How social media dismantled quality
Social media are not cultural platforms. They never have been. They never will be. Yet they still manage to get worse.
They are high-traffic visual landfills, designed for compulsive consumption.
Their logic is industrial: produce, dispose, produce again. Every piece of content must bend to an algorithm that flattens everything to a single standard: readable, fast, predictable. The audience is trained, not educated. Over time, this repetition anesthetizes: the act of scrolling becomes automatic, the critical threshold vanishes, imagination atrophies.
We are not facing a simple technological evolution, but a structural transformation of how visual culture, of which photography is a part and a vital element, is produced and consumed. Born with the promise to democratize expression, social media quickly became platforms governed by a single imperative: maximize attention in an endless stream of content to keep the user inside the platform as long as possible, thus making social media attractive to sponsors with the goal of exponentially increasing profits. This system does not favor quality or complexity, but repeatability and immediate clarity. The algorithm rewards what is easily decipherable and recognizable, feeding a cycle that progressively excludes everything that requires time, attention or a deeper reading. Visual culture thus reduces to a flat, uniform feed, where value is measured in likes and shares. It is the pornography of familiarity: the user must recognize, not reflect.
The so-called content creator, a title that by itself means absolutely nothing, since anyone is technically a content creator — in fact, when you go to the bathroom and defecate, you have just created content perfectly consistent with a container: the toilet bowl — has risen to a key figure of social media, a professional of homogenization, a producer of content perfectly tailored to fit the platform.
Frequency, duration, rhythm, tone. Form is everything. Real content, meaning depth, vision, is irrelevant. If it disturbs, it gets removed. If it’s complex, it doesn’t get shown. If it’s original, it doesn’t get recognized. It’s more than an aesthetic issue, it’s a deep cultural one.
The extreme simplification of images and messages mirrors a shrinking of the viewer’s critical and interpretive ability, gradually training people to recognize patterns instead of questioning meaning.
After all, to understand complex images three things are needed: education, time, attention. Three things that would stop scrolling and are therefore considered failures by the algorithm.
But the algorithm is not an omnipotent entity that shapes everything on its own. It needs a user trained to collaborate unconsciously. This is what makes it not only effective but profoundly toxic. And it is with the assimilation of the user to the algorithm that the circle closes. Attention, having become a commodity, gets compressed into very brief and repetitive time windows, leaving no space for reflection and discovery.
The result is a sort of cultural anesthesia, where the act of looking becomes a mechanical and superficial gesture, suitable for an audience trained to react in a few seconds and scroll to the next post. The zombified user thus becomes an integral part of the system, unconsciously following its rules and feeling satisfied doing so. The act of scrolling is in fact a dopaminergic loop, a reward system fueled by the urge for more. And as in every behavioral addiction, the brain adapts by lowering its thresholds: more stimulus, more speed, more impact is needed. The attention span shrinks, the capacity for depth evaporates.
It is a perfect loop. And a perverse one.
An uneducated mass → does not demand quality content → creators adapt to the level → the level drops → the mass remains ignorant → and it starts again.
And in the social media economy, no one really wants to break the cycle, because noise sells better than thought. The more ignorant you are, the more easily manipulated you become. And the more easily manipulated you are, the more profitable you get.
It’s like feeding an entire city with junk food: if no one has ever tasted a real meal, they’ll think frozen fries are the only flavor that exists. And if you offer them a proper dish, they’ll say it’s too weird, too bitter, too complicated.
In the cognitive desert of social media, any content that requires time is content that dies. Not because it’s weak, but because it’s unfit for the cage it’s thrown into.
The feed drowns it. The platform hides it. And the masses, even when they see it, won’t recognize it.
Visual culture is being emptied by disuse.
