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The saying goes that “the graves are full of sumptuous dinners”, and no one has experienced the feast of growth and impact that social networks have enjoyed in the last decade. Facebook retired and we’ll see how Twitter ends, Instagram and TikTok have capitalized wonderfully on the rise of the smartphone: 2,500 million users have the first and 1,000 million the second, in addition to getting its users to pass more and more time in them. In both.
However, I noticed insiders a few days ago a paradox: this growth comes hand in hand with the death of social networksat least in the conception we had of them last decade, emphasizing its second word.
Now everything is private.
Green circles and group messaging
Try to remember, dear reader, what the sessions were like. stalking soft a few years ago and how they are now. How many people had open profiles on Instagram and how many have them now. How many people used social networks to share their lives without many reservations, and how many now limit it to an extremely filtered version.
They are those images and videos perfectly edited, chosen, aligned with a personal brand more than with an individual. The vehicle for use social networks not as the center of personal relationships, but as the vector of growth of that personal brand. The only thing that is published results from the screening of the image that is wanted to be projected.
Where has it become to share our daily lives with our people without pretensions or editions, much less without interactions? Easy: in private messaging in general, in WhatsApp groups in particular.
Tuenti was the greatest expression of unfiltered uploads, of the collection of friendships like someone who collects Pokémon, but fortunately, we realized that today’s laughter was tomorrow’s regrets, and we stopped uploading drunk photos and committing various illegalities, even if it were for what they might say.
Then came the containment on Facebook and Instagram, and then the locks. If anything, the green circles. After that, the search for virality. Even those who do not seek fame do sometimes yearn for a large list of contacts and figures of likes as high as possible. And whoever does not want to participate in the game is left out. Family photos and good news to share with friends, on WhatsApp, away from other people’s eyes.
It’s not just the fact that we’ve fallen off the deep end and started worrying about our digital shadowthe networks themselves also encouraged this by developing a structure of recommendations in which dopamine became the protagonist, and only virality allows access to it.
Social networks mutated into entertainment platforms made by creators, not (only) by large companies; and with them died the social network of the beginning of time. Today, they survive as family WhatsApp groups. If you want to share an ultrasound or grandma’s birthday, you can surely count on them.
In Xataka | Shy of the world, we are losing the Internet.
Featured image | Xataka with Midjourney.
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