Offline with Jon Favreau - Is This the End of Social Media? With Ian Bogost

Episode Date: December 11, 2022

Ian Bogost, author and professor at Washington University in St. Louis, talks with Jon about the demise of online social networks. In a recent Atlantic article, “The Age of Social Media Is Ending,�� Bogost examines the platforms’ dipping trajectory and argues that people just aren’t meant to talk to each other this much. He joins Offline to elaborate on how Twitter, Instagram and TikTok have sacrificed connection for content, friendship for sponsorship––and why a cultural shift in how we interact with these platforms may be closer than we think. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

And I'm just as guilty of it, right? Like, you know, with my kids and instead I'm looking at Twitter. And for a while it was like, well, that was off limits. That was construed as somehow, you know, policing contemporary life in a way that was inappropriate and impossible.

But it's also right. It's like, no, that is the first step a little bit. Not because you need to have self-control, but because we need some kind of social collaboration in which we can agree to do it together. This is a really simple example of this. I don't think it's the best one, but it's at least concrete that I wrote about in one of my books where you go out with friends

to dinner or something, everybody stacks their phone in the middle of the table and the first person to pick theirs up has to pay. It's a silly game. What was interesting about it is the social structure in which people were helping one another change their habits. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is Ian Bogost, an author, professor, and contributor at The Atlantic, where he recently wrote a piece called The Age of Social Media is Ending. Sounds nice.

So Ian says this is more of an aspirational title than a prediction. But his argument goes something like this. Elon's Twitter drama and Facebook's steady decline have given us the chance to think about how we get into this mess and where we might go next. He points out that social media used to be known as social networks and that the early platforms were about connecting, not broadcasting, building relationships, not publishing content. But with the advent of Instagram and Twitter, everyone got the chance to talk to everyone else all of the time, something Ian argues we just aren't meant to do. And that's the source of a lot of the problems we're still grappling with today. I am obviously a very online guy with

very offline aspirations. So part of me has enjoyed watching Facebook hemorrhage and Twitter spiral. But I also want these platforms to work. And maybe in all the chaos, we finally reached a moment where change is possible. Not the kind of change that comes from Washington or Silicon Valley, but a bigger cultural change in how we interact with these platforms and each other. So Ian and I talk about it all. Overcoming social media addiction, how limiting engagement can civilize online discourse, and the winners and losers of this evolving phenomenon. As always, if you have comments, questions, or episode ideas, please email us at offlineatcricket.com.

We'll be having a special New Year's episode where I answer listener-submitted questions with some help from my fellow Crooked podcasters, the much-cooler-than-me hosts of Dare We Say. So if you have any burning questions about the internet social media online discourse send them along via you guessed it twitter here's ian bogost ian bogost welcome to offline having me. All right, so we have been drowning in takes about the end of Twitter for the last few weeks. Exhausting.

I thought you captured the mood quite well when you wrote that tweeters have been tweeting in panic mode as if from an aircraft about to careen into a mountainside. Yeah. That is the vibe. That is the vibe. Yeah, but it's still up, right? It's still there. You know, we're still out there tweeting.

Unfortunately. Well, so you also offered a take on all of this in The Atlantic that goes beyond just Twitter's potential demise in a piece titled, The Age of Social Media is Ending. Why do you think that happy outcome might come to pass? It's aspirational uh for sure and it would take a lot uh to collapse the social media ecosystem not to mention the industry but but i think this thing with twitter it's like the first time in a long time when the idea the possibility of something different of something new has felt present you know like wow we this is unnatural we, this is unnatural. We, we invented this. We didn't used to do this and now we do. And we might yet do something different. That's what the sort of

Twitter angst means to me. That's what I think people are really expressing. Not that they think the service is going to collapse or that Musk is going to careen it into the mountain. And that really just kind of led me to think about how we got here, which is just a story we don't tell that much. Yeah. I mean, we've spent a lot of time on this show talking about all the ways social media has been bad for us as individuals and as a society. You draw an interesting distinction between social networks, which is what we started with, and social media, which is what we have now. Can you talk about the difference and also sort of the evolution? Yeah.

