Social Media — The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Social media is good, bad, and ugly — all at once.

It seems to be a sport to com­plain about social media.

Excessive screen time is des­troy­ing our youth. Social media algorithms are divis­ive and make us hate ourselves and each oth­er. And Mark Zuckerberg is everything that’s wrong with the world — and a robot.

Sure, I get it. I’m not dis­put­ing that some cri­ti­cisms con­tain streaks of truth. (Except per­haps for that part about The Zuck. Even if he is a com­pu­ta­tion, it’s not evid­ent that a mighty AI over­lord would be wrong about things.)

In short: Progress is challenging.

When I star­ted my PR career in 2005, I res­isted my intro­ver­ted nature. From the bar­ri­cades, I pro­claimed one sin­gu­lar mes­sage to any­one will­ing to listen: our soci­ety’s digit­al­isa­tion isn’t some­thing we can afford to ignore.

Those days are long gone now, but there was a time when our present digit­al soci­ety was­n’t as appar­ent to everyone.

My pro­fes­sion­al con­tacts still remem­ber my pas­sion from those days, though. I guess I doubled down on my mes­sage back then.

As a res­ult, many of my busi­ness acquaint­ances are sur­prised when they hear me dis­cuss social media from a crit­ic­al per­spect­ive. “Wait, Jerry, I thought you loved everything digital?!”

To be clear, I’m not blam­ing any­one but myself for mani­fest­ing this gen­er­al per­cep­tion. I did tell hun­dreds of organ­isa­tions to adapt to digit­al-first. My mes­sage was­n’t exactly gentle; I gave them an ulti­mat­um — adapt or die.

Does this mean that I love everything about social media? Does this mean that I love algorithms and fil­ter bubbles? Does this mean that I love … the Zuck-bot?

I’m still a PR pro­fes­sion­al, god­dam­mit.

My job is to help organ­isa­tions nego­ti­ate vari­ous media chan­nels. My job is to pro­tect organ­isa­tions when the media is get­ting things wrong (which hap­pens all time, by the way).

Case in point: I think journ­al­ism is essen­tial for demo­cracy, but that does­n’t mean journ­al­ists always get things right. They don’t.

It’s not ration­al to con­vince your­self that journ­al­ists are either saints or sin­ners. Clinging to such simplist­ic dicho­tom­ies is a poor busi­ness mindset.

So, why con­vince your­self that social media must be altru­ist­ic or mali­cious? That, too, is a poor busi­ness mind­set. It’s just your per­son­al bias on the mat­ter get­ting in the way.

Do social media algorithms make you feel bad about your­self? Does most of the con­tent you’re exposed to seem point­less or dumb? Is no one inter­ested in the con­tent you share?

Don’t get mad.
Get smarter.
And skip the drama, please.

I don’t love it when journ­al­ists get things wrong.
I don’t love it when social media gets things wrong.

And PR schol­ars should take a bal­anced view, too.

“Scholarship in pub­lic rela­tions seems to be overly pos­it­ive about social media. The dom­in­ant dis­course in pub­lic rela­tions is that using social media is ‘good’, because social media can help organ­iz­a­tions in devel­op­ing dia­logs and rela­tion­ships with pub­lics and in enga­ging with them. Yet empir­ic­al evid­ence in pub­lic rela­tions is mostly case-depend­ent and lim­ited to the realm of under­stand­ing cur­rent organ­iz­a­tion­al prac­tices, with lim­ited under­stand­ing of the con­crete value for organ­iz­a­tions or for pub­lics. In this paper I ques­tion the util­ity of social media for pub­lics, organ­iz­a­tions and pub­lic rela­tions, and I argue that the pos­it­ive view of social media held by the major­ity of pub­lic rela­tions schol­ars is groun­ded on the pro­fes­sion’s need to recon­cile the two sides of pub­lic rela­tions iden­tity — the rhet­or­ic­al and the rela­tion­al. A dis­cus­sion of wheth­er cur­rent pub­lic rela­tions prac­tices in social media reflect these two main iden­tit­ies is offered, as well as a dis­cus­sion of the implic­a­tions of uncrit­ic­al use of social media for the pub­lic rela­tions pro­fes­sion.“
Source: Public Relations Review

I’m only advising organ­isa­tions to stop com­plain­ing and deal with whatever is in front of them. I was back then, and I am now.

Because guess what? The play­ing field is the same for every­one. There are going to be win­ners and losers. Some will fig­ure things out, and some won’t. Information tech­no­logy is a rising tide, and while it’s not a law of nature, it’s a law of mod­ern civilisation.

Clay Shirky said, “There is no inform­a­tion over­load, only fil­ter fail­ure.“
Today, we can say, “There is no evil tech­no­logy, only poor use cases.”

Contrary to pop­u­lar belief, it’s not evid­ent that Facebook, TikTok, or any social net­work are try­ing to enslave our minds or mould us into pass­ive, mind­less con­sumers. They thrive on their users being act­ive, after all.

So, stop com­plain­ing and get busy win­ning instead. This is also what I tell friends and fam­ily who feel like “algorithm vic­tims.” And what I tell par­ents who hate their chil­dren’s smart­phones, pads, and gam­ing stations.

A con­trari­an ana­lys­is would sug­gest that social net­works are highly effi­cient ser­vice pro­viders. Too effi­cient at times.

So, the prob­lem isn’t that these social net­works are bad. The prob­lem is that they’re too good at what they do. And this is what some­times gets ugly.