Email as Social media

It is apparent to everyone that social media is distinctly a different experience today from how it initially developed. It has become a form of mindless consmption instead of a social space where one interacts with other genuine individuals. The concept of content, once merely used on Madison avenue, has become so ingrained in the social media environment that those who would otherwise call themselves enternainers, artists, or journalists have now come to regard their field as mere content creation, as producing things merely meant to get you hooked so that you will look at more advertisments. This has been accelerated due to LLM’s ability to quickly create things that are “good enough” to look at, read, or otherwise consume. Consumption has become the only reason to interact with social media. But it is becoming increasingly clear that alternatives are not only necessary, they are already here.

Social media’s fall from grace did not occur with ChatGPT, but it has accelerated since then. Social media platforms do not make money off of our enjoyment, but merely from our attention. This was perhaps best displayed by the stratospheric rise of tiktok, and of the subsequent explosion in short-form video platforms that followed. These built on an ecosystem that had continously been trying to capture more and more of our waking ours. Actions to resist this were slowly being taken, even if subconciously. The decline of independent forums, where discussion is instead taken to deep-web¹ spaces like slack, discord, group chats and direct messages, is perhaps the clearest sign of this. This was well underway before generative AI arrived, but as Maggie Appleton has pointed out, “the dark forest” of spam and slop has expanded — and will continue to expand — rapidly.

I have written about the benefits of email before, but I then focused on how email could benefit the user individually, and how spam hass forced people to move to other mediums. Here, I instead want to describe how one can not just return to the email-workflow of yore, but reimagine it as a new form of social media that allows one to curate and decide on what to interact with, but also how to format that interaction and to contribute to the meaning and interepretation with the work.