MK

When we dress to be photographed, we increasingly dress to be distributed as an image, and thus transformed into a kind of ad.

This was what personal style was to me in 2008: a cipher for something much broader, a glimpse into the lives of others.

The flip side of that coin also shines. On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience...

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

But connection as a primary purpose has declined. Think of the change like this: In the social-networking era, the connections were essential, driving both content creation and consumption. But the social-media era seeks the thinnest, most soluble connections possible, just enough to allow the content to flow.

The inherent contextlessness of platforms like Twitter also works in the opposite direction, though: It’s easy to use the language of social justice to justify anything we want, and by doing so, weakens real, meaningful activism.

The whole idea of social networks was networking : building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.