Well, first of all, social networks don't have anything to do with the internet or with computers or any specific technology. It's just the people you know and interact with and the people you know in different contexts. All of us have many social networks. We have our colleagues at work. We have our school mates if we go to school or if you're in college. We have our neighbors in our community, people you go to church with, folks who have the same hobby as you. So we have all these social

networks, all these groups of friends, acquaintances, and other kinds of individuals that we interact with. And we've always had that, and we've always had to find ways of facilitating those relationships. When the internet became commercially viable and when enough people were on it in the late 90s and early 2000s, then it became possible to translate social networks into software. And we even called them, at the time, networks into software. And we even called them at the time social network software, like a way of using computers and the internet to build and manage your social networks, the people you knew.

So that's social network. It's all about the people you already know, mostly maybe you meet some new friends through the other friends you have. It's very tight, quite small, purpose-built, and you're mostly using them to do offline things, to get a job or to figure out where you're going to go to a concert or to manage a problem in the neighborhood, what have you.

So that's social networking. Social media took that concept years later, and instead of the people that you were in contact with being the center of it, it was like the idea of connection got blown up. And as many connections as possible became the new value and really transformed that social networking model into a kind of broadcasting model. So on a social media service, you're no longer concerned with building and maintaining relationships. You're using the connections that you can get to send messages out to as many people as possible and as often as possible, or then to respond and react to the messages that other people

are sending. And that latter model is really where the wealth of these big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter came from. There's been this endless debate over social media content moderation, especially since Elon took over Twitter. You share the view of some guests we've had on that the problem isn't necessarily content moderation. It's that people just shouldn't have access to the huge audience you were just talking about that social media provides because we just aren't meant to talk to each other that much yeah why do you think that is like what is it about all this connection and all this broadcasting that's bad or that hasn't worked out that well yeah there's a couple ways of looking at this one of them is

through a social scientific lens and some people don't this, but there's this idea of Dunbar's number. Have you heard of this? No. And there have been different versions of this number. It's been interpreted and misinterpreted. Some say it's like, oh, it's 150 people. Or, well, maybe it's 150 people that you know, but it's only like a handful of people that you're really close to that truly know you in some way. And, you know, whatever you think of this idea, if you kind of just pressure test it in your own life, it does make sense.

There are different types, different qualitative relationships that you have with your family or with your very close friends than you have with strangers on the internet. And what the internet does, though, is it kind of collapses all of this. Everyone looks the same. You feel like, well, I have the same relationship with anyone, the same potential relationship. And I think about this every time some rando online is talking to me. I'm like, who are you? Do I know you?

Because the software structures encourages us to interact as if we do. But even if you give up on the Dunbar stuff, I think we have to admit that never before in human history have so many people had such direct and immediate access to so many other people so often. And whether you think that's good or bad, I have my view on it, which is that it's bad. But whether you think it's good or bad, it's unprecedented. It just hasn't happened before. That's unequivocally true.

Right. And if you think about that for another second and kind of go, well, that is weird. How is it possible that we could just kind of come to terms with that so instantly and act normally or even understand what it means without a great deal of social, political, cultural, legal effort? Then I think you would conclude, well, we can't. We absolutely can't. And we haven't made that investment. We've used these services a lot, but we haven't made that investment. We've used these services a lot, but we haven't made the investment

in kind of figuring out how to use them to our benefit. I mean, I guess we should get into why you think it's bad. I mean, I also think it's bad, but I'm interested in what you have to say. I mean, like the promise of the internet in the 90s and in the early aughts and sort of the tech utopia version of this that i think a lot of other folks bought into early on i think a lot of political leaders

bought into it i was on the obama campaign in 2008 right this was like the you know facebook and the internet is one of the ways we organized and the belief was okay if you could connect people from different backgrounds and cultures and geographies all over the world and you could sort of break down the barriers between people and show people that we're all not that different that we could all connect to each other that you could sort of build this larger global community right that the technology and the internet would sort of be the, this was what, you know, as globalization was happening, this would be the way that we interact with one another, right?

Technology would bring us closer together. Why didn't it work out that way? Why is it such a mess right now? I think we may have made a really simple mistake, which is to assume that those connections, the way that we were going to accomplish that connectivity was by giving everyone all the connections or all the potential connections. What you really want is you want a few and you want some connections that you haven't

previously had. And we know that when people are exposed to others who are unlike them or unfamiliar to them and they get to know them as individuals and as groups, that they can't help but develop a certain empathy for their plight, right? And then that's one of the sort of fundamental ideas of progressive politics. But do we need all of them? Do we need to know all of them directly all the time, this often, constantly, on your phone every day? Do we need to respond to them? Do they need to respond to us? So maybe that's like a really facile distinction to make. But what if it's the right one? That it's not that the connections are the problem, it's using them. It's using them so often.

