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There are a number of things I dislike about social media, from its addictive nature to its total disrespect for privacy to the emotional dependence on attention that it instills in its users. Recently, however, I've noticed another downside to social media that most people seem to miss.
Most social media platforms have a method of sharing content one sees to one's followers. Facebook has a "share" button, while Twitter features "retweets" and Tumblr allows users to "reblog" posts. Reddit, as a topic-centric rather than user-centric service, does not directly implement a similar feature--but widely-viewed content can be sent to r/popular or r/all. Many people use these as a general content hub to scroll through absentmindedly.
Among the usual outrage- or shock-based content that gets shared on Reddit, other posts that go viral often include something extraordinary. A post might have a picture of an unusually-large vegetable, or a cat whose meows sound extremely human-like, or an unbroken triple rainbow. If this type of content is unusual enough, it gains lots of traction and gets pushed to the top of the feed.
The problem I have with this kind of content is that it begins to make extraordinary things less interesting. If a picture of a solid triple rainbow is seen by millions of people online, those people are going to find a double rainbow less interesting, because it's not a triple rainbow. A vegetable that is quite large, but not as large as that monster cabbage they saw on r/popular last week, might escape their notice. Even if people do pay attention to it, it's no longer as impressive.
This effect is even more profound when considering things that are not extraordinary in any way. Regular rainbows are hardly worth pointing out. Regular-size cabbages are ignored completely. And regular-sounding cat meows may even be seen as an annoyance. I know most people already pay no attention to mundane things, whether or not they use Reddit. But I feel that Reddit and other social media sites inundate us with unusual content so often that we start to require even more out-of-the-ordinary phenomena before we start paying attention.
Our lives are not filled with new and exciting things every second. The vast majority of our time can be quite dull and even grating. I feel it's an important part of life to be able to find joy, wonder or even excitement in those boring everyday things.
Being able to escape and see something unusual, even in a token way, is a good thing. Letting that escapism deprive us of the ability to enjoy the mundane is not a good thing. I worry that social media is conditioning people to feel the latter more so than ever before.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]