The Death of Social in Social Media

The Reality-TVification of Ordinary Life

Photo by Steve Gale

I went to high school with a woman, let’s call her Miranda, who recently took a vacation with her husband to what looked like one of those resorts designed for people who want “authentic” Caribbean life without the inconvenience of locals. The kind of place with infinity pools, bland piña coladas, sunsets posted with captions like this is living. Miranda chronicled the whole trip online, as people do now, except what struck me wasn’t the number of photos, though there were plenty, but the tone. Every caption, every video, every #vacay reel was pitched as though she were addressing fans, not peers. “You guys,” “y’all asked for more content,” “stay tuned.” She spoke like a brand ambassador on loan from a mid-tier reality show.

The reality is that Miranda has maybe four hundred followers. I scrolled through them out of morbid curiosity: the vast majority were people from our hometown. People who sat next to her in biology class. People who saw her wrestling with those orthodontist rubber bands you had to snap out at lunch. In other words: not fans. Not “audience.” The same small circle she has always had, only now recast as spectators.

What made it so uncanny was the shift. Years ago, Miranda used to post the way most of us did—updates about her kids, the occasional photo of a family barbecue, a birthday shoutout. She’d still be addressing those same four hundred people, but back then she spoke as if she knew who we were. Now, with basically the same follower count, she addresses us as though we’re a fan base. As though her life is a channel we’ve all tuned into voluntarily and gratefully.

And she leaned into it. There were “room tour” videos narrated like she was unveiling a luxury estate, dinner plates treated like Michelin-starred tasting menus, teasers about tomorrow’s excursions as if we were subscribers waiting for the next drop. Watching her posts, I started to wonder if she even saw us—the people who actually knew her—as anything other than algorithmic abstractions. A tally of eyeballs.

It wasn’t that she was aspiring to celebrity. It was more unsettling than that. She behaved as if celebrity had already become the default mode of existence online. As if the point of posting wasn’t to keep in touch with friends, but to perform for an imagined crowd. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed Miranda wasn’t exceptional at all. She was the logical product of what social media has taught us to be: not people in community, but brands in circulation.

Now, yes, I have a following on social media. A few hundred thousand people, in fact. On paper that number might make it seem like I should understand where Miranda is coming from, that I would see the logic in performing for an audience. But the truth is, I do not post that way. Though, I’d be lying if I said I never feel the tug. The sense that a post could ‘hit,’ especially if it’s in an effort to sell my recent novel for example. The difference is I try not to feed that impulse, even if it’s always there. And I think that is largely why people follow me in the first place. I share poetry, thoughts on social issues, and occasionally a photo of my dog or me at an event or traveling somewhere interesting. But when I post, I speak in the same register that I would use with my friends and family.

I do not imagine an audience waiting for the next installment of my life. I imagine people, many of whom I know and many of whom I never will, but who I still regard as peers rather than fans. The difference matters. To me, social media is a community space. Community is horizontal, it is a shared exchange of words and images and ideas. Fans are something else entirely. Fans look up. They consume. They validate. They cheer while the celebrity performs.

That is the fracture line. For me, social media has always been a form of conversation, an imperfect extension of the ways we keep in touch and build collective thought. For others, Miranda included, it has become a stage. A place where ordinary life is recast as a series of episodes, each post designed as content, each follower reframed as a spectator. It is the difference between living in community and clamoring for stardom, between being a person online and auditioning to be the star of your own reality show.

“Social media” as a phrase is one of those bits of cultural jargon that feels, at this point, like a linguistic scam. It still gets repeated in earnest by news anchors, professors, tech CEOs testifying before Congress, your aunt explaining why she joined Facebook to keep up with the gossip. But if you actually stop and listen to the words—“social,” “media”—and then compare them against what happens on your phone when you swipe open Instagram or TikTok at 11:43 p.m. because your brain is too wired to sleep but too fried to read, you get this sudden uncanny sense that the name is lying to you. That it’s not descriptive at all but a sleight of hand. Because the thing itself, as it now exists in 2025, is not very social and barely counts as media in the traditional sense.

“Social” implies conversation, exchange, mutuality, the shared air of a café table or a dinner party. “Media” is the channel, the transmission, the neutral vessel through which communication flows. “Social media,” put together, originally gestured at some hybrid—communication via technology that preserved the feel of friendship. Only now what you actually get is a kind of global amphitheater in which everyone is perpetually demonstrating their physique on stage, brandishing props of their daily lives, while simultaneously also expected to clap for the other performers. A space in which your dentist posts a “day in the life” reel scored to lo-fi beats, and your cousin writes a thread about their morning workout routine with affiliate links, and a guy you went to high school with tries to build an audience by doing 90-second tips on fantasy football drafting. The central irony is brutal and obvious: the platforms promise community but deliver spectacle.

And here’s the thing—if the whole setup feels vaguely familiar, it’s because we’ve already seen a version of it.

Reality TV, circa the late 1990s and early 2000s, prepped us for this shift. Think of those early seasons of Survivor or Big Brother or even The Real World. Contestants, marooned in some exotic setting, quickly learned to exaggerate their emotions for the camera. Crying louder than they felt, laughing longer than the joke warranted, transforming every gesture into an event, because they had internalized the idea that someone out there is watching. That watching was the whole point. Social media, in its current state, is simply a more democratized, more efficient, and infinitely more invasive reality TV. We are all contestants now. The camera is always on. The audience is everyone else. The prize is attention.

