# The Age of Social Media Is Ending  ## About - Author: Ian Bogost - Title: The Age of Social Media Is Ending - Tags: #articles - URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/twitter-facebook-social-media-decline/672074/ ## Highlights That was a terrible idea. As I’ve written before on this subject, [people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/10/fix-facebook-making-it-more-like-google/620456/). They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either. From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality. That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy. --- If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media. ---