Last week we talked about how mediums—like film and novels—have their own built-in rules, and how those rules necessarily shape the way you can tell stories and express ideas. We made this point, naturally, by talking about Tom Bombadil. This week we’re going to see how the same principles apply online.
A social media network is a medium; the choices made by the designers set the framework for how the medium works. Maybe the most obvious example of this is Twitter.
I was a real Twitter addict in the first half of the 2010s, and I don’t entirely regret it. I built friendships and a career on that site, and I’m nostalgic for a version of it. I wrote last year about how I hate the zombie Twitter that’s still roaming the earth. But it was a lot of fun for a time.
The limitations of the medium—mostly that you only had 140 characters to work with—meant there was a real incentive to be efficient with your words. It demanded a certain creativity to communicate something interesting. It was a place where a certain kind of nerd who was good with words could make the right joke and become briefly famous.
To be good at Twitter meant mastering the art of hinting at complex ideas using as few words as possible. This meant depending on in-group knowledge—in jokes, sure, but also stereotypes and other cultural shorthand. And mixing in a little bit of absurdity to connect with the sort of audience you were likely to find there.
This wasn’t a website where you could make a complete, complex, nuanced point, but you could certainly jokingly point at such things, preferably with ironic flair. And that was basically fine when Twitter was mostly just a video game played by a few internet weirdos. The problem is, instead of staying that way, it became the main platform for political discourse.
I don’t have to re-litigate the rest here, but over time Twitter became a force that boiled every political and cultural conversation down into a competition to say the most absurd thing possible in order to get attention. We all know what happened next (and it’s very stupid). It’s unclear, in 2025, if we’ll ever recover from the political consequences of that media environment.
This isn’t to say that nothing good happened on Twitter. There really were social movements that started on the platform and prompted valuable conversations. But as a whole, the rules and logic of Twitter created the political and cultural framework we all live in now.
Neil Postman, in the 1980s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, wrote that he didn’t have a problem with TV as entertainment—his problem was with anyone who would claim that TV could be used to inform people. From the book:
What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?
I think everything Postman says here applies as well to Twitter in the late 2010s as it did to TV in the 1980s. Twitter was at its best when used as a source of entertainment. It became a place people went to find information and proved to be horrible at delivering it. The results are the political hellscape we find ourselves in. I would go so far as to argue that it doesn’t matter much what people posted on Twitter—the design of the website led inevitably to certain outcomes. The values embedded in the system itself—”get as much attention as you can in as few words as possible”—led us to Brexit, Trump, and whatever comes next.
Other social media outlets—Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok—are similar. Each has its own innate rules. When I talk about “rules” I’m not pointing at things like moderation policy—I’m talking about how things like design decisions and incentives subtly shape what kind of content can be successful, which in turn shapes the world in ways that can be hard to predict.
Which is all to say that the channels we use to express our ideas matter as much as the ideas themselves, because the medium is ultimately going to shape which ideas can and cannot win. The design of the systems we use to communicate have an impact on what kinds of ideas can be expressed successfully, and the systems we have now aren’t doing a good job at bringing us together so we can solve problems (or even agree on what our problems are).
But this doesn’t have to be doom and gloom. We can build a better world if we keep this in mind while designing what will replace the crumbling social media ecosystem—but only if we’re intentional about it.
Featured image, a photo from the long closed Thurderbeast Park in Chiloquin Oregon, is via Public Domain Review
Stuff You Should Check Out
- A prominent OpenAI investor appears to be suffering a ChatGPT-related mental health crisis Joe Wilkins/Futurism One problem with large language models is that they rarely tell you you’re wrong. This means, if you have delusions, they will happily tell you that they’re real.
- The binder George Evans/Crossplay A grown man’s memories of his strict parent’s limits on video game times—rules that affect him negatively to this day.
- Clues by Sam A logic game with new puzzles every day, best played over breakfast.
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