Social Media and Smart Phones Podcast Transcript (14 Sep 2023)

How did the widespread use of smartphones change how we use social media? Did this change serve the original purpose of online social networking?
We look back to 2008 and think about how the introduction of smartphones changed how we connect online, with a special focus on the lead-up to and introduction of Instagram.

Taryn Ward  Hi, I'm Taryn Ward.

Steven Jones  And I'm Steven Jones.

Taryn Ward  And this is Breaking the Feed, Social Media: Beyond the Headlines. 

Steven Jones  We're taking a closer look at the core issues around social media, including the existing social media landscape, to better understand the role of social media in our everyday lives and in society.

Taryn Ward  By thinking about where social media started and why, and thinking about how it's changed, and why, we're better place to consider which of these changes have been for the better, and for who.

Steven Jones  We hope to appreciate the current landscape and anticipate the decisions regulators big social and consumers are likely to make moving forward more fully. But we'll save any future speculation for another episode. 

Taryn Ward  Last time, we looked at where it all started with online social networking before smartphones. Today, we'll look at how the widespread use of smartphones beginning with the release of Apple's iPhone in 2007, change social media, and arguably how social media fueled the widespread use of smartphones will follow these changes up to 2016. So we'll focus on social media that was both post-smartphone and pre-TikTok.

Steven Jones  We'll begin again with a question. How did the widespread use of social media and smartphones change our lives? With two supplementary questions in mind? Did that change serve the original purpose of better connecting us? And were we better or worse off overall?

Taryn Ward  In this case, we'll argue that the answer to all three questions is that it depends, hopefully not in an annoying lawyer way.

Steven Jones  A long way from the days of CompuServe and the dial-up days of America Online, the internet had already changed by 2008, we were using cable or STL connections to connect to the internet speeds have become significantly quicker, though very much slower than they are today. And almost everybody was using a computer at work and had one at home. And children were using them regularly in the classroom. And, you know, at this point, I had had a Blackberry for four years and Blackberry was the absolute pinnacle of connected device that you could carry in your pocket or more commonly, on a holster on your belt if you were men. And you know, I'm not gonna lie, I love my Blackberry. I got it in 2004. And I was quickly Pavlovianed up, I would pick that thing up every time it vibrated. And I probably had it for a couple of months before I started getting that phantom notification syndrome, where you think you're getting a vibration in the thing and you pick it up and actually you're not, right. And that, that's something which everybody gets now with their with their cell phones. And you know, I'll be honest, it was the best thing at doing what it was supposed to do, which was make calls and send email. 

It was brilliant. And I still regret the loss of the physical keyboard, I think I will concede that Steve Jobs was right. The iPhone is brilliant interface. And it's wonderful. But I could type so fast on that Blackberry, and I needed to because I was travelling all the time, I didn't have time to take my laptop out and answer emails, I could blind type with two thumbs faster than most people can touch tight with all 10 fingers. And Blackberry. I think when the saw the iPhone came out, famously one of the founders of BlackBerry felt that it was completely unnecessary to try and compete with it. Not in retrospect, the best business decision. But the first iPhone wasn't that good. As we talked about last time, you didn't have an app store, it wasn't really able to do very much more than, you know, the few apps that were on it. And it was extremely expensive. But then in 2008, it connected to 3G, and the App Store started and that opened the doors to, to social media, the less remember the camera on it was pretty bad. At the time. I think it was two megapixels when it launched. And the screen was 640 points wide, which, which will come relevant when we talk about social media a bit later. But that's it was pretty small. And it was relatively slow compared to today's devices.

Taryn Ward  Right. So as we talked about last time, several of the existing major social media networks were available before 2008, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But there were major opportunities for growth with smartphones, which essentially put computers into our pockets.

Steven Jones  Yeah, and having that with us all the time meant that, you know, we had computers, this significant computing power in our pockets, it was accessible to a larger number of people who weren't gonna buy that laptops or desktops, it definitely increased the amount of time we could be online. And that meant there was an increased demand for content. And of course, that that demand was met through increased supply pretty quickly app developers like Instagram and Snapchat cottoned on to the fact that there was a camera on the back of this phone. And at the time, it was only on the back of the phone, and that they could therefore start to take advantage of that and bring in image-based content, which previously had not really been practical.

Taryn Ward  Right. So we started to see a lot more use of these platforms. once. And it leaves us with a question about whether the success of these platforms was the result of the existing culture, or whether these platforms changed the culture so that they could survive. Ultimately, I think it was probably a bit of both. But it's undeniable that documenting our lives in this way, rather than in private journals, or letters, emails, private messaging, or even text-based posts, or quick, cryptic quotes, or song lyrics gave way to a movement to document the lives of everyday people by image in a completely new way.

