If you ask almost any social media user today, they will tell you that the incredible potential of social media is often not fully realized—sometimes as a result of the nature of the medium itself, and sometimes as a result of the way we use it.

In this post, we will examine some of the difficult realities of social media in our society today.

Limitations of Social Media

The early, lofty promises of social media have changed over the years. In some cases, the promises have been abandoned, and in other cases they have simply been tempered.

Global Connectivity

Take, for example, the promise of global connectivity: social media delivers on its promise to make it possible for an individual to connect with far more people online than they could in person. On Facebook, a normal person can have up to five thousand “friends.” On Twitter, a person can follow an unlimited number of others.

In the early years of social media, people clamored to make as many connections as they could. The breadth of the networks quickly became a problem, though, because there was far more information being shared than could possibly be consumed.

If a person had a relatively meager two hundred online connections, and each of those connections posted twice each day, that would be four hundred potential conversations to filter through. This created cognitive overload for users, which became a barrier to the very promise of engagement—if logging into Facebook was not a rewarding experience, users would discontinue logging in, and Facebook would not be able to monetize that user.

Algorithms

To prevent this disengagement, different social media platforms have taken different tactics, but all have made some use of programmatic algorithms to determine which content is most likely to generate engagement for an individual.

These algorithms examine a person’s history on the platform, cataloguing every interaction (such as comments, “likes,” and shares) the person makes with other posts and generating an engagement profile that knows the types of posts the person prefers (such as videos, inspirational quotes, and text) and what topics they are most likely to respond to (such as political statements, jokes, and life updates). Based on that data, the platform filters the posts that it shows the person, prioritizing the posts it thinks will create an engaging experience for that individual.

Each social media platform approaches these algorithmic filters differently—some allowing users to directly influence them more than others—but they all function to fundamentally limit the user’s exposure to the overwhelming volume of content in their network, thus counteracting some of the potential for unlimited online connection.

Recent research has actually suggested that the human mind has a limited capacity for social connections and that those limits are neither erased nor expanded for social groups that connect online.

Segmenting into Smaller Groups

As our society is starting to mature in our use of social media, we are beginning to use platforms that allow us to connect in smaller groups rather than promising us unlimited connectivity.

For example, Facebook has begun to minimize their focus on users’ ability to add new friends, and is now emphasizing the more personal relationships that can be developed in Facebook “groups,” which are smaller communities with a shared interest of some kind. The early idea of the internet as a global village has been redefined. As Patricia Wallace describes,