Living Outside the Algorithm

Frankenstein, presented by Worms Theatre by Library of Congress is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

Technology is linear. It’s formulas. It’s numbers. It’s not capable of nuance. However, we’ve dressed it up to resemble real life. It seems real, even though we know better (most of the time).

Social media is the perfect incapsulation of that formula all dressed up. It is designed to give you exactly what you want and what it thinks you want. In its most dangerous forms, it can trap you in an echo chamber and radicalize you. In its lighter forms, it can guide you through images and videos to define yourself. It can lure you into believing in absolutes.

It’s our monster, and like any good monster, it’s outgrown the vision of its creator.

The communities you find online are different, but really they’re all the same. They are absolutes begging us to define ourselves for the sake of the algorythm. And the algorythm only works in absolutes, it doesn’t work in the in-between. It’s begging us to define ourselves. It’s the only way it can survive.

A while ago I was watching an influencer’s Instagram stories, and she was answering questions that followers had submitted.

“I’m new here. Are you a crunchy mom?”

We have to know if the digital spaces we participate in are “for us”. The internet is so segmented that my internet is not your internet. My internet is feeding me content for me, showing me posts and suggesting images you may never see.

“Crunchy mom”, a mom who strives to feed her kids organic foods, keep things natural and avoid “toxins”, is just another label. And, honestly a dangerous one, “healthy”, “natural” and “organic” have been weaponized by a movement that is just a click or two away from antivax and antiscience corners of the internet.

But it’s not just moms. It’s everyone and it’s all the time. The feed is based on labels and hashtags.

And, we’ve molded ourselves to feed that formula. Labeled ourselves ten different ways to find community.

But it’s not who we are. We are the definition of nuance. We are all the things, all at once, and all the time. We’re all the things that technology can’t accurately capture.

marketing minute

Marketing Minute: Social Media Experts

If you’ve ever searched for a job in marketing, you’ve seen a job listing for “Social Media Expert”. Usually the requirements call for extensive experience running the social media channels for a large brand, somewhere in the listing it might explicitly say or imply that basically they want you to create and manage “viral” (can we all agree to stop using that word?) content in a way that garners likes, follows and favorites. This leads to brand loyalty and brand recognition and eventually sales (supposedly).

Does it sound like you qualify? Well, truth is you probably do. At my age now, I can say that I have almost ten years experience creating, posting and editing content for social media channels. In twenty years, people entering the job market can say that there wasn’t a time in their life that they don’t remember running multiple social media accounts. Furthermore, as much as we’d like to pretend – the content we choose to post to our channels is never happenstance. There are choices and debates that we all have in our heads before we post something. Something that makes us choose certain angles, certain filters and certain channels to post content in.

This is great news if you’re a child dreaming of working in marketing (which by the way is no one). But for everyone else this is just a new reality. It’s becoming necessary for kids to know how to use social media. Not for a job, but for your personal life. Apps like Kuddle, as highlighted in Tech Crunch, is one way to teach your kids how to responsibly use social media. It’s as writer Sarah Perez put so well, Instagram with training wheels. We’ve all accepted that kids at a younger and younger age will be using social media, so now parents have to make sure that they’re being taught how to use it correctly – how to become responsible social media experts.

That’s all we’re doing – creating personas which at the purest form is just a digital reflection of our real lives but in reality is a heightened and polished version. So we might not all have millions of likes or followers, but we are all becoming acutely aware of what sort of content is appealing in an online format.

At a younger and younger age, we’re all becoming the directors and stars of our online lives. We create personas which we fine tune to ensure we look good. That we look attractive, successful and for lack of a better word…popular.

Soon companies won’t need to hire specific social media experts because we’re all just social media experts in the making.

xoxo

Sandi

Marketing Minute is a weekly-ish post on marketing musings, rants, complaints and observations.