Steven Jones  Yeah, I mean, that comes with some advantages and benefits, right? I mean, the world was getting busier, we were more spread out with physical distance. I mean, I, for example, my wife and I, and the kids were 1000s of kilometres away from our remaining family in the UK. Prior to this, we were calling once a week on scheduled calls on a Sunday. That was how that was done. I had a friend who worked with me at the University, just prior to this, but in New Zealand, and you had to sort of organise those calls, you couldn't even just call because it was such a, you know, too big time difference and so on that you really had to be thought out. And this new technology in our pockets meant that we weren't really worried about any, any of this. And of course, Facebook had launched, I joined in 2008, which was around about the time the smartphone came out, although it wasn't available on the smartphone to begin with, of course, you could access it through the through the browser. And that made it easy to connect with friends and colleagues across the world. And even a country the size of Canada, which, you know, I have colleagues from coast to coast that sir, six timezones that's really convenient to just have this low touch method on hand.

Taryn Ward  Yeah, speaking of how, how you were using Facebook at the time, because you also use classmates.com. It occurs to me that in some ways Facebook was the new classmates.com You could reconnect with old classmates and colleagues share memories catch up meet up in this became sort of a nostalgia-fueled experience. That wasn't exactly how, how I was using it, because I was still sort of in the throes of meeting new people and connecting and all of that. But for you, when you think about this, do you see Facebook as sort of the new classmates.com during this period?

Steven Jones  Yes, I think it was. I mean, he. Absolutely. And you could you're absolutely right. I think at this point in time, people who were sort of my age a little bit older than you, out of university for a while, had a much smaller friend group on Facebook, we made with friends with people we already knew, either through work or through family connections, or whatever. Whereas it started to become the thing that you did, right was if you met somebody at a party, you know, you would connect on Facebook. And so I talked quite often about the difference between having contacts and connections. And I think that that that dichotomy started to occur at this point. If you were like me, you had connections with people through Facebook. And if you were younger, you had contacts. And you know, nobody realistically has 498 friends that they can maintain reasonable relations with and be genuinely interested in their lives. I challenge anyone to argue with me. But that's what that's the sort of thing which happened quite quickly, right?

Taryn Ward  Yes, absolutely. And I think it was, it was a very different experience. But Facebook during this period of time, really managed to serve the interests of both groups, which however I may feel about Facebook right now. Really was remarkable.

Steven Jones  Yeah, I mean, I loved Facebook at this point. And it was clunky. It wasn't like it was slick, let's be honest, it was not using on the smartphone was also not a slick experience. At this point. What I think they did, which was really was really good. And I, we've talked about this before, when we were prepping this was the ability to introduce sort of small apps like Farmville, I remember playing Farmville, collaboratively with friends and family across the world, you know, and he got people to keep going back, right? Because you had to harvest the strawberries every two hours or something, right. And so if you had to go back into Facebook, you might not want to catch up with people. But you might want to go in and get the farm open and harvest strawberries or send somebody something. And that sort of, I think really helped them in ways that they know that they couldn't possibly have anticipated. And I don't know what the commercial deal was between the two companies. But it wasn't something that I could really see Facebook making money off, but it actually I think really helped them. And Farmville was just probably the most popular at the games, at least in my family. But there were lots of other things you could do online. And that sharing photos actually wasn't one of those in the beginning, right? Because it wasn't, it wasn't very effective at that it was we posted some photos, I think eventually, but not it wasn't really what it became, and possibly has drifted away from now. But what do you think?

Taryn Ward  I think that's right. I think a point you made earlier it was we were still posting photos, but it was a long process. So normally we would take the photos on A digital camera. And then those photos would have to be uploaded to a computer. And then from the computer added to Facebook, so wasn't we weren't documenting every single thing that we did. It was a much lighter touch sort of thing. 

Steven Jones  Yeah, that's right, because it was just more work, right? And nobody, nobody wanted social media to be work. We already did enough work, the technology, availability of the iPhone, and the camera in the back definitely had a big impact in social media in that way. And as a positive feedback loop than desire for people to share those photos meant that the canvas got better, right? 

Taryn Ward  Yeah, absolutely. So I think if Facebook was the new classmates.com, Twitter was sort of the new bulletin board system or chat room. And Yelp. and Foursquare also emerged as these great resources for deciding how to live our lives and where the cool kids spent time. 

