Social Media as Stack
This was originally written as a critical essay at Temple University’s Internet Studies & Web Authoring course in the Media Studies & Production program during the Fall 2019 term. An updated and edited version will be released in 2022 as part of a collection of writing.
“when i went into cyberspace i went into it thinking that it was a place like any other place and that it would be a human interaction like any other human interaction. i was wrong when i thought that. it was a terrible mistake.” (humdog, 1994)
“Look at your friend’s Instagram page. Then take a peek in their medicine cabinet.” (2017)
i.
As a category of platform that facilitates both synchronous and asynchronous community ties between people across the world, social media has allowed for new models of interactivity that we previously never considered possible. The ability for computer users to connect with each other has come a long way since the early days of cyberspace thanks to advancements in technology and software development; thanks to the advent of wi-fi and LTE technologies the world has effectively gotten smaller — access to anyone you can think of is simply a few clicks, button presses, or screen taps away. Social media platforms have supplanted the sci-fi ideas of theorized virtual worlds with a realized unique age of digital interaction that is different from any prior change to mass communication humanity has gone through in the past.
It’s a wild statement to make, but it only seems right to acknowledge the massive restructuring the internet has gone through over the last 10–20 decade when it comes to the ubiquity of the sites its users frequent the most. Facebook serves some roughly 2.4 billion users, whereas Instagram reached 1 billion users across the globe in 2018 alone (Carman). Even after its much-publicized decline and struggles over the past year, Twitter still boasts a userbase of 126 million daily users. In any other industry, this would be a tremendous boon — except in the world of the “big three”, where the messaging app is actually behind in usage to Snapchat (Vox, 2019) and rapidly rising video and Vine-usurping app TikTok (Yang, 2018), which boasts some 500 million active users across its worldwide versions. This doesn’t even take into account apps more popular in Europe and Asia like Facebook-controlled WhatsApp, which sits at some 1.5bn monthly users (Constine, 2018) or Tencent counterpart WeChat, which also passed the billion-user threshold worldwide (Hollander, 2018).
This is a dizzying array of often interconnected platforms that make up a staggering amount of the virtual communication structure of the internet. Through the contemporary landscape and overarching presence of mass social media communication methods across the globe, it’s safe to argue that we’re at a sort of “planetary-scale” level of social and communication tech. The telecoms and technology industries have combined and accelerated to the point of overload, where the current state of tech is both seamless and overbearing in daily life — perhaps peak social media.
Even if this is not quite the nadir of the environment — large swathes of the globe, particularly in the global south still haven’t yet fully made the leap to online life — it is quickly becoming monolithic. We’re now navigating a point in time were where our platforms are now a sort of accidental digital megastructure — the stack. Coined by sociologist and designer Benjamin Bratton in 2015 as a way of rethinking geopolitics in the computing age, the idea of the stack discusses different scales of computing technology in regard to how they impact society.
To paraphrase for clarity and time — the stack model on a macro-scale refers to a speculative model for how technology shapes our geography and industries at different levels or layers in a feedback mechanism. The current gargantuan tower of babel that comprises our internet social media architecture resembles Bratton’s platonic idea of the stack — a goliath that “we are building both deliberately and unwittingly, and that in turn is building us in its own image” (2015).
ii.
“The stack is powerful and dangerous, both remedy and poison, a utopian and dystopian machine at once (and as Buckminster Fuller said, it will be touch and go until the last instant).” (Bratton, 2015)
When we discuss the stack insofar as in relation to social media we can pull away from imagery of hulking planetary-wide invisible superstructures — social media as stack can be considered a sort of Jenga tower — this stack is built and structured on top of each other and relies on each other in such a way that messing with one piece either fundamentally rewrite the whole thing or takes it apart. Many of its pieces are effectively algorithmic “black boxes” that influence and control our communications structures to the point where the programmers and designers that created them either don’t know how they work or acknowledge that their creations have effectively created a new set of affordances and constraints for users that are far removed from, or weren’t considered in the original goal. On the other hand, another crucial part of this Jenga tower are the visible design and infrastructural elements of communication platforms in the past — without AOL Instant Messenger or MSN there’s no Skype, without BBS systems there’s no message boards and without those there’s no Facebook, no Instagram without Flickr or Foursquare. TikTok likely doesn’t get off the ground without channeling a perfect storm of yearning and nostalgia for the departed Vine. Personal blogs now seem ancient and even quaint after the rise of Twitter and its 140-character (later 280) “microblogging” — but idly tweeting and sharing about your day only contextually makes sense in that we were already conditioned to do so by earlier points on the social media timeline.
