As new terms like ‘doomscroll’, ‘ragebait’ and ‘AI slop’ begin to emerge, Mission spoke to YouTuber Melanie Murphy about whether going offline is the new cool.
Since the advent of the internet in the 90s, being up-to-date with technology and well-versed in the social media of the moment has been something of a status symbol.
What began with the almost subcultural popularity of websites like Facebook, YouTube and Tumblr – where those with the necessary technological literacy could share content among small but passionate communities – quickly exploded in popularity.
Today, as these sites have long since been inducted into the mainstream, being a social media content creator has become one of the most lucrative careers among young people, with YouTube, TikTok and live-streaming sites like Twitch, replacing television as their most used entertainment channels.
But with this freedom, problems have begun to emerge. With the rise of ragebait, clickbait, doomscrolling and echo-chambers, the question is – has the internet lost its ‘cool’?
Melanie Murphy is among those who built their careers on YouTube. With over half a million subscribers, Murphy has been sharing her life online for over 10 years. Murphy is one of many who has, in the past year, shared her journey to disconnection on her YouTube channel, relegating her smartphone usage to the office and returning to a flip-phone for her day-to-day life. She cites the abundant changes in the social media landscape as the reason for her need to detox.
“I find that algorithms have become my boss, and I don’t like that,” she explained, “it used to be that I made content, it was given to my subscribers, and they would decide if they wanted to watch it… I think now, there is a pressure to make a certain type of content, and if you don’t make it in a certain way, you get punished financially.”
Creators used to make their living through building dedicated communities that enjoyed their content, today, with the addition of personalized algorithms that reward engagement over all else, creators make their money through attention – and any attention, positive or negative, will achieve the same goal.
For the viewer, this results in an influx of content designed to make you emotional, push you to comment or continue watching, and often, it is negative emotions that best achieves that goal. For Murphy, this results in a pressure to change their content to fall in line with viewer habits – “The content that performs best online has shock value… you’re much less likely to click on a wholesome vlog of people having a picnic versus some video with a headline like ‘eating this will give you cancer,’ so I think fear based content and political content that makes people very angry or scared becomes more popular.”
This polarization becomes not just the norm but often the end goal, in many spaces online, finding lighthearted enjoyment online is increasingly rare.
“It all sounds so simple, but nowadays, you have to decide to do those things to escape the internet. And back in the day, you’d be going online to escape real life.”
“People are driven into a war in the comments,” Murphy argued, “even on nice posts like someone making a fashion TikTok, the comments can just be people fighting with each other about whether or not she’s had Botox, whether or not she’s using fast fashion, whether she’s too skinny or whether she’s overweight. I’m finding it harder to find those little pockets of the internet that are just peaceful.”
More and more people are reducing their screen-time by returning to analog roots – reading physical literature; journaling, buying vinyl albums or DVDs instead of streaming… taking walks without their phones, or, like Murphy, physically restricting contact with their smartphones.
“It all sounds so simple, but nowadays, you have to decide to do those things to escape the internet. And back in the day, you’d be going online to escape real life,” she says.
Not having an online presence, being chronically ‘offline,’ is becoming a marker of ‘cool’ – “I’ve noticed that I feel now, the coolest thing is when someone has no social media – it’s so cool when you’re talking to someone and they have no trace of them on the internet. I think we were lucky to be around with the rise of all this, but I do think we lived through the peak of social media, and I don’t think it’ll ever be the same,’ states Murphy.
Today, not having a social media presence is a challenge. But, even for creators like Murphy, its toxic elements are becoming unavoidable – something that has even led to bans more recently in places like Australia, where under 16s are no longer permitted to use Instagram.
Murphy predicts, “online, there might be a return to smaller communities, things like newsletters… I myself am considering starting a Patreon.”
Patreon is a space where creators with existing communities can restrict their content behind a paywall, an increasingly attractive option for creators who are fatigued by the race that algorithms demand on their existing platforms.
What is clear is that, social media that was once the cool new technology that people loved to use has become something we depend on and rely on.
By Lily Davies.
