Social Media Metaphors

Facebook is like a party in a house of mirrors where you wander around from conversation to conversation. The guest list is bizarre - your grandma is here, and your friends from college, your coworkers, and maybe even an ex or two. You're expected to be polite, but things can often devolve if you bring up politics or religion. It's loud and the lights are low and what you manage to observe is distorted (thanks, algorithm - er, "mirrors"). At a certain point you come to suspect that everyone's amusing party anecdotes, carefully rehearsed for the crowd, are all just different versions of a story you've heard a million times before.

Instagram is your high school yearbook. All those school portraits that look like you but don't really look like you. Each club photo and team action shot carefully selected to tell a certain story of what happened. Of course, later on when you flip through the photographs you won't remember things as they actually were, just as they were presented here. And what is a yearbook without its signatures? All the "Have a great summer"s and "Be sure to write"s - like, like, like.

Twitter is a soapbox on a street corner. Only there's a soapbox on every street corner, so really it's a Greek chorus of doomsday prophets shouting endlessly from every crossroads in the city. They're all talking over each other in a terrible racket, and sometimes even though they're saying the same things, and maybe even things you agree with, it's all so terrible that you just want to cover your ears and run to a place beyond crossroads and street corners where you might at last find some peace.