Social media feeds — Twitter and the Facebook wall — turned American society into a sort of digital hive mind. Feeling yourself being absorbed into that great unified consciousness could be an agonizing experience — mobs constantly punished any deviation from conformity, quirky unique subcultures were devoured and metabolized, everyone was forced into a cell with people they had spent their lives trying to escape. The hunt for virality was everything. Viral memes were the thoughts that drifted through the mind of the social media Borg.
There are almost no memes left. For so many years there was a steady drumbeat of images and phrases that people passed around among each other ad infinitum; now, I can’t even think of the last one that really made the rounds. Twitter — now X — has not died but is diminished in scope and relevance. At times it feels like a ghost town.
Where did everybody go? I would like to think that they’re offline, living as we lived in the Before Times, running through sunlit fields blasting each other with Super Soakers or playing Dungeons and Dragons in their living rooms. Or perhaps they’re in Signal and WhatsApp chats and Discord channels, talking with their friends in the comfort and safety of privacy. I would like to think that they rejected the digital hive mind for the ancient ways of individuality and Dunbar’s Number.
But my bet is that they’re just watching short form video. Over the last few years, the entire internet has steadily carcinized into a single type of app/website/media/entertainment — a vertically scrolling feed full of short video clips. Vine invented it, TikTok popularized it, and now every other site has copied this one dominant, all-conquering format. Already, vertical short-form video feeds are more dominant than every form of media except for social media itself.
But even this significantly understates the change. The term “social media” used to mean people writing things to each other or sending images on Facebook or Twitter; now, it’s mostly used to mean people watching videos.
I think for a lot of kids these days, the idea of having like really deep, rock solid values and beliefs that you would die for sounds preposterous. And I think part of it is that a lot of them live their lives in these constant three, four, five, ten second clips, right? And you get one point of view, you get one lifestyle, you get one takedown after another, after another, after another, into the thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. And it really makes it difficult to formulate a solid, flexible, stable sense of yourself and of what is good in the world and how you ought to be in it.
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If you get involved enough that you can understand one meme and then understand the subsequent three memes that are all responding to each other — it’s brilliant, there is a lot of intelligence being deployed. It’s hilarious and there’s a lot of ingenuity and creativity — but in this kind of nihilistic vacuum where nothing, none of it actually matters. It’s just, I’m seeing something you missed and I’m pointing out something ironic or funny that no one else has pointed out yet. And the fact that this is happening to adolescents in particular is a very strange thing.
So there’s another quote by Eliot that I begin the book with. He writes, “Home is where one starts from. We grow older / the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.” My read of that is that the work of child rearing through this incredibly extended process that is really unique to us as our kind of animal is that by the time you are an adult, by the time you kind of cross that threshold, you do have a sense of of being at home in the world, knowing who you are, knowing what your tasks are, knowing what is roughly good and evil.
As Eliot says, then life goes on and you have to bear the burdens of an adult and you have to see things you wish you didn’t have to see and go through things you wish you didn’t have to go through. And that kind of groundedness becomes unsettled, right? And maybe by midlife or before, you’re like, OK, what am I doing? Who am I really? And what is worth pursuing? … It’s a life-long thing to see all that and take all that in and confront the death of people you love and your own impending death. And then at the end to be able to say, OK, I understand this. Here I am. But that’s premised on this kind of, not traditional, but archetypal departure from home and then return to home.
But I don’t know what it looks like if we become unable to give young people a sense of who they are to begin with. … I don’t envy it. And I want to tell my kids, and my students as well, just acknowledge that this is an odd moment. This is a very strange moment to be coming of age.