That same conditioning that sparks our familiarity with the social media stack is also the same conditioning that impacts our relationship with it. It conditions and rewires our reward systems, reorients our idea of social circles (Dunbar 2016) towards a large-scale perspective with hundreds of Facebook friends, accounts amassing thousands of followers and “mutual” on Twitter, and cushions and normalizes us when our platforms become venues and tools for traumatic interactions. The stack, by design, doesn’t care that Instagram is now positively associated with depression symptoms in young adults (Lup/Trub 2015), or that political polarization online is creating an echo chamber and sounding board for the first generations to grow up in a completely online world (Citarella), or that Youtube’s deliberately-curated, highly-filtered children’s section is being algorithmically gamed by a deluge of inexplicably violent bootleg media where Peppa Pig is depicted “eating her father or drinking bleach” (Brindle 2017).
Neo-nazi terror groups recruit impressionable teenagers not by cornering them at concerts but by posting memes on image-sharing sites (Broderick 2018) and derailing Microsoft designed chatbots within hours of their going live. Internet mobs emboldened by an alleged “cancel culture” pile-on users to the point where online shaming becomes a daily occurrence. The 2016 US presidential election will forever be defined in-part due to the use of social media astroturfing from foreign entities and usage of intrusive data collection on the platforms to target potential voters. These are not glitches in the stack insofar as they simply problems outside context; these platforms don’t “account for abusive application or whose user experiences directly empower attackers” (Cade) because once upon a time their creators were oblivious to — or did not think of — these situations when creating the platform. The stack continues chugging while its users remain miserable. Like the tower of babel destroyed — we’re all talking to each other these days, but none of us are speaking the same language.
iii.
“Two distorted perceptions of reality: the public sphere in which everybody is pretending to be something they’re not, and the private in which everybody encourages one another’s worst impulses, and we’re performing different versions of ourselves in each. What comes next?” (2019)
It’s clear this current model of social interaction on the web isn’t working, or at least not well as it should. Corporations have lost control of their Frankenstein’s monster, and governments don’t have much of an answer either. There might one day be a regulatory solution — if Mark Zuckerberg’s being browbeaten in front of US Congress is any indication, the world’s governments realize the key impact of social media on the world’s infrastructure as well as becoming its own infrastructure, and such infrastructure running unchecked might be a credible threat to current hegemonies.
But there’s also no guarantee the regulatory body doesn’t simply orient the stack to its own desires/goals/hegemonies — phones and internet being cutoff during the Arab Spring, the Great Firewall of China, Russian bot farms, all these things still work within the framework of a global model of hierarchical usage of social media. It’s top down — a tree.
Which raises the question of who, or what, can pose a challenge to the current hierarchal and overbearing state of the web, a state that has created a hostile and polarized environment without really trying?
Perhaps outside-context problems deserve outside-context solutions, one where the relationship between users on platforms is reframed away from the current stack. If users are being conditioned to act and be acted upon in an arena of flawed vertical design, perhaps it is the most optimal choice for the users to either step away or reorient themselves to a rhizomatic idea of social media. There is no magic bullet to close pandora’s box with regards to all this, especially with the polarized web simply reflecting a more polarized outside world. Facebook or Twitter may harbor Nazis but it’s the real world where the echo chamber is fortified and weaponized to create actual harm. But — we can choose to work against a vertical top-down visualization of the web to a more horizontal and truly decentralized/democratized direction.
If you have a “finsta” it’s possible you’re already working in this direction, unconsciously. Removed from the constraints, conditioning, and expectations of the stack, we are recused from the threat of “our digital breadcrumbs” becoming evidence that “could and would be used against us” (Strickler, 2019). Sites like Relevant reward trust and signal over noise to encourage well thought-out and curated content from its users, incentivizing the sense of comradery and community once found in a prior version of the social media stack — the message board (which often had reputation systems to further encourage acting in good faith.
Editor and critic Dean Kissick points out that simply existing in smaller more closely-knit private structures can be just as ineffective and simply create a “weirder, more fragmentary culture than ever.” But perhaps a renewed push towards decentralized, peer-to-peer interaction may free us a little bit from the tower of babel.
This stack — this digital world may be precariously teetering on the edge — but another world is possible.
Bratton, B. H. (2015). The Stack. Log, (35), 128–159.
Bridle, J. (2018, June 21). Something is wrong on the internet. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2.
Broderick, R. (2019, August 15). iFunny Has Become A Hub For White Nationalism. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/the-meme-app-ifunny-is-a-huge-hub-for-white-nationalists.
Cade. (2019). On Weaponised Design. Retrieved from https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/30-on-weaponised-design/.
Carman, A. (2018, June 20). Instagram now has 1 billion users worldwide. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17484420/instagram-users-one-billion-count.
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Sherman, K. (n.d.). How social media changes our thinking and learning. 3.
Tik Tok racks up 500 million global MAU as short video craze continues. (2018, July 17). Retrieved from https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2155580/tik-tok-hits-500-million-global-monthly-active-users-china-social-media-video.
Wagner, K. (2019, February 7). Twitter finally shared how big its daily user base is — and it’s a lot smaller than Snapchat’s. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/2019/2/7/18215204/twitter-daily-active-users-dau-snapchat-q4-earnings.