That's where we made the error. Yeah. And I do wonder to your point about empathy, when you are in a situation where you are broadcasting your thoughts to the rest of the world, there's 15 tweets and whether you know the people who are tweeting well or not well or somewhere in between um you sort of see them as their text and their and whatever picture they choose you don't really see them as as human as much or you see them as less human as you would if you saw them in real life or even were on a text with them one-on-one, right? Like even in a text message conversation. So I do wonder if that's part of the issue. One really simple thing that I'm not the first to make this observation, but it's worth making again. Back when MySpace was the big social network, people would make these sort of bananas looking MySpaceSpace pages, where they personalized them. It's kind of like GeoCity's homepage style

meets Facebook-style, Friendster-style social networking. And I've always been a little skittish about saying that you can express yourself by putting a background image on your web page. But there was some distinction, at least. Your page looked different than my page. The music that we were showing wasn't just like, what did I like? And when Facebook came along, it tore all that apart and we all got the same blue and white page and the format,

the frame in which our expression took place was collapsed. And there was only one of them. And then, and then what choice turned into was, well, you can choose between social media services. That's the way that you'll make the choice. Are you making video on YouTube? Are you posting square images on Instagram? Are you posting short quips on Twitter? But yeah, like the way that the form in which the material gets presented, it does turn us all into these kind of machines acting for the benefit of the social media companies rather than as individual agents speaking in our own voices. Twitter is probably the purest example of this dynamic. It does seem like Elon's Twitter,

as you've written, is sort of the purest distillation of a service that devours itself in order to fuel its own furtherance, which I love. Yeah, that's kind of a line, isn't it? I think you called it the famous for being famous dynamic, which is the, you called it the Kardashianification of ideas. Can you talk about what you mean by that and why you think Twitter became more of a habit than an important public good? Yeah. So let me just say about Twitter that I think that it was, in retrospect, it wasn't called this at the time, but it was like the first, it was really the first social network in the modern sense of the word. And that was because it was always a broadcast network, a chat room for the world.

And that almost facilitated the idea that you would go there to become popular, to build broad-based social capital, which of course many people in the media business did, politicians did, real celebrities did. But people who are famous on the internet, who are internet famous, they tend to use other platforms. They use YouTube or Instagram or TikTok now. So I think there was always something about Twitter that was a door onto this new environment.

But in terms of the idea of celebrity, it also changed that. Not just Twitter, but social media in general. It changed the idea of what it meant to be renowned. We're already undergoing a shift. We had reality TV already and people who were socialites or Paris Hilton types or whatever. They've only been around for a long time. Usually, though, that renown came along with either earned value through talent, you know, you were an actor or a musician, or else you had the resources with which to manage it. And, you know, many

celebrities manage celebrity very poorly, even though they're very wealthy. So when I say manage, I don't necessarily mean manage it well, but there was an exchange. In exchange for being in the public all the time, I have the material conditions in which I can sort of deal with that situation, even if it just means getting a bunch of bodyguards or building a big fence. With the internet, we kind of got the worst of both worlds. attention associated with fame, where anybody, because you're renowned, can form a belief about you or feel as though they are justified in passing judgment against you without the obvious

or the kind of concomitant material benefits. And you see this all the time in the sort of influencer economy, which is directly created by social media. Like the people who do really well do really well and most people can't make a living at it, but yet they're still subject to this abusive, constant attention. Maybe the most famous examples of these are these public shaming events. And I think we all kind of look at those and we think, this is bad.

