Original source (on modern site)
If you've lived online long enough for Facebook to start dredging up embarrassing status updates from a decade ago, chances are you've picked up on a distinct vibe shift in our virtual world. Experts describe our current social media landscape as "chaotic" and "fragmented", with the sentiment of some users online feeling at a loss of where to go next. So how did we get here? And what is the future of how we live our lives online? Facebook was created 20 years ago in Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room. Two decades later and your feed is likely less a mixture of updates from friends and more ads, sponsored content, posts from groups you're not in, and now artificial intelligence (AI). Instagram is an amalgamation of its efforts to cannibalise competitors, launching Stories, Reels and Threads in a bid to outlast Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter. Twitter is now X, with Tesla founder Elon Musk altering the DNA of the platform almost overnight. Thousands of users have left X, but no other alternative have gained the mass appeal Twitter once possessed.(Reuters: Carlos Barria) And TikTok, the biggest disrupter of the bunch, is facing a potential ban in the United States. "I'd say that we've gone through a period over the last decade of a real consolidation of the major platforms," says Nicholas Carah, the director of the Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies at the University of Queensland. "But things seem kind of chaotic." "Platforms are trying to work out what to do about young people's changing uses of social media where they're less inclined to post publicly, [instead] much more ephemeral video, all these kinds of things." For Dan Angus, the director of the Queensland University of Technology's Digital Research Centre, "fragmented is the best way I would describe it." Professor Angus says "a lot of people" have left X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and dabbled in other alternative social media ecosystems like Mastodon and Bluesky. "Those have yet to appeal to the same kind of mass audience as Twitter once did," he tells ABC News. "But I think what we're seeing certainly is that people now kind of don't know where to go. "Where it was clear previously that you had certain kinds of social media for certain kinds of facets of your life, right now there's a general feeling out there of people not being quite sure about where to go to get certain kinds of interactions that they once kind of just took for granted." In simpler times, your parents joining Facebook used to be the worst thing to happen to the platform. With more people online, "you're open to more angles for surveillance," says Crystal Abidin, a professor of internet studies at Curtin University. "It also means that while you may have previously been able to manage multiple silos, facets, versions of your sub identities as my generation, millennials, have done with our 100 Tumblr blogs, it is not so easy to do so on social media platforms anymore when everyone is on it. "The platforms are redesigning how we intersect, and how we commit to a profile there. And that makes all of our different identities, genres, interests collapse into one." While there are many factors that shape our attitudes towards social media over time, Professor Abidin says one reason is "LinkedIn culture." "It can be thought of as hustle culture, as well, where everything you put on social media either falls into the category of being inspirational, or aspirational for people who want to be like you," she tells ABC News. "And that has made social media very exhausting." "We have retreated from sharing aspects of our personal diary […] and we have evolved into using our personal brands, our personal accounts to be more overtly promotional." When asked what the next big thing in social media might be, Professor Angus points to the fediverse. A portmanteau of "federation" and "universe", the fediverse is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other using a common protocol. An easy way to understand the fediverse is to compare it to emails - a Gmail account and a Yahoo account can communicate because those services support the same protocols. Last month, Meta - the parent company of both Facebook and Instagram - announced that Threads had officially entered the fediverse. Threads marks Meta's first step into the fediverse.(Threads: @zuck) Professor Angus says "it's interesting that some of the alternatives that people went to after the collapse of Twitter are these newer models where you're not investing into a platform as such, you're investing into a handle that you can kind of take with you. "So if you spend time cultivating, say, a network of friends and followers and others, that's kind of can be your property to take with you. "The thing that a lot of people get really hung up on, and for good reason, is when a platform collapses, they don't want to leave because they've invested a lot of time cultivating a persona there and a following and such. "And so a lot of people have been reluctant to leave Twitter because it's like 'wow, but I don't want to give up all my followers. And I've actually had a really good time here. And I've got a considerable presence on this platform.' "The fediverse kind of addresses some of that because your account is attached to you." Experts say the major platforms are imaging a world where social media is a "continuous immersive experience."(Unsplash: Julian Christ) In Professor Carah's opinion, the future of social media goes beyond the devices at our fingertips. "I think what's been happening over the last five, maybe even 10 years is all the major platforms have been trying to imagine what happens after the smartphone," he says. "All of them have been imagining that looks something like virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality. They want to do something to our reality." Last June, Apple unveiled its Vision Pro headset, which they say "seamlessly blends digital content with your physical space." The device will be capable of toggling between virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), which projects digital imagery while users can still see objects in the real world. It's not the first of its kind - other goggles on the market include Meta's Quest, Google's Glass, and Microsoft's HoloLens - but it's the most expensive, with a price tag of over $5,000. "They're trying to imagine that what social media becomes is this kind of continuous immersive experience," Professor Carah says. "And I think that vision is now starting to collide with the development of this next generation of artificial intelligence." While it's impossible to capture the mood of billions of social media users, Professor Angus agrees there is a shared sense of "frustration" online. "I think there's a frustration because what we're seeing is tussles between governments and social media platforms, and perhaps arguing over the wrong things," he says. "There's a frustration I see among my academic colleagues, but even in public, in some of the ways that these massive companies have significant power in the public realm. They have the ability to weaponise their users against the government." Last month, TikTok displayed a notification to some US users, urging them to call their senators and ask them to vote no to a bill that would ban the app if it is not divested from Chinese tech company ByteDance. "Tell your Senator how important TikTok is to you. Ask them to vote no on the TikTok ban," the notice said, which allowed users to enter their postcode to locate their senator's phone number. In late April, US President Joe Biden signed legislation giving ByteDance 270 days to divest TikTok's US assets or face a ban. "That should give us a bit of pause for thought when platforms are such that they start to leverage the user bases for political ends," Professor Angus says. For Professor Carah, social media "has always been characterised by a paradox." "On the one hand, our mood about social media platforms is that we have very low trust in them as companies, we assume they're collecting our data and using it for purposes that are probably not in our best interests," he says. "On the other hand, we find them unbelievably fun and entertaining and expressive. "I'm sure there'd be a German word for this mood where you're like, this is exciting, but something is deeply wrong here." "So in one sense we feel like we're kind of powerless in the face of these platforms. "But in another sense, we're unbelievably clever and adaptable about the things we've learned to do with them and the ways we learn to communicate."The meta-morphosis of being online
We're all online, and we're all influential
Entering the fediverse
After the smartphone
The social media paradox