Social media is bad when it spams your mind with cheap garbage and bullshit propaganda, exactly as with any other form of media.<p>When I get a snapchat from an old friend, whom I don&#x27;t see much of anymore because they&#x27;re in another city, that doesn&#x27;t ruin my life. It makes me happy. It strengthens our connection in a nice and simple way. The business model of that company is independent from my experience.<p>Presumably mail couriers and telephone operators suffer from the same effects of rent based economics and growth targets. Yet we see them as neutral carriers—the way Facebook would like to be.<p>Yes, social media is to some extent an ecosystem of brands that exist only to extract value from the already existing Internet.<p>They are also the most compelling use of the Internet thus far. They&#x27;ve managed to create products that people actually use in their daily lives. They&#x27;ve sparked a few political revolts. They&#x27;ve allowed new forms of organization.<p>The charges of banality read to me like expressions of boredom. I remember in 2008 after my initial college Facebook period had faded into something less exciting, I said &quot;Facebook isn&#x27;t as fun anymore&quot; and my friend—who didn&#x27;t use it—said &quot;well, how are you using it? Are you contributing anything fun?&quot;<p>A couple of days ago I was on WhatsApp talking to a friend in Australia. I know her because she&#x27;s the friend of another person I met through social media. We have some stuff in common and like to chat. She was at home having pretty bad anxiety. I couldn&#x27;t fix it but I could offer a conversation, some diversion, a bit of cheering up. This is what I think about when I think about social media.<p>People who get into writing books and stuff turn their social media accounts into tools for self promotion. Always tweeting about their book tours and stuff. If they used it to make meaningful connections with new people, maybe their articles about social media would have a different tone.<p>Media people in general, including authors and journalists, seem to both thrive in the social media realm, and to be drained by it. A Swedish podcast with two such men had their previous episode be all about how they uninstalled social media apps for a week and discovered things about themselves. Like how they were using the buzz of the Twittersphere as a shield against emotions and situations. How social media hooked them into this judgmental world of obsessive gossip. But this isn&#x27;t all of social media.<p>The negative feelings some people have about social media, I have them about all kinds of media. Look at television. Holy fuck, what a disaster. Newspapers, I can&#x27;t stand them and their incessant political editorializing, their failure as social institutions, their pompous social engineering, their creation of Donald Trump. So there are much deeper problems with large scale human communication in general.<p>Howard Rheingold didn&#x27;t seem to me like a hippie utopian. His book on virtual communities was more of a set of case studies of the idiosyncratic ways different people and communities used different network tools to bond and share. That&#x27;s still happening every day. The varieties of networked experience. This kind of anthropology is needed to actually understand social networks. Not just more and more reactionary opinions.