Something's wrong here when you can say some offhand comment on the internet and then you lose your job the next day just because it's inconvenient for your company to have to deal with it. That feels dirty and sick. But there's no upside to the fame, right? Unless you turn it into a podcast or something. Like you kind of leverage it. Like look at me, I'm famous for being infamous online. So I think that dynamic is totally new culturally at the scale that we now

encounter it. Well, there's also, I mean, there's the negative side of what happens to you when you're famous, whether you're a celebrity or you're just someone who tweets a lot and gets notice there. there's the potential for public shaming for public embarrassment for saying something wrong there's also the other side of it which is and this has been around as long as celebrity the idea of celebrity has been around which is what you have to do to become famous right which is you present yourself a certain way to the world that is carefully curated and crafted and edited. And now that you have everyone doing that who's on social media, it's just yet another way you

don't really get to know people and connect with people because they don't know themselves. Right. You're connecting with what they want you to perceive them as. Right. It's all kind of pretense or the promise of pretense. And we know this is happening and people talk about it very actively. They say, you know, like, look at this, look at this, you know, you see folks like Instagramming themselves in public and like, what are they, what are they doing? And for a while there was sort of a sneer, you know, like, let's just let them do it. Like, don't police what they do online, you know, with their lives. But then it did start to feel like, well, this is strange. And, you know, not even that it was bad, but just that something was different, that we were structuring our lives in a different way. idea that I have something that might be widely consumable, not necessarily even valuable, but just that if you see it,

and if a lot of people see it, that that would be gratifying to me. And that gratification is really real. You know, that emotional reaction, that response that you get to being recognized and praised or chastised even. And so we sought it out more and more. And those became our dreams. Yeah. Well, it's a dopamine rush, right? It's a constant hit. You mentioned TikTok. Obviously, Twitter's going through something right now. Facebook has been going through something for a little while now. TikTok is, you know, it's growing, right? It's becoming more popular, more dominant. And I think that's a platform that's even less about, I would argue, is even less about networking and more about broadcasting than Twitter. Where do you think TikTok fits into this larger story about sort of the possibility of the age of social media ending?

Yeah. So if I can take a quick step back, I think it's worth kind of looking at what I would call the invention of social media, which to me happened sometime between the smartphone and Instagram. That's when this idea cohered. The smartphone, what the smartphone did, by the way, was give us all the internet all the time. It's in your pocket. It's in your purse. You're constantly online. And that's a prerequisite to social media existing. Instagram bridged the social media and social network worlds. So it was kind of, and kind of still is a little bit about your friends, your family, you know, seeing what they're up to. And then it also became about performing these identities we were just talking about, about being Instagram famous, about getting sponsorships or getting

sent free stuff, all the rest of it. And since then, we've seen a series of new services kind of crop up as they fad in and out of favor. Facebook for a while was popular and then it fell away and people started using Instagram and then they were using Snapchat. And so it's easy to kind of look at these services and just think of them all as kind of being in line for the current young generation's attention, which is one of the ways that people talk about TikTok today.

It's a Gen Z social network. But there's also something formally and structurally different about TikTok than Instagram or Twitter. And it's the observation that you wisely made, which is that it's almost not at all about connection. The way that TikTok works is that you don't really sign up for, you can kind of make an account, but you don't connect with your friends. You're instantly given this feed of material and the algorithm drives everything that you see. And yeah, you can still follow people and that has certain value on the service. But the way that you interact with it is basically just as a like a giant uh series of channels um of material uh and you don't even know why you're seeing them so we're just right back to broadcast

all over again and all that social networking baggage has been uh jettisoned because it was slowing everything down but the slowing down is what I want. That's what I thought was good about social networking. I think it's bad about social media. So TikTok is a real puzzle. It's not a puzzle, it's a problem because it has gotten rid of the things that were at least giving us a little bit of friction.

You know, we're causing us to have to think, well, who do I even want to see on this service? All that's gone on TikTok. I was thinking the same, but the same word is friction there's there's no friction on tiktok and i was very late to tiktok because i'm older i'm 41 me too um my wife was on it for a while and so i finally sign up and i was like oh so do i i'll follow you i'll follow everyone like who else do i follow and she's like it's not really

a following thing yeah i'm like wait a minute it's not really a following thing. I'm like, wait a minute. It's not? She's like, no, no, it's like, just, you just watch it and you just keep, you know, you just go to the next video. And it's like, well, that's stupid. And then I, and then like two hours later, and I was suddenly, I got it. I was like, oh, this is incredibly addictive, but it is all consumption. There is like, I am not doing anything else. I'm just watching video to video to video. And it is all consumption there is like i am not doing anything else i'm just watching video to video video and it's like there is something you lose because sometimes when i see a funny video on tiktok i want to like talk to someone about it right i want to like text someone and say oh isn't that funny or let's talk about it right it really disincentivizes sort of any interaction with other people which feels like it is just just just

digging the hole deeper yeah it's just a fire hose and like the uncoolest thing you can do on the internet today is is like text someone a tiktok or put it on twitter like that's the worst thing you can do so uncool because that's just not how you use it that's not how it works the other thing is it's it's really hard i, there's a lot of friction involved in making a video at all, but like an effective TikTok. And you would think that that would make it less susceptible to these kind of bad patterns of social media, but somehow it actually makes it worse because you, as you say, you're mostly consuming it. Like to become a TikTok creator is really difficult, let alone to become an effective one.

