For a bit over five years now I’ve gradually slipped away from social media. I barely noticed at first being all caught up with my work and I found less time for this side of the internet throughout the day. This break from social media gave me a fresh new perspective on what I had before my eyes and for a while I kept asking myself: “Is it just me, have I become too pretentious or has something changed?” 

Maybe it’s a bit of both. 

Social media platforms create a virtual space where almost everyone can feel like a celebrity of sorts, in their own mind that is, where they continuously feed content to enforce a social position through meaningless validations. A lot of hunt for attention and fame for nothing practical in particular, but to selfishly feed one's ingrowing psychological issues.

Beyond the narcissists playground, it seems like some social media platforms have became like a go-to virtual space to vent and look for hyperconceptual characters embodied by some random users account on which to place all manner of festering frustrations that have little to do with the actual person, but mostly with the pressures that build up in the mind after it’s been left to forage and feed through the dumpsters of the internet, pedaling through piles of trash information teaming with sponsored or suggested content. 

When it doesn’t come to this, there’s the hunt for idols to supplement the vacuum of belief. The good, the bad, and the ugly idols of celebrity culture. Overly popularised earthly idols that people endow with all manner of characteristics beyond their actual capacities. If they’re not selling you some garbage they'll come around to tell you how to think, either in a movie or on some shitty podcast. It no longer has anything to do with the act of being social or informed but to cradle anxieties and feelings of apathy and angst that permeate in societies that have grown broadly anti-social. 

Looking around through the comment threads nowadays you can barely find any signs of users being social to each other. Where the most successful threads are largely filled with cheers, cynicism and rigid opinions. If you don’t participate, you don’t exist. The reaction media. This virtual “social” space where the system of likes or followers that creates the false impression of value and quality. Influencers that bring almost no social contribution through their content but largely pray on the vulnerabilities of the wasted audience are placed on a pedestal over people that put their time and energy into something truly useful but are often left in the wasteland of anonymity to which they belong. This is a clear sign of the mediocrity of the content that can easily grab a lot of attention only on mere emotionally uplifting outpourings. As this sort of detached behavior perpetuates itself on social media it naturally spills out in the actual social space, influencing some people to imitate the values of the virtual space with which they’ve become more familiar through the extensive time spent there.

A space where the superfluous and mediocre is valued over the truly exceptional. This effect can be noticed in all fields of vital social importance like music, art, politics, journalism and others where they are more likely to be seen as a form of entertainment rather than sought after for intellectual and social growth. Where characters are more likely to be cheered for acting the part but not being the part. This is the curse of outdated postmodernism. 

Probably one of the saddest effects of the social media staple is that a lot of intellectually gifted and talented people, in a struggle to become successful, succumb to the social media standards of mediocrity, unknowingly dumbing themselves and what they produce to the liking of their numbed out audience. There’s also lot of good and useful content floating around the internet, but usually it's hard to find being often pulled down under the furious tides of meaningless garbage content that the platforms often promote.

This is what I called homogeneous mediocratisation. Out of this mess there’s a looming spiritual poverty of desperately consuming all manner of beliefs expressed through a plethora of hyperconcepts that pass as knowledge or truth, leaving the consumers mentally anemic and incapable of critical judgement. The wasted consumer is more likely to choose an ever repeating passive familiarity over novel active thinking, leading a society in stale stagnation. 

From the earliest days of human civilisations and the many teachings of history we have accumulated, one of the biggest lessons that often evaders us is that where a civilization loses social cohesiveness, when they lose the ability to work together and start competing against each other, they enter into a process of social decay. Where people can no longer look to each other’s needs and sensibilities, they recede in a state of dysfunctional aggressive competitiveness that is very much praised and romanticised in our age. Throughout history, societies where most of the citizens commune and collaborate become more productive and successful but most importantly, such societies becomes sustainable as this is close to our natural condition as a species but also as part of a complex ecosystem to which we are built for.