Why is social media so humourless?

An essay version of the video – not just a transcript but a text that I’ve rewritten thoroughly to work as text.

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Overview

Why do jokes fall flat online? Why is it so easy to get into trouble by saying something you thought was fine, but others found offensive?

Turns out this is because of a basic feature of how these social media networks work.

Video

Audio

Context collapse in social media

Have you ever made a joke on Facebook, or some other social media site only for land like a lead balloon?

It might have worked for your friends – your pre-existing circle on social media – but as soon as somebody re-posted it or boosted it out of your circle, somebody utterly humourless reacted badly and didn’t get the joke. They got offended and angry about silliness merely existing.

There’s a reason for that, and it goes to the root of most of what’s wrong with social media.

Not everything that’s wrong, but it is one of the core problems, especially in short textual media.

As I’ve been getting into doing videos and podcast episodes and thinking about the role that social media plays in my media landscape and my contributions to that landscape, I’ve been revisiting some of the research I studied and read about in the past.

And it turns out there are reasons why the social media experience is so toxic for so many of us.

In the last video I addressed many of the issues that affect TikTok and other short-form video. It gives you the impression of an argument as opposed to letting an argument unfold.

The constraints imposed by the duration, by the screen size, limit the level of detail you can deliver in a video, which affects the argument they can deliver. This obviously is not great, since this is where much of our political discourse is taking place. But short-form textual social media – the ones that are all modelled after Twitter – aren’t much of a positive influence either.

They have a lock on the journalistic class, the political class, and on quite a bit of academic research. People of influence tend to disproportionately get their information from these networks. Whereas the public tends to get them from videos – short and long.

They are the first step in for modern information distribution.

An academic who wants to promote their paper will start by posting about it on X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon.

Politicians make their announcements and commentary on X and then on video.

Reporters rely on these sites to discover news and scoops.

These social media networks all have the issue where you can quite easily ruin your entire career – or at least your day – by saying something completely and perfectly innocuous that gets interpreted by somebody else as offensive.

Sometimes these things are offensive, but you’re used to voicing them in a more forgiving environment. So when you switch to social media, you don’t adjust your language and tone. You don’t code-switch. You don’t change your vocabulary and approach to suit a more public audience.

You might not even be aware that a more public audience was possible. Most of us only have our few followers and friends and people rarely notice our nonsense. But sometimes people do notice and it’s rarely pleasant.

There’s a name for this: context collapse.

It originates with the sociologist and psychologist Erving Goffman, but I personally first encountered it in the papers, essays, and talks, and books by danah boyd who is one of the leading academics on social media – especially the social media use of teenagers.

And the way that she describes context collapse is that, before, you’d have distinct spheres of social interaction – the high school hallway social interaction for students, the classroom interactions, the family interactions – each of these would have a different language, different vocabulary and different approaches. They would have different expectations for what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s healthy, and what’s unhealthy. What makes the other people in a context angry and what doesn’t.

What social media does is collapse all these contexts into one, so you now have to keep track of half a dozen different environments in your head when you’re writing online.

Any one of these contexts could find your discourse offensive.

This is particularly obvious with humour because jokes require an understanding of the audience and its expectations, because playing with expectations is what makes a joke funny. If your audience is completely different from what you expected, the joke is gonna fall flat or even be considered offensive.

But this also effects normal discussions about topics that are important to our media landscape, our culture, and our politics. Like how we talk about reading.

Reading is important, as you can tell from the fact that a text-based social media remains to this day the first line of information distribution over video. So reading is quite important and the media loves to debate declines or changes in literacy.

But when we talk about reading on a social media network, there’s a limit to how much context we can provide. There’s a limit to how much additional text we can include in each post to define which kind of reading we’re talking and what context we’re coming from. The length limits of the text exacerbates the context collapse.

When you try and discuss the various distint features of audiobooks, print books, and ebooks what you have to say immediately gets mired in multiple different contexts.

One context is that there are snobs who try and elevate print over everything else. They are trying to exclude other media, especially the kind that they feel is making books too accessible, such as ebooks or audiobooks.

Conversely, designers and typographers who are trying to deliver the best designed textual reading experience need to be able to discuss the needs of each form without reservation.

When somebody wades into the online discourse and says something like “audiobooks aren’t reading,” both of those contexts – design and elitism – collapse into the same social sphere.

There is no distinguishing between the two. The designer, in saying this, might be making the point that audiobooks require very different considerations and very different engineering sensibilities such as acoustic design. They require things that just don’t exist in print. Print conversely requires a level of design and thought to the binding, paper, and the kind of ink. All of which are considerations that don’t make any sense in the context of an ebook.

The discourse of a designer trying to talk about the distinction between these, is collapsed with the discourse of the snobs who want to alienate entire sectors of society from reading. Everybody gets ganged upon for making an argument that they aren’t actually making. Because the context has collapsed. The designer get shouted at for being a snob. Or they get supported by the snobs because they think the designer is talking about the elevation of print.

But they didn’t actually say any such thing. They just didn’t have the space in three hundred characters to highlight the specific context of the print form.

These contexts are forced to exist within the same space and this makes nuanced discourse impossible.

It makes arguments and conflict inevitable. It degrades our ability to discuss important topics. The all-encompassing nature of social media degrades our ability to surface specialisation and knowledge from academia and experts. Their contributions are cut off right out of the gate, because textual social media is where information starts its journey to disseminate out into the other media.

This context collapse destroys any possible discourse before it starts spreading. We have crippled our ability to talk properly about society, the world around us, and understand the environment that we live in.

There really isn’t a way around this.

As long as these remain the spaces that academia, politicians, and experts are using to convey their ideas and as long as it’s only space that reporters and journalists really pay attention to, we will be held back by this mush that it turns our discourse into.

The only recourse we have as individuals is to be less reliant on these platforms and switch to other forms of discovering information and knowledge. RSS feeds, trusted websites, or anything really that delivers longer texts, audio, and video and, more importantly, is siloed into separate contexts.

We need specialised pages that follow each topic and give it the detail and nuance it needs without worrying about outsiders misunderstanding it, and then attacking it for offending them in a way that was not intended at all.

We need to be careful about our reliance on social media. Not just because of the mental health issues – there’s a lot of emphasis on the anxiety and mental health ramifications of extensive social media use.

One of the bigger problems with the dominance of social media is that it distorts our understanding of the world around us. It changes what we see, what we hear, and what we read in ways that diminishes our understanding of the world. It makes it harder for us to constructively respond to crises.

Try and spend less time on Bluesky or Mastodon, and just leave X entirely. No good comes from X. It’s just going to give you bad ideas.

Find a few good websites or podcasts and follow them on the topics you’re interested in. Read those. Don’t rely on search engines or social media to get the get your information.

Try to let the nuance of specialisation exist without attacking it. Because we need it.

It’s kind of the only way we can go forward from here.