It's kind of the opposite of the supposed democratization of internet creativity that we saw in the first 15 or 20 years of social networks and social media. So back to the original, the aspirational hope that the age of social media could end. Look, I could see one scenario where twitter facebook end up being replaced with new social media platforms that have similar problems if not worse um i can also see a scenario that you argue is unlikely but at least plausible

where what comes after social media is a return to these social networks that sort of started it all. What do you think it would take for that scenario to transpire? I mean, it's almost impossible to imagine. And, you know, despite what I've written, we have to be realistic. We're not going to, you don't go back in time. Things change. I think the way I would sort of prognosticate about it is that some of the aspects of social networks, you know, there's something that we could borrow back from them. Or maybe here's a better way of putting it. There's a lot of space between the old mode of social network interactions or even the older mode of broadcast media where nobody got to say anything and where we're at now where everybody's constantly saying stuff so if we

just like explored that space between you know a handful of broadcasters on news programs and in newspapers and magazines and everyone constantly all the time on a thousand internet apps then surely there's something in there that would feel good that would be-social, that would give us some of the benefits of social network and even some of the benefits of the attention economy, which isn't all bad exactly, but that wasn't kind of turned up to 11 all the time. I think that's the most realistic future exit to imagine because the genie can't be put back in the bottle

to some extent. I mean, you've called this concept sort of downscaling. You've written a lot about it. Like, how would that actually work? Could you see, you know, in our fantasy world here, we're able to do this, which, you know, as we both acknowledge is somewhat unlikely. Would you actually just say that people can't reach

an unlimited number of people with each post or message? That's a great example. And it's an example I've thought about. What if your message is just kind of timed out? I mean, they could do so temporarily, but it reaches a certain number. And that's just enough. No message should reach more than n plus one people, whatever that number is. And then it just dies. It goes away. It vanishes. It's impossible to really enforce because you can copy it or you can move it. But as a native spreadable unit of content,

what if it then evaporated? There's so many things that we have adapted to that were invented that we now treat as natural. The idea of sharing something on Facebook or on Twitter or any of these places that allow reposting, that had to be invented. And back before it was invented on Twitter with the retweet, we used to have to copy and paste a retweet. That was

enough friction that when it changed, the viral spread of these messages, good and bad, exploded. So we know that just a little bit of friction, it doesn't, it still gives you the ability to spread the word, right, to get your ideas out, but doesn't make it so that every idea both can and aspires to be, you know, seen by millions or billions of people. So that's one example. Another is just like maybe the amount of connections that we have should be constrained. That was something that we also did with these services in the past. You didn't used to be able to follow as many people as you wanted on Twitter. There were these sort of models of how many followers you had to have versus how many you could follow.

And even something as simple as the way that LinkedIn, which is a social network that became a social media service for business, though, they always have always had this, like you have 500 plus connections, you know? And, and the deliberate, I've talked to them about this,

the deliberate design around that was to discourage people from collecting, which of course you're very tempted to do when you're networking. And it didn't really work, but the idea was there, right? So there's like really simple things that can be done. Another, you know, what if I just can't post as often, right? I mean, I tried out this app, I wrote about it for The Atlantic too, that is like email that works like snail mail.

Like you get a delivery once a day as if the postman is coming. And, you know, it doesn't really have a future as a mass market product but as an experiment that gives us a sense of what's possible or that just gives us a different feeling yeah all right you know that there's a lot of ideas that haven't been explored and every time i talk to you know i talk about this and people are like well you know isn't this preposterous like social media media is here to stay. Just remind them it wasn't always here. And all of these incumbents were once seen as disruptors. So it certainly can happen again. What do you think about some of the places that people are fleeing to from Twitter, the Mastodon posts, some of these potential Twitter alternatives?

