We don't work for social media networks, so why create content to feed their algorithms?

Reclaiming digital activity as a form of connection and co-creation

In discussing his 1995 novel Blindness, a tale of humanity’s will to survive an epidemic, Nobel laureate Jose Saramago, described it as “the simplest of all stories: one person is looking for another, because he has realized that life has nothing more important to demand from a human being.”

I only recently “discovered” Saramago, while searching for great works of Portuguese literature to give me a greater understanding and appreciation of the culture and history before traveling to Portugal later this year. Saramago’s novels occupy several spots on lists of top books in Portuguese, and I can’t believe I never encountered his works before. Everything I’ve read from him so far is wildly creative and provides glimpses of the life-affirming connections we nurture when we look for other human beings.

Saramago developed his own challenging style (a blending of dialogue and narration, with limited punctuation and page-long sentences). He refused to adapt or simplify it in pursuit of commercial success. His defiance of convention allowed him to create works that require readers to open their minds to different ways of seeing and being.

Often, the human creations and content that open our eyes and lead to deep connection differ dramatically from the content that is profitable, marketable, popular, and/or easily consumed. In the realm of social media, content that “performs well” when measured by what the digital platforms have defined as “engagement” is unlikely to result in meaningful relationships, thought-change, and behavior-change.

The familiar social media metrics of reactions clicked, share buttons pushed, and even most comments or DMs are designed to track content that accomplishes the networks’ goals of keeping people glued to their network. Using those metrics as a key way of evaluating the effectiveness of social media content designed to build community, foster dialogue, and find ways forward together doesn’t make sense. They can’t capture whether a person encountering the content begins to think deeply about it, starts talking about it with other people offline, seeks out additional information, changes their mind or behavior, or finds community.

We don’t work for the networks and we don’t need to generate content that “maximizes engagement.” We can use social media in whatever ways are meaningful to us. A singular post may not “perform well,” but over time, the people in our networks will see what we are pouring into digital spaces and it will become part of their understanding of the world.

Even small contributions of ours change the stories we know and tell about what it means to be human — and when the stories change, the world changes.

Another of Saramago’s books, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, deals with how inserting a single word (“not”) into an historical account can not only change the story, but change individual lives. I’m only a few pages in to this book, so I can’t discuss it in depth yet, but I was drawn to it because it reminded me of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

(Bear with me as a I get lit nerdy for a minute.)

In Borges’s story the world is transformed by the discovery and study of artifacts from the planet Tlön that, it turns out, was entirely made up by a small group of intellectuals. The intellectuals imagined a fictional planet, devised a history of that planet, wrote an entire encyclopedia from the planet, then translated the encyclopedia into the planet’s language, which they also invented. Single volumes of the encyclopedia and other relics from the planet were placed piecemeal into libraries and private collections around the world to be found and examined.

In the story, these small, seemingly unimportant insertions into our world slowly add up, become assimilated, change fields of academic and scientific inquiry, and, eventually, re-make the world in an image of Tlön.

I read the story in college and it has taken up space in my brain ever since. I became curious about the power of story fragments and self-discovery in perception shifts — in letting people make sense of ideas and incorporate them into their mindset in whatever ways are meaningful to them, rather than spelling everything out and demanding strict adoption of the idea in the form generated by the creator. I also wondered about the appeal of working with other humans to decode and make meaning through acts of translation, interpretation, synthesis, and co-creation.

Years later, I started to see some of what I pondered in the wake of encountering Borges’ story show up in analysis and theories of digital communication.

Memes, for example, pieces of content that travel from person to person and change along the way, are ways of co-creating meaning and making connections with fellow humans. “They may seem inconsequential,” says technologist An Xioa Mina in Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power, “but they contain within them a world-changing, movement-building capacity, if provided the right soil and the right care.” She further says, memes are “the media through which we test and iterate and envision and contest the type of society we want to live in.”

Leaving room for people to add their own interpretations and flourishes strengthens the transmission and adoption of core aspects of a narrative across digital spaces. When every carrier of a message is welcome “to add a mutation” the narrative become “more contagious for his or her own networks,” say Jeremy Heimans and Henry Tims in New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World and How to Make it Work for You. After all, as they point out: “It’s really only a movement if it moves without you.”

Rather than creating content the social networks incentivize us to make, we can, instead, put fragments of the world we want to see into digital spaces. This invites connections with our fellow humans and provides fodder for self-discovery, co-creation, and amplification.

By articulating “our shared humanity, extending our own desire for warmth, love, and community to others who need it,” says Jeremy Lent in The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, we can disrupt the “stranglehold over global media, politics, finance, business and economics achieved by transnational corporations and the uber-elite class of billionaires” that is pulling society in the opposite direction from global compassion and the embracing of interdependence.

In his Nobel Lecture, Saramago said that the characters he created made him who he became. By staying true to how he wanted to write — not conforming to commercial expectations — he changed himself. In doing so, he created works that point readers to the necessity of humans seeking meaningful connection with fellow humans in times of uncertainty and despair.

We can follow his lead. We can embrace our own way of communicating in digital spaces finding each other and buoying each other in our hope and action.

What fragments do you want to place? What world do you want to co-create and share?

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Digital Kindness Journal Prompt #11

Has social media opened your eyes to a viewpoint, lifestyle, or experience you hadn’t encountered before? How?

Answer this prompt wherever you journal or the comments section to participate in a community discussion. The Digital Kindness Journal: a year of guided reflections for compassionate social media use contains an outline for developing your personal digital kindness plan based on what you discover from 50+ prompts and a month of reflections on your social media activity and experiences.

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MISCELLANEA

• Digital Kindness: Being Human in a Hyper-Connected World turns 5 in June! Thank you to everyone who has read the book, recommended it, chosen it for a book club, written a review, invited me to guest on a podcast, and hired me to speak or consult! Please keep it up! It's a joy to be able to do work I love and believe in ... because of you. 💜 To celebrate its 5th birthday, the e-book version of Digital Kindness will be free June 28 - July 2!

• Because of requests from Digital Kindness readers, I now offer workplace empathy and communication workshops/seminars as well as designing social media strategies that align with an organization’s or company’s values instead of chasing engagement and growth metrics. If you or someone you know is looking for services like these, I’d love to chat!

• Have you heard about the "#PayOffDebtTrend on TikTok? People are explaining the network’s metrics for paying creators, demonstrating how many viewers and minutes-watched are needed for the creator to earn enough money to pay off a specific debt, and asking users to help. It’s fascinating to see people use the network’s metrics to benefit each other.