Maybe I Don't Get Social Media

by Victor L Vogel

February 12, 2023

Someone recently replied to a post I made. That person said they thought I didn't get social media. I appreciate that comment. Those comments motivate me to stop and think.?

I discovered that social media feels like it could be more social to me. My background is in interpersonal communication. I have used it for almost 50 years, professionally and personally. You learn a lot from interpersonal interaction.

After reflecting on social media, at least from my belief systems and communication background, I see social media as a two-edged sword. On the one hand, people have a platform to say and do almost anything they want. On the other hand, people can mostly say and do whatever they want. The openness of social media allows people to accumulate more information of interest. On the other hand, people suffer from information overload. For example, if you are interested in leadership development and Google leadership development, you will find a pro-ponderous amount of information about leadership development. When writing this chapter, I got over a billion references. That is information overload. Social media copes with information overload through the use of algorithms. An area of great debate.

Who determines the algorithms? Is the underlying purpose of algorithms the most expert and informed post for the searcher? Or is it to prioritize the position based on advertising revenue for the company? Most people who conduct Google searches don't know the purpose of Google's algorithms. Many companies change their algorithms frequently. The control of information overload is focused on something other than giving an individual searcher the best expert response. More than likely, they are using personal data to direct the searcher toward those posts that advertise the most on their platform. They track users' data and recommend items or information before you request it. That is what social media has become. Not so much social and a hell of a lot about revenue generation.

Now that I have reflected on social media, it brings me back to my purpose for using it. Retired, I am not looking to build a brand or grow a business. I am making fifty years of expertise available to people who may benefit from my knowledge, experience, and wisdom gained through fifty years of mistakes and successes. This experience comes from working in the private sector, for-profit corporations, non-profit organizations, and government contracts. I dealt with various domestic and international industries, varying sizes from billion dollars to individuals, e.g., lawyers. Throughout these fifty years, I have used my education and advanced degrees, along with continued education through professional organizations, research, and growth in my field, to transfer those theories into practical application for culture change, leadership development, high-performance team development, and personal relationships. Of course, through time, I have had failures and successes, both large and small. No one is perfect. My losses and victories have strengthened my knowledge and skill in interpersonal communication to improve the above areas.?

Mastering unsocial media is proving to be a challenge for me. Primarily because so much of unsocial media focus on something other than social. Okay, I will stop calling it unsocial media because that is distracting. But that is what has happened to social media. It has become unsocial and more attention-getting. Why do I say that? I most associate the term social with "seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; friendly; sociable; gregarious. of, relating to, connected with, or suited to polite or fashionable society: a social event. living or disposed to live in companionship with others or in a community, rather than in isolation: We are social beings." Merriam-Webster. To attain this meaning, you need to sustain ongoing interpersonal communication. By its very nature, social grouping demands communication to enjoy companionship, feel connected, and participate in some society of your choosing.?

Today's social media sites violate many basic principles of interpersonal communication. For example, the continued dialogue loop improves messages' meaning through dialogue. This looping communication, which requires active listening and feedback using verbal and nonverbal communication channels, is often shortened or eliminated via social media channels. Tik-Tok's posts have a half-life of 0 minutes, which means your message sustains for less than a minute unless the post goes viral instantly. A half-life for LinkedIn is 24 hours. Here is a link that lays out the meaning of half-life and reviews the half-life of most of the popular social media platforms?https://scottgraffius.com/blog/files/social-2023.html.

So what are some of these communication principles that social media violates? First, it minimizes the channel's a person uses to communicate with others, e.g., lack of nonverbal communication. The messages are in the form of written posts and replies. These posts and responses restrict the length and duration, which speaks to the above link describing half-life as a measure of the impact of a post. It is a well-established fact that people attach over 80% of the meaning of a message to nonverbal communication. There is virtually no nonverbal communication on social media. If you use video posts, you don't have any immediate feedback or the opportunity to listen to the person with whom you are communicating actively. You don't have dialogue because the primary purpose is to reach as many people as possible with a post. Your success is measured by the number of likes you receive, not the quality of dialogue interaction. In essence, you are involved with group communication addressing a large audience. It could be thousands, with many only providing a few hundred at most replies, seldom resulting in an ongoing looping dialogue with active listening and feedback.?

Another impacted theory is the theory of communication continuum concerning social media. This theory states that interpersonal communication is based on a continuum of interaction, from impersonal to personal. Impersonal is often peppered with superficial information, e.g., where do your work? What movies do you like? What is your favorite restaurant? Impersonal communication is restricted to non-personal issues and familiarity. If you find common ground or an attractive quality about someone, you might venture into more personal communication topics like politics or fundamental values. At the personal level, you feel comfortable with someone and may discuss intimate issues like fears and core values like love or hate. Seldom do people traverse this continuum on social media. We know this because people easily judge others on social media because they don't have to address them face-to-face and cope with the conflict in an ongoing dialogue. You unfriend someone—possibly the most dehumanizing aspect of social media. First, I doubt they qualified as a friend in the first place. But, if they did and you unfriend them on social media, break up a relationship, or even terminate someone affecting their livelihood and psychological well-being, you would not term this social.

My purpose is to offer what I believe could be helpful to people struggling with toxic leadership or a personal relationship where improving your communication skill might help you improve those situations. I want to help people. But I also know from experience that if people aren't required to invest in their development, they don't have the incentive to change based on that development. While consulting inside organizations, the company covers the cost of employee mentoring. The employee's motivation was keeping the job or moving to a better position.?

On social media, many people are looking for free and quick-fix solutions. They want to know the five best leadership skills to be a better leader. They will receive a post on LinkedIn or an article from Harvard Business Review, read it, then try to apply it, often failing and not understanding why. It isn't the five skills listed but the lack of dialogue to ensure you know what was behind those five skills that make them effective and your knowledge about how to transfer those skills into a resisting environment. Most likely, someone may take the skills from such an article and try to apply them without knowing whether or not they are needed. Sometimes these come through posted memes without a thorough explanation. Why? The meme is a loss leader to draw you back to the person who posted the meme for potential work.?These leadership tips often only prove useful with quality assessments that use the same leadership tips. Adding to this problem is that many of those billions of references mentioned earlier have five or ten leadership tips. Still, they all differ, leaving the reader with hundreds, if not thousands, of leadership tips to filter.

I struggle with social media because, in many cases, it defeats the purpose I am trying to impart to people. That is the importance of fundamental interpersonal communication to improve connections and communication quality. I don't see this happening on social media. There is an opportunity for it to happen without people taking time from their families to travel and gather in groups face-to-face so dialogue can occur. I see that potential in how one might use ZOOM or any other similar platform to conduct ongoing dialogues. Those platforms are expensive. So fees must be associated with using these mediums to help improve interpersonal communication. The current best solution is a subscription platform that allows minimal mentoring with the option of individuals booking advanced mentoring. With a subscription, as I have designed it, you get interactive live interpersonal communication webinars. I am developing a curriculum around interpersonal communication webinars. The curriculum is my educational strategy. The mentoring approach can be done one-on-one, but without corporate assistance, most people can't afford to take advantage of that help for any length of time.?

These are my dilemmas in reaching my goals of helping leaders and individuals improve their interpersonal communication skills, thus enhancing their ability to connect to others. It is a work in progress. Putting the interpersonal into social media is the challenge. My other challenge is the fact that I am not doing this to make a living. I want to continue to help those struggling. I can't, however, do it for free. Perhaps this combination has created unreachable goals, but the unattainable has always been my target in life.?