Social media overgrazing, 3 reasons why we need to give the land a rest . . .

We often hear about the affects of globalisation on pollution and the environment. That we are destroying our planet and ecosystems at a rate that is too high to be able to come back from. Yet, how many people consider the online ecosystem and how we are creating a desensitised, over-stimulated world through the usage of our social media and technology?

Just think of a normal ecosystem,it is not too different from an online one. This one also has resources, it has a food chain and it exists within a specific setting. Each social media platform is akin to a piece of grazing land where people come to graze by giving their attention to particular posts. With this perspective an interesting trend begins to emerge. Each new social media platform not only changes how we communicate, but also provides us with new tools to do so. As such, it is not surprising to see that each new platform has organic or natural traction. It was much easier to get a viral YouTube video in 2010 than it is today, simply because of the amount of content people consume, their attention spans and the amount of people on the platform.

Furthermore, this same pattern can be seen in Facebook and Instagram where over a period of time their organic reach has gone down. The reason is to do with the 3 factors mentioned above. Just as a land has limited resources before it is mined dry, so too our social media platforms have a limited amount of resources.

Limited in terms of the amount of natural reach you can get per the amount of people watching, limited in the amount of attention people give per piece of content and limited in how many pieces of content people can absorb. The “sheep” on social media can only graze so long before the land becomes degraded due to over saturation. It follows that in the same way that we have tried to protect our natural land we need an overarching policy to regulate our social media space to avoid its overuse and abuse of its natural resources:

Attention, content and natural traction

A way to do this could be to divide social media regionally or internationally, or to set a limit over how many people can use a particular social network at once. This limiter would drive up competition, enable paid variations of certain platforms and encourage people to use otherwise unused platforms in order to engage new audiences.

If we continue to mine our social media resources dry, we might have a future in which content over saturation leads to a loss of functionality on social media, with heavy pay walls and closed communities separating those who succeed on social media, from those who do not.