26 September

The easiest social media posts to critique are the obvious hate speech type things, or scammers, or people being generally abusive. But this type of friendly innocuous post is actually the most dangerous symptom of all of what social media has done to us. We’re living our lives on it. It has become our community. These posts betray that loud and clear, people see them *as* Bathurst (in this case), as the community. The new public square. In reality FB (for example) is an American corporation, monetising all of these communities, driving engagement (and thus $$) through algorithms that encourage people to constantly compare themselves with others, and to fight and argue with one another. That’s also why you don’t see much of my everyday life on FB. To me that’s the worse violation of social media, to make this the venue for that life. It turns peoples’ lives into endless imitative rivalries, posturing for social status, fracturing families and communities.