Our shared social-media reality: We know more things, more superficially

I’ve recently made a new friend. But even the levels of this thing called friendship are so complex these days.

We have been Twitter mutuals for about a decade, but only found occasion to meet in real life over the past fortnight or so. In a way, we’ve been friends for ten years. On another level, we only met the other day when we went for a coffee.

Meeting in person is different. There is a certain private intimacy that is not available on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. (Though possibly on WhatsApp.) After some weeks of quarantine, it was a relief to confirm that real life still exists, to some extent.

So there we were having coffee. What to talk about? Traditionally, that would be something like what we’ve been up to. Sadly, neither of us had left the house much, so there wasn’t a lot to share there.

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That leaves entertainment. Again, we haven’t left home, so there was little chance we’d gone to see Foo Fighters the previous week. Television? Well, there are so many platforms sharing movies and series that it’s rare for two people to be watching the same content at the same time.

And you don’t want to spoil a series for someone by discussing something they may want to watch in the future. This isn’t the 1980s, where the entire country is on tenterhooks, waiting to find out who shot JR on Dallas next Tuesday.

So what do we end up talking about? You guessed it: Twitter.

Did you see that clip of that lady losing her balance on her heels? Here, let me show you! What do you think about that LGBTQ controversy? Do you think they were harsh to suspend that guy for what he tweeted? Are you watching the Zondo commission? No, not on TV, on Twitter!

We found some common ground, but it soon became clear that most of it was on our favourite social-media platform.

For me, this marks a pivotal moment in contemporary society. No longer does social media simply discuss the real world. The real world discusses social media.

We are locked in a never-ending feedback loop where the most interesting thing for people in the real world to talk about, is the goings-on in the digital world. And real-world activity gains credibility the more relevant it becomes in the digital realm.

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Some things are simply better experienced via social media. NFL football is impossible to watch live. But via bite-size highlights on Twitter, it’s great fun. It would never subject myself to an entire episode of Love Island, but I love to be served a couple of excruciating highlights on my timeline. Likewise the Zondo commission. Tell me what happened on social media! Don’t show me, live, on TV!

Reality has reached the stage where it only assumes critical relevance once it has been mediated through the digital lens. Once others have shared and commented, and an accepted view has begun to coalesce.

Reality therefore becomes digital, even when it’s not. It must be digitised first, in order to reach the world, to be interpreted.

My new coffee companion and I also seem to be assessing each other according to our place in the constellation of social-media opinions. US election? MacG controversy? GameStop stock manipulation? The cultural contribution of Beyoncé?

What you think about a social-media trend, is the criteria. Not so much what we think about socio-political trends themselves. Social media has become the filter, the mediated reality, the shadows on the cave wall, to paraphrase Plato’s allegory.

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This mediated, digital understanding of the world never represents the true, full expression of anything. But it’s enough.

Social media gives us such a broad taste of many different aspects of the world – science, medicine, politics, economics, entertainment, race theory – that we are prepared to make do with an essentialised edit, a highlights package.

Today, that is what we have in common. We understand more of the world than we did before, but more superficially. And you can build relationships on that, I’m hoping.

Hagen Engler.

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