Social media is a party and we can't party all the time

Aaron Ross Powell wrote a long, thoughtful post about social media and blogging . I thought his metaphor for social media as a party works really well for diagnosing why short-form media feels so bad for us and why the media ecosystem, which has become dominated by these party dynamics, feels so corroded.

What makes social media troubling isn’t that we should never be in a situation where we’re consuming the streams of consciousness of others, because that’s what parties are and parties are fun and rewarding. What makes social media trouble is that ours is a world where digital communication has become the dominant way many of us socially interact, and if our primary digital communication is through social media, then it’s like if we only ever interacted in the real world via parties. That would kind of suck.

The solution, then, isn’t to abandon short-form, stream-of-consciousness social media entirely, just like the solution, when you move beyond the all-parties-all-the-time of your early 20s, isn’t to never go to a party again. Rather, it’s to layer in alternatives that provide ways of socializing that are calmer, quieter, more considered, more composed.

Powell goes on to say that adding back blogging, but with some of the discovery dynamics of social media (he references AT Protocol and Leaflet specifically) can help provide a solution.

There's more — why blogs specifically are worth holding on to not just moving everything to a newsletter, the value of self-hosting, and more. It's really one of the best articulations of what's happening in the distributed social media era I've read in a while.