With the upcoming TikTok ban, I’ve been thinking a lot about what social media means to our lives. Most of current TikTok is full of users discussing alternative apps and how to save your content. For some people, a very small portion of the app, their lives have changed and their content is worth keeping. But for the vast majority of us…

Let it go!

When the mass exodus from Twitter/X happened last year there was an article that called it the largest loss of information in human history. Akin to the Library of Alexandria.

While it is lost, I have to imagine the Library of Alexandria was not full of hate speech, the rush to have the first edgy comment, naked bodies, or links to other things. Yes, maybe once a day if we were lucky there was something fascinating. A mystery solved, a revelation, breaking news, something. Most of what was there and is there now is nothing that needs to be saved for posterity.

During the height of reality TV many people said their lives could be a reality show. Yes and no. I could believe that people who have a large family, place of work, or friend group, could find a half hour worth of interesting things that happen in one week. Or 22 minutes minus commercials. 22 out of 10,080, .22% of the week might be interesting. The rest is sleep, and eat, and drive, and shower, and clean up the house. All of the day to day monotony that we seek to escape from with TV.

I was being generous with my estimates of how much of social media is worth keeping but I would be willing to drop it down to the same .22%. We’re keeping things that don’t matter because if something is worth saving then it is also worth the time we put into it. If all the content of an app goes away, then the time spent on that same app feels a waste.

My TikTok posts are random thoughts from the day. Saving them would be like saving all of my phone calls. Most of Twitter/X is the same random thoughts, and links to anything I’ve done in between. I would want to always save what I’ve written and the podcasts I’ve appeared on, but that’s not social media. Those are posted on sites and programs with the entire purpose of hosting creative endeavors.

Honestly, I think the only thing worth saving across any social media are memories. There will come a day when Facebook and the other sites will go away or change into something we no longer use. When that happens I will want to make sure that those sites are not the only place where pictures of my son exists.

The only thing the apps themselves do that can’t be replicated elsewhere and is worth continuing is connecting us with other people we would have never met otherwise. I have many friends who are only in my life because our creative projects crossed over and we went from following each other online, to DMs, to phone calls and texts. That is a bond that is always worth continuing, but it is also a connection that is bigger than one app. People found ways to make new friends long before the internet, computers, or even electricity. We’ll find a way as all of these apps go dark.

All that said, I am carefully looking at who I follow on TikTok with a voice that I still want to hear and I’m finding those same people on other apps. But if they ever went away then that’s just part of life. I’m not still in touch with anyone from my first few jobs or grade school because we all move on. Don’t think of it as TikTok going away forever, think of it as “have a great summer, see you next year.”