IT'S TIME FOR CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

or How Social Media Platforms Can Start to Stop Destroying Humanity

2 minutes ago.

1 day ago.

2 hours ago.

12 weeks ago.

5 days ago.

Just now.

If you’re scrolling through social media and wondering why the world is so shit right now, it’s because it is… but also because social media algorithms are showing a veritable greatest shits of world news from any time in the past whenever.

It’s like if terrible world and life events on social media were like songs on the The Eagles greatest hits album.

Listening to that album, you may be led to believe that The Eagles did not ever write a bad song.
However, they did.
You know they did.
You’ve never listened to “Chug All Night” twice for good reason.

You see, algorithms on social media are in place to show us what we want.
Like letting a child eat ice cream for every meal.

They determine what we want in a variety of ways but mostly base it on how long we spend on a post.

Then they keep showing us posts on things that it feels are similar in theme.

Lingered on a post about kids being killed in a war because it’s horrific?
Here’s a never ending scroll of terrible things from the past hour, day, week, year.

This creates a terrible ‘Hotel California’ vortex, if you will.
It makes you think that every Eagles song is a ‘Hotel California’.
And, quite frankly, we all know that is not true or possible.

Algorithms that give us exactly what we want are not good for us.
I’ll even go as far as to say they are the main accelerant for maintaining the fires of division.

Everyone’s For You feed is different.
Check it out for yourself.
Have someone standing beside you open up their app and compare feeds.
We may see some of the same posts but largely we are watching a never ending scroll of content that has been chosen by our subconscious.

That’s not good.
We are idiots and this is not how we grow and get smarter.

What’s even worse?

The content the algorithm chooses for us isn’t in order.
It shows anything from largely anytime.

Algorithms have no use for dates and times.
Algorithms just want our eyeballs.

Facebook does it.
Twitter does it.
TikTok does it.
Instagram does it.
They all do it.

This is fine if we’re just watching cat and doggo videos.
But we’re not.

Life is social media now.
We check what the lunch specials are today.
We offer condolences to people going through grief.
We follow world events.
We live on social media.
We make sense of our world through social media.

And right now?
Social Media posts are all over the goddamn place.
There’s no chronological order.

That is not good for humans.

In no other human forum are we cool with abandoning clocks.
Even casinos have shift changes.

Imagine regular life unshackled by time and dates.
It would be mayhem.

Life is wacky enough without making it all seemingly happen at once.

Sure, you can choose the Following tab and get posts from those you follow in chronological order, but you have to choose that and it resets to the For You algorithmically chosen feed every time you log back in.

If we spend time on posts about things that make us angry, or even enraged, we just keep seeing more of them even though they may be already resolved, mistakenly reported, changed, whatever.

Why are we being kept in this perpetual state of rage?

I’ll tell you why.

Social Media platforms use algorithms to keep us engaged so they can keep us on their platforms more and sell more ads.

I don’t think that’s good for us but I also understand it.

I also think it is what will be the undoing of the social media era as we know it.
I think we’ll get tired of being played.
Social Media isn’t going way… and that’s good.
Social Media can be very good.
But we’ll eventually demand that it change.

I can even see it being legislated.

It’s time for chronological order.

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(Pictured: Author checks the time on his phone and thinks about how lucky he was that the huge raindrop didn’t fall on him)