The paradoxical anti-sociality of social media is well-documented. For example, a recent 2023 study shows a heightened level of loneliness in social media users motivated by maintaining social ties. Despite access to the awe-inspiring breadth of information, knowledge, entertainment and human interaction made available through personalized computing and pervasive internet connectivity, Gen Z tech natives are as socially distanced as ever. Equally, a dominant narrative has taken root, claiming that social media induces dissociation from real life. Many believe that social media is drawing people away from reality and into the artificed world of internet platforms with counterfeit, hollow forms of connectivity. Is it true that our worst tendencies are mirrored and abetted by the structures these internet platforms take? Have we taken for granted the miraculous forms of communication that they seamlessly offer us?
My daily experience with social media does not fit this negative discourse. Like many, my life is heavily mediated by social media. In most contexts, music ambiently thrums through my earbuds, filtering the events of my experience and their emotional impact upon me through the specific tonal world of the music. My phone’s readily available communication apps bring friends and family into my moment-to-moment experience—represented spectrally through lines of text, but creating the illusion of presence.
My phone acts inexorably as a prism through which I see much of reality. And yet, I do not feel isolated. I feel that my symbiotic relationship with the internet and social media invigorates my need to connect. The tertiary quality of the music rattling through my ears vitalizes every conversation with potent emotional valence; the texts in my phone are transfigurative reminders of the continuity of relationships I hold dear. Often, the mundanity of daily experience instills an ennui that blocks our ability to access the well of empathy, emotion and connective force within us. Technology allows abiding accessibility and contemporality to all social relationships and elements of history. Our ability to find music, art, film, social opportunity and spectatorial appreciation of all of the world through social media keeps the heart aflame. Social media is an unparalleled reminder of the enormity of human existence, especially in its capacity for user-generated content to introduce civilian perspectives existent outside of mainstream media.
Of course, it would be naive not to acknowledge the pervasive negativity within social media other than music streaming and texting, two relatively accepted technological norms. Social media has invented new forms of othering and aggravated existing ones—cyberbullying, isolation, depression, misinformation, negative body image and technology addiction. Moreover, social media exploits our aggressive impulses. Most apps prioritize the generation of vitriol and outrage through their medium and algorithms, as negative emotions generate the most engagement and therefore the most income.
This negativity is only one side of what social media does to us, and the potential for positive action in digital spaces is not well-acknowledged. The connective and empathic potentials of video algorithms increasingly implemented on major social media platforms are aspects of social media I am particularly inclined to use. Originating on TikTok, Instagram has adopted the short-form algorithmically-generated content within their version: Instagram Reels, the primary way I interact with this form of media exposure. Many people characterize the endless wall of content that floods users of TikTok and Instagram Reels as mindless and banal—a “doom scroll” in which users are trapped in a vacuous Skinner box of dopamine activation by a flood of short-form content.
Still, there are moments of reality that surge through the deluge of numbing media: A video with single-digit likes by a real person (not a content creator!) talking about their day, recording a meal they are eating, singing along to a trending song or showing off their pet. When the endless scroll opiates users on a flashy and insubstantial stream of nothingburger content, the sudden intrusion of something real, unproduced and individual, a fleeting glimpse into a life without mediation, becomes all the more shocking.
The profound and revelatory heterotopia of finding the bizarre, the beautiful and the challenging on social media is why it has the power to enact a revolution of the heart, a radical and widespread activation of empathy. In real-life experience, we have similar glimpses of sublimity within the humdrum of the day-to-day which remind us of the cosmically inscrutable nature of our existence—a bird perched on an iron fence, the way sunbeams filter through the leaves on an old oak, the winnowing of a breeze across a plain. We are reminded of the essential wonder of life underlying societal concerns by admiring these precious things in a moment of pause.
Social media has the same capacity to produce vignettes of beauty—and better yet, it offers users the ability to cultivate a truly human experience. Instagram Reels is a distorted representation of reality, a kind of shattered mirror. With enough likes, shares and saves on the most emotionally cathartic content I encountered, I could move the mirror’s glass fragments to form a brilliant refraction of humanity.
When I open my Instagram Reels now, I am greeted by a man named Connor Mcevoy (a fan of horse racing, the United Nations and King James) wishing me a happy Friday and delivering a positive message: “You are educated, you are intelligent, and the uneducated insult and make fun of others for who they are.” I scroll and see username @pinnacleofsalt (real name Aaron Medeiros) imparting another proverb: “Beauty does not exist. In my eyes, everyone is beautiful. So believe in yourself, believe that you’re gorgeous.” I scroll again and see another uplifting message by username @yallgottastayblessed, perpetually clad in a collared shirt, tie and slacks across all his videos, imploring me, as usual, to stay blessed. Final scroll, and I encounter @frostandleo (named after his two black cats) singing opera in falsetto over a piano melody and dancing back and forth through his kitchen. These are all real people who record themselves doing what they are passionate about and ask others to fulfill the greatest capacities of self-love and expression we can aspire to.
Social media can be a malignancy, and its systems can erode our sense of empathy, inculcate a culture of hyper-consumption, disseminate misinformation and provoke lucrative forms of anger among its user base. However, social media is also a tool, and as a praxis of resistance against forms of violence in the real world, we must take it upon ourselves to cultivate it as a tool used for empathy.
Perhaps social media’s greatest potential for revolutionary praxis is that its user-generated content exists outside of the traditionalism and hegemonic mores of mainstream media. Social media allows users to learn about, communicate with and empathize with subaltern and marginalized populations who would conventionally be rendered invisible. Additionally, forms of radical, practical, anti-hegemonic empathy—mutual aid and freelance investigative journalism—have already been proven to actualize the socially transformative capabilities of social media.
Knowing that social media is an instrument that can truly benefit individuals and society, we should strive to develop an ethos of responsible and healing social media curation that enables us to do best by ourselves and others. Though most do not use social media as a tool for the empowerment of self and others, those who do should utilize these platforms’ social aspects—chiefly sharing humanizing videos—in order to increase the visibility of this content.
Social media allows us to access an endless assortment of perspectives on life, enacted autonomously and simultaneously at an unfathomable scale that connects independent actors with the same consciousness, agency and feelings as us. It allows us to understand a little of the lives of people we will never meet and never fully know. If empathy is our ability to take in and feel another’s perspective, social media lets us drink from an empathic firehose. We need only change our relationship with social media.