What’s disturbing is how fast the shift happened, and how little protest there was. Because there was a time—this is not nostalgia talking but a matter of recorded technological fact—when the internet really was used primarily for conversation. If you’re over 30, you probably remember AOL Instant Messenger: clunky green-and-white chat boxes, the eternal question of what to make your away message (“brb, shower” vs. a clever Jay-Z lyric). Or the earliest days of Facebook, when it was still “The Facebook,” gated to college students with dot-edu addresses, and the biggest flex was having more than 200 friends in your network. MySpace pages that let you embed a song on autoplay, hand-coded HTML backgrounds with neon flames. These were not, yet, performance spaces (at least not outside of the typical social performing we do for our peers). They were imperfect but earnest attempts at digital sociability.

You shared news—got into college, broke up with your girlfriend, discovered a new artist. You weren’t optimizing for reach. You weren’t auditioning for strangers.

Then came the metrics. Slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, like the way water creeps under a door during a flood. Friend counts turned into follower counts. “Top 8” lists on MySpace warned of the brutal hierarchies to come. By the time the “like” button arrived, the logic had shifted: no longer was a post just something you put up for people who already knew you, but something to be measured, tallied, compared. The “like” seemed innocuous at first. A little blue thumbs-up, a token of recognition no heavier than a nod across a crowded room. But it metastasized into something else: a micro-contract, a signal of allegiance, a demonstration of loyalty. The absence of a like became suspect. Why didn’t she like my post? Did he see it? Did I do something?

The button, which Mark Zuckerberg once justified as a way to “spread positivity,” in practice rewired how people thought about each other, about themselves. It became a scoring system, a moral economy.

And then TikTok arrived, and the underlying logic was revealed in its purest, most distilled form. TikTok does not even bother pretending to be about friends. Its algorithm doesn’t care who you know, only how long it can keep your pupils dilated and your thumb flicking. Which means the experience is like channel-surfing in a casino: your cousin’s dance recital spliced between a stranger’s skincare tutorial, a cat falling into a sink, a welder in Ohio demonstrating a new torch. The randomness is not accidental, it’s engineered to maximize stickiness. And the design flips the script entirely: instead of a network of friends, you get a slot machine of content. Any one post could be the jackpot. Virality is always one spin away.

Boom. Addiction.

The psychological effect of this cannot be overstated. Once you internalize that every post could be the one that “blows up,” every upload becomes a lottery ticket. You no longer post to communicate. You post to win. The “creator economy”—a euphemism that makes being a small-time hustler for attention sound like a middle-class profession—is fueled by this very logic. Each of us is a player at the slots, feeding content into the machine, hoping the reels align.

And once you start living inside this logic, the self reorganizes accordingly. Ordinary experiences are no longer just experiences; they are raw material. A dinner isn’t just a dinner. It’s a potential reel. A vacation isn’t a vacation. It’s a season finale. A workout, a protest march, a haircut, a breakup: everything is content waiting to be shaped, filtered, captioned, optimized. Your coworkers, your neighbors, your sister: they are no longer just people you know but spectators to your curated persona. You no longer talk to them directly so much as perform at them. And this isn’t simply narcissism, though narcissism is certainly part of it. It’s also adaptation. It’s survival. Because if the platforms are casinos, then to participate at all is to play by the casino’s rules.

And the house always wins.

The brutal flattening effect of this transformation is visible everywhere. Intimacy collapses into performance. Grief is formatted for the timeline: someone dies, and the mourning is translated into hashtags, black-and-white slideshows, captions engineered for shareability. Joy is presented in press-release form: birth announcements, engagements, anniversaries—all optimized for reach. Even politics and activism, once collective endeavors, are atomized into bite-size packages: slogans rendered in pastel fonts, protest videos trimmed to thirty seconds, outrage turned into memes. Everything is flattened, packaged, commodified.

And who benefits? Not you. Not your cousin. Not the guy doing fantasy football explainers. The beneficiaries are the platforms themselves, the companies that siphon off every microsecond of your attention and repackage it into data points for advertisers. They have trained us to see one another not as people but as nodes in an attention economy. The metrics are not incidental. They are the point. The performance is not an accident. It is the product.

My high school classmate, Miranda, has become this way by design.

The cultural result is that people now live as though they are micro-celebrities in their own reality shows. The Truman Show, but with everyone simultaneously playing Truman and the audience. Every brunch is a press junket. Every follower is a fan waiting for the next episode. Every silence, every lull in posting, feels like irrelevance creeping in. Which explains the peculiar anxieties of our time: the obsessive brand maintenance, the terror of being forgotten, the collapse of privacy into perpetual publicity.

We volunteered for this role, and now we can’t quit.

You could argue, of course, that none of this is new. Haven’t people always performed? Weren’t family photo albums curated, holiday letters self-promotional, cocktail parties full of posturing anecdotes? Sure. But the difference is structural. The photo album was not engineered for monetization. The cocktail anecdote was not mediated by algorithm. What’s new is the industrial scale, the systemization, the monetization of performance itself. The posture is no longer a byproduct; it’s the business model.

Which brings us back to the starting problem of language. “Social” has become spectacle. “Friends” have become fans. Conversation has been eroded into performance. And the cost is not only intimacy but something deeper: the ability to exist unperformed. The ability to be uncurated. The ability to be human without imagining how that humanity will play as content.

The final, unnerving question is: if everyone is performing, who is left to be the audience?

Who is actually watching, if everyone is too busy auditioning? The possibility that the answer is no one—that we’re all screaming into the void—would almost be a relief. The darker possibility is that the only true audience left is the machine itself. That the gaze we spend our lives performing for is already nonhuman. The algorithm, the data center, the server farm in Utah that registers our likes and scrolls.

And if that’s the case, then the deepest irony of all is this: in our frantic effort to be seen, to be witnessed, to be recognized, we may have surrendered the last truly human act of all…

a life unperformed.

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