Steven Jones  Yeah, that's right. I mean, I didn't really use Foursquare. I'm not sure why I'd maybe it wasn't so popular in Canada, or at least wasn't popular, you know, amongst the people that I was connected to. I did use Twitter a bit. But I was mostly a locker rather than a poster, which is still true, to be honest. But that's true for most people. I read somewhere that most people post on Twitter once a month. And it actually all the content is driven by a relatively small number of users, which post, who post all the time, which I guess explains why some voices dominate. Did you use Twitter much? Were you a tweeter?

Taryn Ward  I didn't use Twitter a lot. I think like you I lurked. But it was very exciting, this idea at least that we could connect with experts and have direct conversations about things that matter. And if we could come up with something clever enough or relevant enough, they would engage with us and maybe even like a tweet, or comment or follow us back, which was, was amazing. I used both Yelp and Foursquare but never made it to celebrity status. So I would sort of post things once in a while and check in. But I found it a little bit weird. I think I was I was in that sort of in between where I was young enough that what I wanted to try new things, but old enough that I wasn't I wasn't quite sure I liked all of this connecting. It was a very strange sort of change. You know, I'm still from the generation where we call their parents maybe once a week. And now all of a sudden, I had friends who were posting, and their parents could follow their entire week across various platforms. And their their old friends could follow exactly where they were eating and who they were eating with and what they were doing. And it just felt like a lot of pressure and a lot of time online. And I think this was really the first time I had experiences with people in real life where I felt they're not really experiencing this with me. We're having this great lunch or this beautiful brunch. I missed those, those all day brunches, by the way, but they weren't fully there because they were so busy documenting the experience online, that they weren't fully in the moment. And I think that really sets us up for what happened with Instagram soon after. 

Steven Jones  Yeah, I think that's a really that's a really interesting point are my kids were probably the right age. And to be honest, like I enjoyed it, too, that when ECA came out with Emma Stone where she's placed this student who becomes a scarlet woman in the high school, there's one scene in there and this was really indicated that Twitter had hit the mainstream in in the big time because the teacher complains about the, you know, inane tweets that students are posting that they they got a coffee and doughnuts before they came to school and all that every minute of their day was being documented in there was absolutely no content in it whatsoever. And you're like, yeah, that is actually what exactly why it's exactly what's happening. And it is right to send it up. But at the same time, you know, Twitter that was used by journalists around the world to tell people what was going on in otherwise repressive regimes. It was used to organise, you know, the Arab Spring, although we could really delve into, you know, the cost and benefits of that. So there were there were good things that were happening happening to it as well, but this, this need to document everything and to get approval from everybody about everything that you were doing. And you know, it wasn't enough to eat a beautiful meal, that beautiful meal didn't exist if it wasn't appropriately documented in the photographs and talked about online, where review was written of the incident, you know, the place where you got it. That was a new phenomenon. And I think certainly for me was a bit bizarre, although I must admit that I for a while I was committed to TripAdvisor, and with a review and read reviews religiously because I was travelling around and didn't know where to go. 

Taryn Ward  Yeah. fair enough, I think there started to be a general sense that you could share a picture of yourself and receive a fuller picture of someone else based on the choices they were making. And some of this was Foursquare and some of it was even Yelp. But is this somebody I can relate to or not based on arguably superficial measurements? And I think that really does set the scene for Instagram. And I think we could spend easily hours talking just about Instagram and and how that changed how we engage with each other and society and how we live our lives. But I think before we dive too far into that, do you remember life before selfies?

Steven Jones  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, most all of my childhood and a large part of my young adulthood was time before selfie. Like when, when we had our last child, we were living in Salisbury, my mother lived in Plymouth, so she wasn't gonna see her as much as seen the other kids. And so she bought us a Polaroid camera so that we could take instant camera instead of photos and share them. And because that was, that was actually the most convenient way to do it, take a quick snap. But something interesting is happening, right. And, you know, we used to care about photos, I remember film cameras, that's how old I am. And if you were going to go on holiday, you might have one or two rolls of film that so that was what 72 pictures at the most that you would take on a holiday. And that would have to have been a good holiday because it costs money for the film, and it cost money to have them developed and you wanted each photo to be really good. You didn't take pictures of yourself in these destinations, you took pictures of this destination of the people that you were with, it was an entirely new phenomenon. And I am still not that comfortable with, you know, images of myself. Partly, I suppose, because I really don't know how to make myself look as awesome as people who grew up with the technology in the front-facing camera do.

