January 19 2010
Farewell, cruel social media life
Time has an interesting article about a Website called the Suicide Machine. I’m linking to the article rather than to the Website because the article deserves to be read (but visit suicidemachine.org if you want to see the site).
If you’re tired of your social media content, clap your hands — the Suicide Machine promises to delete all the content in your Facebook and Twitter accounts. It will also sever all your connections.
People get tired of the social media scene. Despite reports of tremendous growth in the use of social media, I have to wonder just how many of those accounts are created solely for promoting businesses (and/or scams). I would estimate somewhere upwards of 10% of all social media accounts are robotic in nature.
I’m tempted to say “perhaps more” but that would be repetitively redundant since I had already said “upwards of”. However, that is the way social media works. People don’t think much about how they say what they say when they say it socially. Heck, if you watch Ghosthunters or Ghosthunters International with any regularity you’ll hear them abuse and misuse the pronoun “myself” at least 10 times per episode (can no one muster up the courage to say “me” or “I” any more?).
My point is that social media profiles tend to pile up. You create them and create them and create them — and when you want to walk away (which no marketer would want to do) you cannot because the process of “closing” an account is so tedious. People need closure but you cannot obtain closure in social media.
So now we have the Suicide Machine, which gives people the closure they need because social media — at its core — fails to meet one of our most basic needs: it doesn’t let us say, “Good-bye”, “fare well”, “au revoir”, “sayonara”, “adios”, etc. Social media is fly paper and it doesn’t really want to let go of you. It depends too much on including you to allow you any real freedom to come and go as you please.
So in the end, when all the real people have figured out how to leave social media, perhaps we’ll still have millions upon millions of robotic marketing accounts blindly pitching carefully targeted crap products and services to each other, and the social media metrics will show that the services are still alive and well.
Meanwhile, everyone will join Todd Friesen for drinks at the bar, and they’ll all laugh at how silly they were, thinking they could just hand their real-world lives over to a computer network.
You’ll know who your real friends are when they cross the sentinel line and risk their lives to free you from the cold, hard grasp of the machines. Until then, at least you have inflated friend and follower counts in your social media profiles.
Good luck with that.
Written by Michael Martinez