I want to acknowledge the obvious contradiction here. I am writing to you from a platform that has galvanized an audience based on a social media strategy. I am also a person who has built brands, campaigns, and households through the power of social media. This recommendation does not come from the pulpit. I will not be preaching to you about the moral decay of society. This recommendation comes from a disturbed gravesite. I am a man who digitally died for 6 weeks, saw the other side, and came back with a new understanding. I am not the resurrected or the redeemer. I am a scientist with observations and a conclusion. My knigga, you gotta get off social media.
Social media is dangerous. You’re grown. You know that. To a certain degree, I want to gloss over California courts equating social media addiction to nicotine addiction. Maybe if I were a better writer, I could wrap this up in a catchy sentence that could fit in a 1x1 format on the 3rd picture of an IG carousel post. Unfortunately, this might take a little comprehension. Hear me out for these three points, and then I’ll show you another way forward.
#1 Social media uses convenience to distort our understanding of community
When we communicate through social media, we are communicating to a demographic, not a community. A community has a function. A demographic is an audience. Social media has convinced us that these are the same. They are not. The difference between the two is a measure of convenience. Creating a community is analog and difficult, requiring the art of curating personalities bound by shared rituals and language. Selling to a demographic is scientific, requiring a strategy that flattens language for a broad audience of differing rituals.
In digital death, it was easy to see that the language of “likes,” “shares,” “direct messaging,” and even “social” is an intentional misnomer to create the illusion of community. I woke up to a message that all of my meta-based accounts had been disabled without the ability to appeal. I desperately wanted my community to grieve this loss with me. I found out that my community disagreed that a loss had occurred. For them, nothing had changed. The convenient method of communication was gone, but the functionality of the community remained.
My community still showed up to play games of spades, turned 5-minute FaceTimes into 3-hour phone calls, sat with me on the balcony of my beautifully ghetto apartment, mailed me invitations to camping trips, held Meta to task rather than question my innocence, and did everything in their power not to treat me like a consumable. These relationships are not bound to automated censoring measures of a billion-dollar surveillance organization.
#2 Social media got you code-switchin’
We sound different on social media. The words we use, the cadence of our speech, the casual disdain for humanity, and the references we make are different than our natural voice and socialized culture. You might call it optimized performance for the algorithm, but where I’m from, that’s called code-switching. This is not a judgment, my knigga. Do what you have to do to feel safe. However, I must ask, what is judging you? What is threatening your safety?
Code-switching keeps you safe by hiding what makes you dangerous, and if we know who defines danger on these platforms, when will your existence, like mine, be defined as dangerous? In digital death, the answer to that question is clear: yesterday. Consider that in a year, Facebook shifted from pledging $1 Billion in DEI support to claiming DEI is a racist practice. In return, we shifted our language so that Mark and a small group of tech billionaires could leverage our demographics for more sales opportunities.
For your demographic to be sellable, you have to be socially acceptable. Transforming the language of death to its passive synonym, unalive, or neutralizing the indictment of pedophile to a mundane document type is acceptable if a product is being sold. For the death of me, I do not understand the pride of being a product.
#3 Social Media ain’t Heaven
Our opinions have been infiltrated by social media. We used to debate with friends or peers who had differing perspectives. Now we fight against a bombastic antagonist we will never meet. The classic angel and devil on our shoulders has been replaced with mentions and @s. We have considered, too many times, a global audience of strangers before we considered our immediate community or our own voice. We trade the mass publication of opinions for the dilution of individuality. And for what? To appease the space? To satisfy the overseer? To seek success on an oppressive platform? The privacy of our opinion once shielded our opinion from the dangers of groupthink and the tactics of Big Normal.
After 6 weeks of digital death and a consultation with a Meta account manager, I returned from the grave just in time for a trending tragedy. I won’t be specific about the tragedy because it will distract from the point. When I read the posts connected to the trend, I immediately noticed a pattern. I had seen this pattern before when I was doing culture & trends research for an agency. The tragedy was the context. The bulk of the content created was in response to a handful of people with dissenting perspectives about the tragedy. The second bulk of content was defenses and retorts of the response to the dissenting perspective on the tragedy. If you know the legal system, this sounds similar to the justice system. In death, I realized, there isn’t a judge because this isn’t a just space. It’s just space, like a commercial office building or a billboard.
Social media feels like you are constantly being tested. Are you beautiful enough? Do you make enough money? Do you believe the right things? Did you post the right thing? Don’t get me twisted. There are absolutely wrong answers to these questions. Answers that undoubtedly make you a complete piece of shit. But who let social media be the barometer of purity? My knigga, you not pure. You don’t need an algorithm to confirm or deny this with the fodder of fools.
A Recommendation from Lazurus
Here’s what you should do. Pull up the AFI Top 100 movies and your favorite bootleg site. Every time you find your hands itching for social, watch a movie. Specifically, watch the movies that were made, and now anyone connected to the making of the movie or even the original viewing of the movie is dead. The pacing of films made by people who were raised by the radio will slow your mind down, deprive you of convenience. The grandiose and romantic delivery of language will pull you away from the truncated communication we use on our demographic. Most importantly, when you watch these films that have been adjudicated by experts practicing their craft longer than your parents have been alive, you will have to develop your opinion alone. You won’t find much social media discourse to guide your opinion. There is no answer key. There will just be you.
I’m not telling you to delete all of your apps and go live in the mountains. Let’s be real, my knigga. There is money to be made, relationships to be sparked, and laughs to be laughed. However, you need a moment to put social media back into context and you back at the forefront. To do that, you gotta get off social media.
XX
Bryant “BeMo” Brown is a 3x Emmy-nominated broadcast journalist and award-winning cultural analyst. For 7 years, BeMo has navigated the shifting tides of digital media from traditional television broadcasts to monetized, virtual communities. Matching his vibrant personality with an intense journalistic integrity, BeMo shines brightest while investigating the banal beauty of the human experience. Bryant’s understanding of the Black experience allows him to find value in what is usually undervalued and ultimately gentrified. You can find BeMo at his New Blueprint Parlors, crafting cultural solutions, or on a show in the SEEN’T Community Broadcast Network.
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This! We gotta LIVE life in order to connect, yall. All the analog stuff is still at the cool kids’ table.