Taryn Ward  Yeah, we've talked about this before I blame some of it on not having long enough arms to really position the camera in, in the most flattering way. But I think some of it was generational and timing. I think people who are just a little bit younger than me really came up with this expectation or I don't selfies and this whole photo or it didn't happen, is this 'gram-worthy. Do it for the gramme sort of sort of way of living. And I certainly remember life before selfies, I think half of my life was existed before selfies, at least selfies online were a thing. But it's hard for me to remember what life was really like before selfies, because it's just become such a part of how we experience the world, and how we check in with each other and how we show someone how we're living our lives. It is really hard to sort of try to claw my mind back to what it was like before that was, was really a thing.

Steven Jones  Yeah, I mean, it is it is a I mean, a selfie again, is like to Google, it has become the thing that it's called, you're taking a front-facing photo cat camera photo, right? I mean, that's what you do. But everybody knows what a selfie is. I know yesterday, I was watching a TV show and they want it was Ted Lasso, and he's on the plane going to England to take on this football coaching job. And a kid on the phone, quite an irritating guy wants to take an Ussie because it's both of them is not just you know, him and us He is never going to catch on. But it was quite your funding in the context of a TV show, you know that? It's sort of like pokes fun at the ludicrous nature of this need to document absolutely, absolutely everything. And he, of course goes on to tell Ted that he's a complete nutcase for taking on this job. And they going to absolutely murder him, and does it very cheerfully, and was very happy to get the photo of them together before he is destroyed by the British press. Yeah, it is. It is a cultural phenomenon. That is the culture now. And my kids, certainly my youngest kid, definitely grew up with selfie culture and documenting literally anything. And since she's away from home in Central America right now, and she's posting things on Instagram. And I'm following those stories religiously. It is it's actually very nice. As you said, you can see what's going on and where she is. But I'm not sure that life wasn't better before selfies. Let's put it that way. 

Taryn Ward  Yes, I think Well, I think that's a that's a good question. Although I don't remember where I was or what I was doing. When I took my first selfie or saw my first selfie. I think it really was a huge switch. Because we moved away from text-only or text-based posts in engagements with an occasional photo, it suddenly was all photos. And I think we can fairly ask whether Instagram met that initial goal of connecting people. Did it let us show more of who we are and learn more about others? Or not. And I think that really is up for debate. 

Steven Jones  And there's pretty good evidence that it's not commenting on other people's photos, which causes a decline in young women's mental health. It's not even what other people say to them. It's their view of what they posted their attractiveness in these photos, which is a problem so not only are you not connecting genuinely with other people, but you're not really having a healthy connection with yourself if your view of you is really what you see on on Instagram. And you know, a lot of what you see on the Instagram isn't real, to the point that this has become a little bit of a trend over the last couple of years, right posting the, this is what I look like when I'm just standing like a human. And this is what I look like when we take a picture for Instagram. And those two things are not the same. And this is what it looked like with the Instagram filter, I look perfect. And I actually don't look anything like that in real life. And some of those comparisons are absolutely striking. So, you know, you used to be able to say that the camera didn't lie. But now that's all it does.

Taryn Ward  And I think to take that even a little bit further, if we did agree that it's not connecting people better or not making us more connected, what is the draw? And I think it has to be something like reality television, we know that we're not seeing somebody's real life on Instagram. But there is this sense that, especially in combination with other apps, you can have a glimpse of who someone really is a little bit of an idea of what their everyday life is, at least insofar as what they want to present as their everyday life to the rest of the world.

Steven Jones  Yeah, I think that's that's right. I think it was aspirational. And maybe this was part of the time, I think there was a whole foot set of things which came together, right. So 2008 was the financial crisis, people's lives were, you know, suddenly not as awesome as they would have been, you know, I was travelling to Florida for work quite often. And there were so many houses that people just walked away from, because they were worth so much less than they bought them, you know, knew that this was beautiful houses and beautiful locations, but the market had just been destroyed. And along with it people's lives. And the ripples of that went out, you know, retirements were postponed because pension plans had lost a load of money and disappeared in some cases. And so that real life was suddenly too gritty. 

And just like that, aspiration was suddenly very, very attractive. And that coincided with the appearance of the App Store on the iPhone. And it was, let's be honest, this was really driven by the iPhone, it took a while for the competitors to catch up and the availability of a camera so that you had this poor quality image capturing device on the on the back of the phone, it that powered, and then have the availability of Instagram. And it's no shock, that Instagram had exactly the same sort of horizontal resolution as the iPhone screen that existed when it was launched. They just turned it into the square format. And iPhone very happy that Apple, you know, launched the phone app, which would actually very conveniently take square photos to drive your Instagram page. Right? So it was this positive feedback loop, they helped one another. And you were I think absolutely right, you were seeing other people's lives as they wanted them to be and a glimpse of the life that you wish you were gonna get. But the times were very difficult.