It's mostly silly in my view. I think mostly what these folks are doing, and I get it, is they're sort of performing their distaste for Musk-era Twitter. That's sort of my impression. Yeah, and all of the problems I'm describing with social media are structural problems. They're not just that it's Twitter or that Elon Musk is in charge. It's that the way that the services work at a software level and at a social level, there's something wrong with them. So to think, okay, well, I'm just going to go from Twitter to something as close to the software as possible

that isn't run by Musk, then what are you doing? It's just a lateral move. We're reproducing or trying to reproduce all of those same bad habits in a new venue. So it's just a non-starter to me. I mean, it does seem that one big challenge here is there's sort of a social cultural challenge in persuading people that this belief that you should that you could say whatever you want to as many people as possible. But I think the reason that Musk has sort of co-opted this idea of free speech is because free speech as a value is so sort of embedded in the American experience and in liberal democracy that I wonder how difficult it is to tell everyone, hey, maybe you shouldn't be able to talk to everyone or build the biggest audience possible. Right. No, it's a really smart comment because we've basically just conflated free speech, which means that I should have a voice that the government doesn't control. That's all it really means, right? It doesn't say anything

about how often I can have it, and it puts constraints on the contexts in which I can have that speech. But we've confused that idea with, I should be able to say whatever I want to whomever I want as often as possible. And it's a powerful rhetorical move on the part of the political actors, whether they're technologists or politicians or others, that want their voices to be the loudest. It works for that purpose. But that's a rhetorical move. It's not really about giving people a voice.

It's about allowing the loudest voices to become even louder. I mean, the other argument I've heard that I do find persuasive is there are social and political benefits that come with allowing people who haven't always had a voice to broadcast their beliefs and build an audience. the age of three broadcast networks and, and just people having columns in newspapers or even now, right? Like you have a, you can write in the Atlantic if you want, right?

Like that's an era of gatekeepers and those gatekeepers tended to not just recognize talent and hard work, but also people who tended to be, you know, whiter and more male and can come from good schools and good backgrounds, right? And then people who have been marginalized and don't usually have a voice, social media has allowed them to sort of have a voice. How do you build sort of larger movements and lift up voices that haven't been heard in smaller social networks. Right. Every time I hear this objection, which I hear a lot, right, because it sounds as if what

I'm advocating for is that only people like me get to have a voice. And that's not it at all. I think that we should have more voices. It's not the number of voices. It's the frequency and constancy of them. And I think in the same way as that sort of free speech notion has been contorted, the idea that more voices, more of the time is always better, that's also been a little bit misconstrued. What we want is we want to give the right people the right opportunities. And we probably do want the right people to mean as many different kinds of people as possible. I think we can do that.

And we were doing that. We're even doing that with social networks. It's not like this idea of online discourse or online connectivity or movements that were arising out of it is somehow unique to the social media era. It's rather like, what are the structures that we want to put in place to facilitate those kinds of activities, but then also to dampen them? And here's where things get tricky, because I think we do want gatekeepers. We don't want just one kind of gatekeeper, but we want some gatekeepers. You shouldn't just be able to say anything all the time. And we are somehow going to have to contend with the fact that that position, we just need to

figure it out. And it's going to be a lot of work to kind of unwind it so that it doesn't sound like me, a white man who writes in the Atlantic, is saying, well, that means that people like me are the ones who get to talk on podcasts like this. Really, all I'm saying is let's just think about it for a minute. Let's use some process of constraining and controlling the total amount of speech that we have available, which in my mind doesn't in any way obviate the capacity of these grassroots social movements to flourish. Maybe a simpler way of putting this is there has to be something in between three broadcast networks and social media. There just has to be. Yeah. I sort of wonder if the effort it will take to sort of break people out of these addictions, which is sort of what they are at the best they're bad habits worse their predictions

it i saw you um compare it to sort of making smoking uncool right which i do think it was it was a great analogy because i thought like you know that that is what's required like i've done so many of these interviews and we sort of talk about the regulatory possibilities and that seems like it's never going to happen for a whole bunch of different reasons, institutional, political, et cetera. And I also think just on an individual basis, it's tough because when you're addicted to anything, let alone, you know, social media, it's tough to just stop on your own. So it does seem like there's a broader cultural movement that needs to happen. Have you sort of thought about what that might look like? It's going to be harder than smoking because we could see it. You know, smoking was a

thing in the world and, you know, you could smell it, you could taste it. It got on your clothes and in your car upholstery. It was everywhere. And that was like bracketing the fact that it was also killing us, literally. It was palpable. And I think, though, that if you look back on smoking and the era, the 20th century obsession with smoking as a social practice, everyone knew. Everyone knew that they knew it was bad, they knew it was gross. But what else were you going to do?

