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Thread 1/21: A Meta Thread on Threads and Meta and Embodied Audience Simulation on Social Media and the Joyfully Fröhliche Game of Personalogy. The launch of Threads — and the initial onboarding decisions of whether to go “public” or “private” and whether to follow “all” or some or none—has inspired me to share my thinking about the inherent challenges and frustrations associated with embodied audience simulation (EAS) in the context of socially mediated communications (SMC).
Thread 2/21: I propose a freshly gamified model for how to engage in socially mediated communication while maintaining your mental health, which I call The Game of Personalogy. As a user of every social media platform (from Friendster to Farcaster), founder of a social network (if you must know, it was a platform for coining words and phrases, a place where profound metaphors and silly puns mingled), and an advisor to many social media platforms...
Thread 3/21: I’ve come to see how socially mediated communication (SMC)—unlike direct messaging (DM)—requires significant mental processing capacity for embodied audience simulation. We engage in embodied audience simulation—the cognitively and emotionally neurologically tangible construction of a frame of the number and identity of audience members—even when speaking to a single person.
Thread 4/21: Sure, it's more complicated and resource-intensive when talking to a group or speaking to a crowd. But when we engage in socially mediated communication, embodied audience simulation becomes a next-level frustrating moving target. Unlike communicating with a single person, group, or even a stadium of people, on social media, we’re constantly re-simulating an ever-fluctuating audience frame, creating uncertainty about the identity and number of people in our audience.
Thread 5/21: The framing instability is a bit like you’re trying to take a picture while the camera keeps jumping from close up to zoomed out, and every frame and filter in between. To cope with the ever-shifting audience frame, we have developed mental models and heuristics as socially mediated communication has matured and our use of social media has persisted.
Thread 6/21: We might simulate an audience frame of a handful of known individuals who like our communications ("audience of likers" heuristic), or a group of individuals who tend to critique us ("audience of haters" heuristic) or a truly representative sample audience of everyone online (the “representative sample” heuristic).
Thread 7/21: Interestingly, the “shots fired” Tweet by Elon Musk about Threads—"It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram"—suggests that he believes that Threads users will embrace and encourage the “audience of likers” heuristic, while Twitter users swallow the red pill of the “representative sample” heuristic.
Thread 8/21: Alternatively, we may simulate ourselves as the target audience ("solipsistic audience" heuristic), or we might just say what we want as if we’re screaming into a void, allegedly not caring about any audience, as if we’re shouting into that canyon in Garden State (the "DGAF" heuristic). And there are so many more heuristic possibilities— perhaps you imagine speaking to a single person, like John Steinbeck or his winged pig, Pigasus…
Thread 9/21: The issue is not with any one heuristic, but with their inherent instability when confronted with the motivated yet unpredictable, partially intentional and partially algorithmically driven reality of the actual audience for our socially mediated communications. What happens when your simulation of an “audience of likers” is confronted with actual haters?
Thread 10/21: What happens when your simulated audience of your Cartesian self encounters a Hegelian other intent on enacting some reciprocally subjugating dialectic? What happens when a choir of unignorable voices comes back from your Garden State abyss?
Thread 11/21: The unpredictable nature of socially mediated communication—and all this concomitant simulated audience frame shifting—introduces unexpected encounters that disrupt our default embodied audience simulation, making the experience of even casual social media use epically mentally exhausting.
Thread 12/21: Consequently, we often find ourselves continually adjusting and recalibrating and regenerating our communication to align with the moving target of our embodied audience simulation.
Thread 13/21: So what’s the solution? To unplug? Certainly, it helps to take a break, or at least to cease daily active use. But like the mob, “just when you think you're out, social media pulls you back in." How? Oh, a multitude of ways. With tons of entertaining memes and media. And by embedding a direct messaging platform into a socially mediated communication platform, just like Instagram, Twitter, and soon—I'd be willing to bet—Threads.
Thread 14/21: But that’s not all—even if you manage to get out and delete your social media accounts, as Jaron Lanier proposes (for good reasons, I might add), I believe that too would be too little, too late. The lunacy of socially mediated communication has already embedded itself in our heads. You don’t have to be Marshall McLuhan to see that, like writing and television, socially mediated communication introduces its own framework of being that operates throughout the culture in which the communicative technology has taken hold, irrespective of whether particular individuals opt in or opt out of its use, and a core tenant of social media's framework of being is the perpetually moving target of embodied audience simulation.
Thread 15/21: So, what’s the solution? I can think of a big one. And it’s sure as heck ain’t perfect. But on the first day of Threads, I figured I’d try my best to awkwardly thread this needle. We can engage in socially mediated communication as if we’re playing a personally branded game of analogical personhood: The Game of Personalogy. In my experience, most successful and mentally healthy users of social media (yes, they exist) have adopted some version of this Game of Personalogy, as opposed to trying to be their “authentic selves” on social media.
Thread 16/21: Ironically, the "try to be your authentic self" model of socially mediated communication, a key pillar in Facebook’s initial ascent (and cited in the S-1 they filed to go public), is likely the model most damaging model for mental health. When you're trying to be your "authentic self," every shattering of the simulated audience frame, all of which were created by your authentic self in the process of being your authentic self, can feel like an indication that your authentic self was wrong about the very audience it was addressing.
Thread 17/21: Along with space and time, the embodied simulation of the size and identity of your audience is, in a sense, part of our a priori understanding of the reality of our authentic selves, so constantly breaking and undermining that frame can feel like a profoundly invalidating indictment of your self-concept, your stable conception of reality, and your authentic self.
Thread 18/21: When you play the Game of Personalogy, that risk is reduced. And even thought you're no longer trying to be your authentic self, it’s not necessary to expressly play an entirely alien role or adopt a surreal performative persona. Instead, you can simply play an analogical version of yourself.
Thread 19/21: Adopting a new screen name or handle can aid the Personalogical Game model, but it’s not a necessity, so long as you know what you’re doing. Playing the Game of Personalogy on social media enables you to emotionally detach from the high stakes game of "authentic selfhood" and enjoy the ever-shifting simulated audience frame as one of the challenges of the socially mediated frame of being.
Thread 20/21: You can even celebrate the fact that it’s dictated by an elusive and perpetually changing mix of human and algorithmic and artificially intelligent factors. (Right now, incidentally, I’m playing the Humbly Benevolent Socialmediologist, so I’d be overjoyed if even a single soul were to derive even a modicum of benefit from any of this, but also completely comfortable if this thread were summarily ignored, the sad fate of many such reflections.)
Thread 21/21: Nevertheless, playing the Game of Personalogy on social media lets us groove to the algo-rhythm (without wondering whether making dad jokes like “grooving to the algo-rhythm” could condemn our authentic selves in the imagined eyes of our simulated audiences.)
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