On Social Media and Connection

I designed the reactions on this website to be a bit more stalker-friendly. I like the idea that someone can be around without having to announce that they’re around.

Social media made almost every form of presence visible, measurable, and expected to produce a response. I think that’s part of what began to bother me about it.

Being away from almost all of it gave me peace of mind I hadn’t felt in a while. It also made me notice how normal constant overstimulation has become. You can scroll for a few minutes and move from someone’s vacation to a war to a joke to an ad to someone’s body to some tragedy somewhere else in the world. None of these things is a problem on its own. It’s the volume, the speed, and the constant switching.

Then we expect the same brain to focus, read, study, work deeply, sleep well, and be productive. We become overstimulated, then spend the rest of our time trying to build habits that help us recover our attention.

And I think the same thing happened to the meaning of connection. Staying away from social media started to look like isolation, introversion, or antisocial behavior, as if constant visibility and availability were the normal state. Reachability became connection. Visibility became presence. Observation became familiarity.

We basically mixed a lot of different things together until we started reacting to them as if they carried the same meaning, even when they don’t. I’m not in a position to claim anything scientific here—this is just an observation—but I think the meaning we attach to things contributes a lot to how intense our emotions become. And that intensity matters. It can shape how tense, exaggerated, or overreactive our response ends up being.

What fascinates me is the motion itself: how meanings can slowly drift without anyone really deciding that they should, until one thing starts emotionally carrying the weight of another. At some point the distinction is still there logically, but not necessarily in how we react to it anymore. And because the change happens gradually, it can feel completely natural by the time we notice it.

I think that’s the part I keep coming back to: not what people are doing on these platforms, but what the platforms slowly train us to treat as normal.