You just have to smoke. You have to be around people who smoke. Until we said, no, wait, hold up. This isn't necessary. There are other ways of living our lives together. And that required a reinvention. It required new structures where you would say, what if we just started with a place where you don't have to deal with there being smoking? And that never really quite worked, but we did get non-smoking sections of restaurants. It used to be able to smoke on airplanes. It's kind of shocking to think about.

And then slowly there were some regulatory wins that were achievable. First it was no smoking in bars and nightclubs. First it was restaurants, in bars and nightclubs. First it was restaurants and it was bars. We sort of slowly removed this from the fabric of the world. And I think when I look back on this period, just as an analogy, not as a model, there's an admission that we have to make about our present habits. And that's that the things that we know are bad habits, we have to adjust we have to make changes to so for a long time with with smartphones and with the internet there's been this idea that

if you sort of say to someone hey like can you put your phone down like for a minute and like i thought we were having a conversation right and i'm just as guilty of it right like you know with my kids and instead i'm looking at twitter and And for a while it was like, well, that was off limits. That was construed as somehow policing contemporary life in a way that was inappropriate and impossible. But it's also right. That is the first step a little bit. Not because you need to have self-control,

but because we need some kind of social collaboration in which we can agree to do it together. This is a really simple example of this. I don't think it's the best one, but it's at least concrete that I wrote about in one of my books where you get together, you go out with friends to dinner or something. Everybody stacks their phone in the middle of the table and the first person to pick theirs up has to pay. It's a silly game.

But what was interesting about it is the social structure in which people were helping one another change their habits. So habits are just the things that we do. They can be good or they can be bad, but it's very hard to break them once we do them all the time. And so unless we have some sort of mechanism in which to change those habits together, then we're really sunk. And we are waiting on regulation is, I mean, it's just not going to happen. But then waiting on like the technology companies to fix themselves also not going to happen. And likewise, waiting on some sort of upstart to come along and give us some new option that that's also uh unlikely so we'll have to try to you know do it at small scale like where are the environments that you're in how do you want to

behave and live in them which gets us back to this whole idea of real social network i was just going to say yeah that i love the example of the the restaurant game with friends and that's sort of policing each other in uh in a small social network. Yeah. Yeah. I have a friend that I talk to about this stuff. And I was like, what do you do? How do you deal with these things? One thing I've tried to do is I'm just not online on Sundays. That felt like something I could do.

And I can do it with my family because it's also the weekend. And it still puts a lot of burden on the individual which i don't think is a solution as such but it's going to be slow and hard and it will take a long time it took smoking uh 50 years uh to just you know really dissipate and evaporate from society and then we of course like immediately brought it back with with uh nicotine um so that's yeah vaping and that kind of thing but that's a that's a different topic but um how how last last question for you how has um how has your relationship with social media changed uh over the last several years i mean i think i am not an exception exception. I'm just as guilty as anyone of having these bad habits.

I'm more aware of them. I'm certainly seeking the conflict and the interactions less, though. And part of that just means I pick fewer fights or I respond to fewer people. I feel like I've been through it now. I know what feels bad, and I try to avoid that a little bit more. But how do you live? How do you live online? I forget if you're a media professional, just, you know, how do you not have a LinkedIn or a Facebook or something? So I really think we're all in it together. And

you know, I think when you talk to people and they say, I found it, I found the answer, I'm the exception, they're lying. Yeah. No, that is true. I'm the same way. Less conflict, less picking fights, but the consumption is still there. That's the problem. Yeah. Ian Bogost, thank you so much for joining Offline. This was a great conversation. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer.

Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every

week. We'll see you next time. in an office chair or a sixth grade classroom. The problems may be limitless, but so are the solutions. Listen to Work Appropriate now wherever you get your podcasts. New episode drop every Wednesday. It's a fantastic podcast. Anne Helen Peterson is a brilliant writer and host, so please check it out.