☀️ The empty “town square”
There's a specific kind of sadness in going back to a place that used to matter to you and finding it completely changed.
Tom Whyman, a writer for The Guardian, puts it plainly: he met the mother of his children on Twitter. He made friends, shaped his values, and found his voice. And then, somewhere around 2016, the vibe shifted. The conversation became a performance, the fun became a duty, and the duty eventually became futile. He still logs on occasionally, the way a former smoker allows themselves a couple of cigarettes, more out of habit than need.
He is not alone. Ofcom data shows that only 49% of UK adults now actively post on social media, down from 61% the year before. In France, nearly half of users describe themselves as "active only occasionally." In the US, just 33% post daily, while 57% scroll for entertainment. The gap between the people making the content and the people consuming it has never been wider.
I've been doing my own version of this experiment. Almost a year ago, I uninstalled the social media apps from my phone entirely, and for Instagram specifically, I now only open it in a browser on my desktop, where the experience is genuinely bad in a way I've come to appreciate. The vertical videos look absurd on a wide screen, the layout is cold and cluttered, and the pull of it just dissolves. I end up using it rarely and for much less time, which has made me realise that much of what felt like desire was really just friction working in the app's favour all along.
What happened to these platforms? The short answer is that they optimised themselves out of what made them worth using. The long answer is what this edition is about: the slow, strange transformation of a genuinely social space into something closer to a very personalised television, and what we lost when that happened.
📖 3 Articles to Spark Your Curiosity
Looking at Instagram on a Desktop Solved All My Problems
The cure for the Instagram habit: opening it in a browser on your desktop. The experience is so charmless that a decade and a half of earned habit can evaporate within a week. A piece about how much of our social media use is really just the app's design working against us.
→ Read on Watching Together Alone
The Illusion of Closeness: How Social Media Redefined Respect
Drawing on philosopher Byung-Chul Han's idea that respect requires thoughtful distance, this piece asks what happens to genuine intimacy when the pressure to share everything becomes the default.
→ Read on Psyche
The Information Arms Race Can't Be Won, But We Have to Keep Fighting
Misinformation online works like an evolutionary arms race: the moment one side develops a defence, the other adapts. Philosopher of science Cailin O'Connor argues there is no permanent fix, and that the only honest response is to keep fighting with the same intensity bad actors use to mislead.
→ Read on Aeon
🗞️ 3 Headlines Worth Exploring
How Social Media Ceased to Be Social
Social platforms have shifted from spaces where people talked to friends into entertainment hubs driven by professional creators. Data from France, the UK, and the US shows the gap between active posters and passive scrollers has never been wider.
→ Read on BBC Worklife
Why a Social Media Ban for Teenagers Misses the Point
Banning social media for under-16s doesn't address the real issue: the broader smartphone ecosystem will simply redirect the same compulsive behaviour to other apps. A useful corrective to the idea that a ban counts as a solution.
→ Read on The Conversation
Social Media: UK Adults Are Posting Less
Tom Whyman traces his own retreat from Twitter alongside Ofcom data showing a sharp drop in active posting. His conclusion: social media has become a place where individuals talk into the void rather than to each other.
→ Read on The Guardian
☀️ 3 Actions to Step Out of Your Comfort Zone
The desktop experiment
Pick one social media app you use most on your phone and spend a week only opening it in a browser on your computer. Notice how the experience changes, how much less you use it, and whether what you were getting from it was actually what you thought.
Map your real feed
Scroll through your main social media platform for ten minutes and count how many posts are from people you really know versus content from strangers or creators. The ratio might surprise you.
Send a message instead of posting
The next time you have something you'd normally share publicly, send it directly to one or two people who would genuinely care about it. Notice how that feels different from posting into the open.
⚡ 6 Quick Sparks
🧘 To try: How to Do a Social Media Detox
A practical guide to stepping back, with approaches ranging from a full break to a more gradual reduction.
→ Read on Calm
📖 To read: How to Use Social Media Healthfully
Harvard public health researchers on what the evidence says, and how to build a more intentional relationship with the platforms you use.
→ Read on Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
🔬 To check: Social Media Detox Boosts Mental Health, But Nuances Stand Out
A one-week detox reduced anxiety by 16%, depression by 24%, and insomnia by 14%. The more interesting finding is how differently people responded.
→ Read on Harvard Gazette
🎥 To watch: Quit Social Media | Cal Newport
Cal Newport makes the case that social media is a product designed to capture and sell your attention, and that quitting is more achievable than most people think.
→ Watch on YouTube
💬 To know: Online Platforms Risk Becoming Ideological Echo Chambers
As users migrate from X to Bluesky, they risk recreating the same problem in a new place: a feed that only ever agrees with you.
→ Read on The Conversation
🧠 To keep in mind: Your Social Media Feed Is Built to Agree With You
University of Rochester researchers found that introducing more randomness into algorithms measurably reduced echo chambers and made people more open to different perspectives.
→ Read on University of Rochester
🎲 This week’s wonderfully random corner of the internet
🖥️ Saving Internet Art
A Google Arts & Culture project dedicated to preserving digital artworks, from early net art to scripted social media performances. The internet has a history worth keeping.
→ Explore on Google Arts & Culture
📝 Word of the Week
Kenopsia (English, Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows) - the eerie, unsettling atmosphere of a place that used to be full of people but is now empty and abandoned.
It is the feeling of walking through a school after hours, or a shopping centre that has slowly lost its shops. And, reading through this week's resources, it is hard not to feel it when thinking about what social media used to be. The comment sections that once felt like a neighbourhood, the timelines that once carried real conversations, the platforms where people shared relevant news from their lives with each other. The infrastructure is still there, sure, but what put the “social“ in “social media“ has left the building.
🧘♀️ Question of the Week for Introspection
Think about the last time you posted something on social media and genuinely felt connected to someone because of it. How long ago was that, and what has replaced that feeling since?
See you next Sunday! Until then, keep your eyes open, your questions big, and your sense of wonder alive.
Your curious internet friend,
Ruxandra