Taryn Ward  Yeah, and we all became fairly good at reading into these posts and sort of guessing at what was real and what wasn't even if we weren't consciously doing this. My my sort of guilty example of this is bookshelves by colour. So when somebody posts a photo of their bookshelf, organised by colour, it makes the hair stand up, I can't stand it, I know immediately, we're not going to be friends, we have nothing in common. And that's it. I know everything I need to know about this person, which is horribly unfair and terrible. And I'm really not as shallow as that makes me sound. But it's just one of these things that, you know, if you've taken the time to reorganise your bookshelves to look this way, and to post a photo of it on Instagram, my conclusion is, we're just not going to have that much in common. Do you have anything like that? Or anything you're willing to confess?

Steven Jones  No, I, I guess I don't really although I do agree with you. Like, I like to be friends with people who read books, and how are you going to find the book that you want to read? If it's organised by colour? I'm not suggesting that you need a Dewy system, although I might need one. But you know, at least organise them by book series or genre. And then the Harry Potter books, for example, are all different colours. How are you going to organise them on a shelf? That's supposed to be all the same colour? Do you print new colours? And put? I mean, it makes no sense. Yeah, I, I don't I try. I try not to make a conscious effort not to judge people because I am, you know, I firmly believe that it's all fake, you know, apart from my pictures, because I'm not skillful or thoughtful enough to fake much of them there that my life really is that boring. But yeah, I sort of have some sympathy with you there. I think that that is a bit silly. But that it is this sort of, it's perhaps driven a form over function, not just in our bookshelves, but for our lives. The life, our life can't just function anymore. It can't just be good. It has to look good, has to smell good. It has to taste good. And it has to be most importantly, appreciated by other people. Because if you don't get those likes, then your life is somehow a little bit less awesome at that, I think is something we're definitely going to talk about in episodes are on mental health, but it's something that is a problem for everyone.

Taryn Ward  Yeah, I think as part of that, connecting in a more Real Way is scary enough with people we know in communities where there are generally accepted and enforced norms online. And this was true in different ways early on than it is now. We still don't really understand how this works. And there were virtually no safeguards, and abuse and harassment to be clear came early and often, even in those early days of of Instagram. And it's still it's still a feature. Today, not a flaw it is it is a feature of how of how these things work. And so I think it was just too scary. And although the colour-coordinated bookshelves, you know, really do bother me and irk me. I also know that that's pure snobbery. And people may have very good reasons for posting photos of their organised bookshelves, and maybe it just makes their brain happy to do it. But we're still probably never going to be friends. And so I think there is this weird disconnect now, even though I know that I do it, and I don't like that I do it. And I know I don't have a good reason for doing it is still when I scroll through Instagram, I sort of draw these conclusions about people. And I think I think we probably all do it. And I don't know that we're better for it.

Steven Jones  No, I don't, I don't think we are, you know, and the scale of the problem is immense, 3 billion photographs uploaded to Instagram every day. That's 3 billion images, which are probably somehow faked. So that's a lot of misrepresentation of the real world. And you know, how if this is how people if Instagram is how people are seeing the world? And obviously, it is they're not seeing the real world. They're they're seeing something fake and, and how can you be happy with your life when that's what you're looking at all the time? And, and I think this, you've whilst you are connected to all of these people, and all of these images, you don't have a real connection with them. And that's why perhaps, the data says that people are lonelier than ever, despite all of these ways to interact with other humans, we are lonely. And interestingly enough that the latest data says it is not old people that are the loneliest, it's it's young people who are lonelier than everybody else. And that makes no sense to me, because looking back on when I was, you know, in that age group, we were out having fun with our friends all the time. And I guess the thing is that now, you're not. You're living through the online experience.

Taryn Ward  Yep, smartphone technology and more stable internet connections meant not only that people could access social media more reliably and frequently. But also that expectations around how often we were online and available also drastically changed, which didn't help any of this. 

Steven Jones  This gained momentum until it reached a point where something had to give. And whilst some expected the pendulum to swing the other way less time online, less cheering, the groundwork was actually set for TikTok to take things to the next level. 

Taryn Ward  Next time we'll look at how TikTok has changed the way we social media, even if we don't use social media, and the broader impact it's had. In the meantime, we'll post a transcript of this episode with references on our website. You can find this in more information about us at TheBrightApp.com. 

If you want to hear more about how different types of social media platforms evolved over this period, check out her bite episodes on dating, messaging and voice and video socials.

Steven Jones  Until next time, I'm Steven Jones.

Taryn Ward  And I'm Taryn Ward.

Steven Jones  Thank you for joining us for Breaking the Feed, Social Media: Beyond the Headlines.