A text message arrives and we feel an obligation to answer it.
Someone unfollows us and we wonder what happened.
A post receives little engagement and we wonder whether anyone cared.
Someone reads a message and doesn't respond and suddenly silence contains information.
But does it?
What if we are subconsciously responding to secret signals that have no reliable bearing on reality?
In my previous essay, I mentioned how startling it is to see the rapid growth where I live and the simultaneous struggles of local businesses when theoretically the local economy should be thriving. It begs the question, what is actually happening here? This is where I found myself wondering whether part of what I was observing wasn't economic at all. Apart from the cause and effect of broadcasting and consumption, social media has also given us an enormous quantity of visible signals- likes, follows, shares, tags, views, comments, RSVP's- and because those signals are measurable, we have begun treating them as evidence of behavior that hasn't actually occurred.
Dozens of likes on a post about an event doesn't mean dozens of people will physically get dressed, drive there, give up their time, and spend money. That requires behavior. And yet the digital environment presents the first as predictive evidence of the second. Then reality arrives and people wonder why the numbers didn't translate. Attention is not participation or even support.
We've mistaken proxies for proof.
Humans have always used signals. Wedding rings, invitations, Christmas cards, who sits where, who calls whom, whether someone waves or says 'hello' if they see you- social life is FULL of symbolic behavior. But most historical social signals were embedded in actual human behavior that required deliberate action. Social platforms introduced extraordinarily low-cost signals- follows, likes, views- and then gave them extraordinarily high social legibility. Someone can maintain hundreds or thousands of relationships through almost no deliberate action whatsoever. And perhaps that is where the distortion begins:
We have somehow made the absence of low-cost signals feel more meaningful than the absence of high-cost behavior.
The system makes what is measurable visible, not necessarily what is meaningful.
Follow = relationship
Unfollow = rejection
Like = approval
No Like = disapproval or indifference
Views = attention
Followers = audience
Engagement = connection
Except none of those equivalencies is necessarily true. One engaging post that prompts a follow in no way means that you will enjoy every single subsequent post. I recently went through all of the accounts I follow on Instagram in an attempt to narrow the margins and maybe, just maybe help myself actually enjoy using the app again. Out of all the 1500+ accounts I unfollowed, at least 90% of them were accounts that I had no idea who they were, what they post about or even that I followed them in the first place. The algorithm didn't even show me any of the posts to make the account recognizable, so how could an unfollow possibly equal rejection when I literally don't even know who you are?
Metrics begin as representations. In business and finance, we understand them as indicators. But when we use metrics to track human interaction- attention, interest, relationship, popularity, approval- the representation can gradually become the thing itself. This reaches beyond social media too. Ratings. Streaks. Views. Subscriber counts. Read receipts. Even the little typing bubbles. That one is almost laughable! We're surrounded by signals about human behavior that invite us to construct stories about human beings.
And sometimes the human reality bears almost no resemblance to the signal.
Perhaps the surge in current nostalgia for the 90s and early 2000s makes a lot of sense. Maybe we aren't merely nostalgic for landlines, malls, CDs or the styles of clothes we wore. Maybe we're nostalgic for a time when so much of human life remained unmeasured.
We didn't know how many people saw something until we got together to talk about it. You didn't know if someone was actually home and just unable to answer the phone. You couldn't watch someone else's life unfold while sitting alone in your own. Silence contained far less data and much less comparison.
Life simply had to be participated in with enormous amounts of ambiguity, privacy and unknowability.
Maybe what we miss isn't the past. Maybe we miss not knowing.
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