social media managers are turning 40 😭

20 years ago thinking that a million people would be employed in social media marketing was unimaginable.

per Max Read, “The main purpose of social media is to call attention to yourself.” As he points out in this essay I still love, the fact that anyone can join social media and publish an opinion lends the industry a democratic air while it profits off of our every spare thought. We’re lulled into a stupor and call it participation. “Each new byte of... See more

It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.

Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature.

The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social n

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All of this feels a bit weird to me, a proud denizen of geriatric social media. It is quite strange, especially when you write about technology, to feel like the tools that define your formative era of the internet are no longer ascendent. But just because patterns are changing, I think it’s a mistake to assume that social media is on its way out a... See more

That we straddle a pivotal moment in history being old enough to remember a time before the internet but also native enough to online culture to recognise and appreciate the whole new world of human interaction that the internet is only just beginning to open up. Many of us spent much of our late adolescence and early adulthood socialising online a... See more

That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their

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