite the rigid format of the event.

Parker describes the organizers as “oppressors,” remarking that “they forced the audience to protect themselves.”

Social media platforms often feel a lot like that event: all about the platform itself with little consideration paid to our experience with the platform. We’re treated like props — there to make the platform appear popular (thus worthy of an advertiser’s dollars). We’re forced to protect ourselves from the platform and those who use it to subject us to content we have zero interest in seeing.

For those of us who still see purpose and value in remaining present on social networks that aren’t demonstrating adeuqate consideration for users (and I completely understand why some of us don’t!), we can stage our own revolts by rejecting the marketer/consumer framework of most social networks, using them in whatever ways suit us, and proactively protecting ourselves and others from the harmful structures and content we encounter.

The platforms can dictate the forms and the algorithms, but they can’t control how we choose to interact within them.

Strategies include:

Using our social media activity to direct attention to the stories, issues, and information we want people to know about.
Setting our own terms of engagement. Deciding which conversations we want to have on social media and which ones we’d rather avoid.
Communicating our expectations for engagement on our own walls and newsfeeds. When sharing something, add guidelines and context for appropriate interactions.
Intentionally inviting people from a variety of perspectives into conversations to broaden and deepen discussions.
Protecting people from online attacks or abuse by intervening and standing up for them. Being aware that research shows the majority of online abuse is directed at women, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community.
Training ourselves to wait before responding to social media posts and messages that frustrate or upset us. Taking time to consider whether we want to respond and how we want to do so.
Moving hard or controversial conversations offline so the engagement-maximizing algorithm doesn’t feed from and warp our discourse.
Disconnecting from anyone we don’t need or want in our digital landscape.

As individuals, we may not be able to create and scale social platforms intentionally designed to bring out the best in human behavior, but we can use the ones that exist in collaborative, hopeful, community-building ways.

How do you use social media for good?

MISCELLANEA

Episode 5 of Digital Hope Talk is available! Have you listened yet? It’s about digital spaces as human places. I’m working on adding some music cues to podcast episodes and hope to be able to unveil slightly enhanced versions in the next month or so.
I’m considering adding mini-book reviews at the end of some newsletters to give a bit more information about the works and people that inform my writing. Is that something you’d find useful or interesting?
Completely unrelated to anything I usually write about: a few weeks ago I tried a whiskey boba tea and I’m still telling people about it, so I thought I’d tell you as well. Is it something you’ve tried (or would try)?